Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Dr. John Avant and I believe anything is possible.
Welcome to Anything Is Possible. I'm Hallerin Hilