1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 Celebrating the power of possibility. 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:34,000 I'm Dr. John Avant and I believe anything is possible. 3 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:40,000 Welcome to another episode of Anything is Possible. I'm Halerin Hilton Hill and these are great stories. 4 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:46,000 I love getting to do this about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible. 5 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:51,000 Joining me on this episode, Dr. John Avant, welcome to the broadcast. 6 00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:53,000 Thank you, Haloran. Good to be here. 7 00:00:53,000 --> 00:01:00,000 Let me start with this. When I first met you, you were the pastor of First Baptist Concord. 8 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:01,000 Yes. 9 00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:13,000 I had heard a lot about you. I came to a service and what I remember most was how much I loved hearing you teach the word. 10 00:01:13,000 --> 00:01:22,000 There was a passion that was more than just, okay, I got to give the sermon, I got to give the homily this week. 11 00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:29,000 I mean, I think if I had squirted some lighter fluid on you, you would have just burned up. 12 00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:30,000 Probably. 13 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:35,000 Is that an accurate description? Do you love it? 14 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:43,000 I love it. Everything flows from my love for Jesus, but He's just given me a passion for life. 15 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:54,000 I met Him during a great student movement in the 70s called the Jesus Movement and I thought that's everything that it meant to follow Jesus. 16 00:01:54,000 --> 00:02:01,000 I didn't know there was anything, any other kind of Christianity than this all-in kind of passion. 17 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:06,000 A lot of people said I'd get over it. I'm in my 60s now and not yet. 18 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:12,000 You haven't done it. Let's go back to the beginning of your life. What is your story start? 19 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:19,000 Wow. Dad was Air Force and then General Electric and we moved all over the place for a while. 20 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:25,000 We settled down in middle school in Hendersonville, North Carolina, not far from here. 21 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:33,000 I'm kind of a mountain boy, but I was not following Jesus. I didn't know Him. 22 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:48,000 My whole life changed as I said when I was a teenager and was introduced to this beautiful idea of the good news of Jesus and it changed me forever. 23 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:50,000 Were your parents religious? 24 00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:58,000 They were and they had a very close relationship with the Lord growing up and it kind of drifted a little bit. 25 00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:04,000 When I came to faith in Christ, they wondered if I'd joined a cult or something because of my whole life changed. 26 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:11,000 I was singing lead in a rock band and then suddenly I was singing in a Jesus music kind of hippie-like group. 27 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:18,000 They came to the church where I was and said, oh, this is what we knew as teenagers. 28 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:24,000 I saw them come back to recommit their life, baptize, change their whole family history. 29 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:26,000 You have siblings. 30 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:27,000 Yes. 31 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:28,000 How many? 32 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:35,000 Two. A brother runs the pediatric ICU unit. He's a doctor in Greenville. 33 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:42,000 My sister is a worship leader and mom and grandmother and all that good stuff in South Carolina as well. 34 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:43,000 You have children? 35 00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:49,000 Yes, three kids. One is here. Her husband teaches theater at Webb. 36 00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:56,000 She's got a big show this weekend and her husband, Matt, is an IT. 37 00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:07,000 I've got a son who's an attorney in Houston and his wife and then a daughter and her husband who are in South Carolina on staff at a church there. 38 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:08,000 You're married? 39 00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:18,000 Yes. Incredible wife. She's leading a women's conference in Michigan as we speak and we do ministry together. 40 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:21,000 She's been stuck with me for 43 years. 41 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:33,000 Let's go back to this experience that you had finding your faith. Where were you? What did you hear? What happened? 42 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:41,000 Well, a pretty girl turned around in study hall and invited me to come hear her sing. I was a singer myself. 43 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:42,000 Really? 44 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:48,000 Yes. I thought, well, wherever she's singing, I'd love to go. She wasn't interested in me in that way. 45 00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:55,000 She was interested in my soul and I really didn't understand that until I realized she wants me to come to a church. 46 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:09,000 But when I went, I saw people doing music I related to and heard a message from a man named Ian Walker who has been my father in ministry all these years. 47 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:19,000 He shared that faith was actually not about religion but about relationship and I'd never heard that. 48 00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:24,000 I'd never heard the gospel presented clearly and I responded and changed my life forever. 49 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:30,000 What was that next day like? What things had to change in your life? 50 00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:42,000 Well, initially, not a lot changed as far as what I was doing. It was really interesting because I remember I didn't, nobody even told me it was a problem with smoking weed. 51 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:55,000 I was sitting one night with some of the members of the band I was with and I remember holding a joint and going, something's different. 52 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:03,000 I don't want this. Why don't I want it? What's going on? I threw it on the ground and stomped it and the guy cussed me out. 53 00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:09,000 I said, I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. The Lord was transforming me and giving me a new passion. 54 00:06:09,000 --> 00:06:23,000 It wasn't until people like Ian and others really helped me understand discipleship and what it meant to follow Jesus that I understood the Holy Spirit was changing me and giving me new passions. 55 00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:28,000 And so from that time, everything began to change. 56 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:39,000 Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal and the Knoxville News Sentinel. Coming up. 57 00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:52,000 If the things Jesus taught are true, the creator of the universe becomes one of us, lives a perfect life, takes our sin, dies for us, rises again, is coming again, fills us with his spirit. 58 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:59,000 He can't be moderately important. He can't be a part of our life. Cultural Christianity is not Christianity. 59 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:19,000 It's one thing for you to have a faith experience and then to decide to follow Jesus or to end the resistance and to be drawn. 60 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:27,000 It's another to decide that you want to go into ministry. Walk me through that. 61 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:34,000 Well, it's a very crazy story. It actually comes all the way to Knoxville eventually. 62 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:47,000 So I'm sitting in school again and they told me that my pastor, their principal, called me over the old loudspeaker and said, your pastor's on the phone and I thought somebody died. 63 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:53,000 And I went to the office and he said, I want you to come by my office after school. 64 00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:59,000 The Lord has spoken to me and he's calling you to ministry and you're going to preach Sunday and I'm going to help you. 65 00:07:59,000 --> 00:08:06,000 And I really didn't know what he was talking about. I couldn't imagine that it was actually at First Baptist Church, Hendersonville, North Carolina. 66 00:08:06,000 --> 00:08:13,000 But that's what he meant and I was 17 years old and I'm still astonished by it. 67 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:20,000 And the next Sunday, the pastor just calls at school and says, God told me you're going to be a minister. 68 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:22,000 That's right. 69 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:31,000 And it had to be the worst sermon in the history of Christianity, but when I stepped down, I knew that he's right. 70 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:38,000 This is what I'll do the remainder of my days. And he became my father in ministry. 71 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:48,000 I mean, literally everything in my life has been changed through that family. 72 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:56,000 Years later, our marriage was in trouble. He and his wife coached us in marriage, really saved our marriage. 73 00:08:56,000 --> 00:09:03,000 When I was invited to come here to be pastor at First Baptist Concord, I was like, no, I don't think that's what I'm supposed to do. 74 00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:12,000 Ian said, no, my family's in Knoxville. My grandson is an intern at the church. You're going to come and mentor him the way I mentored you. 75 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:24,000 And I did. And today, the grandson of the man who led me to faith is my pastor here in Knoxville at Midtown Community Church. 76 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:35,000 And really an interesting end to that story. Ian and his wife Esther have been in a nursing home here in Knoxville in their 90s. 77 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:48,000 And I had the privilege a few months ago to go and sit with Ian and his family filmed it and walk through every single way he had blessed my life from the very beginning. 78 00:09:48,000 --> 00:10:00,000 And then last month I did his funeral. And so I stand kind of an amazement at how the Lord has put all that together, the story he creates in our lives. 79 00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:09,000 One of the things I've always enjoyed about you is, like I said, I love hearing you teach the word. It's a beautiful thing. 80 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:21,000 But what I see reflected there is you love to study the word, right? You're a scholar. So you did the Masters of Divinity, you did a PhD. 81 00:10:21,000 --> 00:10:30,000 You are a real scholar of the word. When did you make the decision that you were going to go in deep on scholarship? 82 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:43,000 Because you are, I know within the Southern Baptist Convention, you were, what I understand is you are a rising star. You are doing this. 83 00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:57,000 Yeah, I don't know. Some of that can create ego and ambition. And I look back in my younger years and go, man, there's some things there that I'm not proud of, some ugliness just that God needed to strip away. 84 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:12,000 But my desire to learn and be a lifetime learner, really I was just doing my bachelor's degree at better university and met a man I had not far away now from Ian Walker or my family. 85 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:19,000 So I didn't really have a mentor. I met a man from Nigeria named Titus Oluwafemi, the most brilliant man I've ever known to this day. 86 00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:35,000 Spoke seven languages, Masters in Chemical Engineering, PhD in Religion, and he began to mentor my wife and I and changed us, set us on a road to where we wanted to be a part of racial reconciliation all of our life. 87 00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:41,000 But he kept challenging me. You need to use your mind. Use your mind in every way you can. 88 00:11:41,000 --> 00:11:54,000 And when he was tragically killed in a car accident, I heard the Lord whisper to me, live your life for two. And I really didn't know what that meant. 89 00:11:54,000 --> 00:12:03,000 But over the years ahead, I came to believe that it was living out a part of Titus's dreams and a part of his challenge to me. 90 00:12:03,000 --> 00:12:17,000 So in seminary, as I was finishing, they started a new PhD degree. I did not intend to do a PhD, but they started a new degree on the history of the movements of God in the world, from the New Testament all the way to modern days. 91 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:22,000 Interesting that you would study that, but then you were part of a big revival. 92 00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:39,000 Yeah, yeah. We still can't believe what we walked into in the 90s. I was pastoring a church in Texas. And January 22, 1995, a college student came forward in the service. 93 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:53,000 And a very long story, making a long story short, God broke loose in our church and then among our students at Howard Payne University, and it began to spread across the country. 94 00:12:53,000 --> 00:13:01,000 It changed our city, changed it in just about every way. It broke down racial barriers. People came to Christ in large numbers. 95 00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:14,000 Churches came together. And then about two to three hundred college campuses, depending upon who you ask, broke out in this movement that just kept spreading in 95 and 96. 96 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:26,000 And I was just pastoring a mid-sized church in small town Texas, and suddenly I was speaking all over the place and just changed the trajectory of my life to this day. 97 00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:40,000 So you study the history of these movements. What did you learn about movements? Because I think we're at a place in our history now where America needs a revival desperately. 98 00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:51,000 But what did you learn about revivals? How they happened, how long they last? Is there a framework? Is there a there there? 99 00:13:51,000 --> 00:14:01,000 Yeah, well, specifically my passion is movements of God, and they've changed the history of the world so many times. 100 00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:14,000 You think about the New Testament that we have came out of a movement that won over the same Roman Empire that was killing the people that wrote the New Testament. 101 00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:27,000 That's astonishing. And a lot of that when you study it is tied up in suffering. It's why I'm never going to miss going overseas as long as I'm healthy and being a part of what's happening overseas. 102 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:34,000 Because the greatest revivals, I think, in the history of the world are happening now in the persecuted church. 103 00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:47,000 But in the ancient world, the New Testament movement and the post New Testament movement was greatly influenced by plagues, which is interesting in a post COVID world. 104 00:14:47,000 --> 00:15:03,000 Terrible, terrible plagues. 5,000 people a day dying in Rome. And yet Christians would take dying children and they would have been thrown out into the streets by Romans and nurse them to health, love them, care for them. 105 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:15,000 And imagine if you were a Roman citizen that threw your sick child into the gutter and fled, and you come back a year later when the plague is over and your child's alive being raised by followers of Jesus. 106 00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:24,000 What would you do? And so these movements that are happening now, fastest growing movement in the history of Christianity, is in the nation of Iran right now. 107 00:15:24,000 --> 00:15:36,000 We have an adopted adult Iranian daughter, she's not in Iran at the moment, but from 100 believers in 94 to 5 million now in Iran. And so terrible suffering. 108 00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:56,000 And so in our country, the church has become, I'm afraid, addicted to comfort. And if we want revival here, we're going to have to get out of our comfort zones. 109 00:15:56,000 --> 00:16:15,000 So you said what you noticed is with these movements of God, there normally wasn't attached suffering. That suffering may be till the soil or broke up the fallow ground as it were and set you up to need revival. 110 00:16:15,000 --> 00:16:19,000 Can there be revival without suffering? 111 00:16:19,000 --> 00:16:28,000 Yes, I actually preached a message called, Can We Have Peace Without Persecution? And in the New Testament church, we actually see both. 112 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:40,000 In Acts chapter 9, after Paul, the persecutor, became a follower of Jesus, it says there was peace throughout the church and it exploded in growth. 113 00:16:40,000 --> 00:16:55,000 We can have that, but I think the only way that what we can't have is revival without desperation. When you think about it, the things that Jesus taught, if they're true, the only thing he can't be is moderately important. 114 00:16:55,000 --> 00:16:57,000 It's impossible. 115 00:16:57,000 --> 00:17:00,000 Say that again. Say that right there again. 116 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:16,000 If the things Jesus taught are true, the creator of the universe becomes one of us, lives a perfect life, takes our sin, dies for us, rises again, is coming again, fills us with his spirit, he can't be moderately important. 117 00:17:16,000 --> 00:17:26,000 He can't be a part of our life. Cultural Christianity is not Christianity. We're not born into it. It can't be something that's just a part of our life. 118 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:33,000 And so if someone becomes desperate for God, whether they're suffering or not, we can have revival. 119 00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:38,000 That is, I like that a lot, a lot, a lot. 120 00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:50,000 So your life continues on, you're blowing and going and growing, but then your life starts to shift. 121 00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:58,000 And you highlighted just a minute ago that God had to purge some things out of you. What was going on? 122 00:17:58,000 --> 00:18:06,000 Well, I pastored three large churches. A large church ministry doesn't have to, but it often breeds ego and arrogance. 123 00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:15,000 And we're having a lot of scandals, a lot of people, burning out, falling away. Pastors are quitting at record numbers. 124 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:22,000 And I get all that. At some points, I've probably been a part of the problem, and hopefully I'm not still. 125 00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:31,000 But maybe in the 90s, we began to go overseas and we began to see a different kind of faith lived out. 126 00:18:31,000 --> 00:18:40,000 We also were a part of an interracial movement where God took an all-anglo church and created a church that looked like heaven. 127 00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:46,000 But it was very painful. We saw the ugly fruit of racism. 128 00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:53,000 But all of that, I think, went into beginning to change my wife and I's heart and shift us to just be able to say, 129 00:18:53,000 --> 00:18:57,000 Lord, we're not special. We're just your servant. 130 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:04,000 And our yeses on the table, what you want us to do is what we'll do. 131 00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:12,000 As I shared, it eventually took us here. We pastored three large transitional churches where pastors, 132 00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:19,000 often great pastors, had left or were retiring or whatever, and there was a need for transition. 133 00:19:19,000 --> 00:19:27,000 But about eight years ago, we started sensing God's directing something different in our life. 134 00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:35,000 We're to help pastors and help missionaries and help churches and universities and not just be in one place. 135 00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:37,000 And that had been most of our lives. 136 00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:47,000 And so an opportunity came to help lead a ministry that I've loved for 30 years called Life Action. 137 00:19:47,000 --> 00:19:59,000 And we took the big leap out of a secure, stay in one spot kind of ministry to a ministry where I travel more than 200 days a year now. 138 00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:03,000 You smile when you say it. That's a basic thought by itself. 139 00:20:03,000 --> 00:20:11,000 I want to do, in part two of our interview, I want to explore a couple of things. 140 00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:20,000 One, I want to talk about race and racial reconciliation. I would like to talk about the church today, 141 00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:29,000 especially in the context of the political environment that we're in now. 142 00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:39,000 I want to ask you the question, what it means to follow Christ in 2024? 143 00:20:39,000 --> 00:20:42,000 And then I want to ask you about your greatest challenge. 144 00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:50,000 Your greatest challenge because I think it's courageous of you, 145 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:58,000 and I don't know if you would count this as your own courage or just the transformational power of the spirit, 146 00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:08,000 but I think it's courageous of you to have looked at all of those things and decided I'm not afraid to deal with that. 147 00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:14,000 And I would really love to know where you sourced that courage. 148 00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:24,000 Because at this point, if you start, I'm talking about at the time at which we're recording this interview, 149 00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:32,000 if you talk about race and reconciliation, if you talk anything about politics and the church and what it means to follow Christ, 150 00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:40,000 oh my goodness, you might as I see a scene from MacGyver, there's a bomb and there's a clock ticking down, 151 00:21:40,000 --> 00:21:46,000 and if we don't diffuse it, it's going to kill all of us. So I would love to explore that. 152 00:21:46,000 --> 00:22:02,000 My guest is Dr. John Avan, part two coming up.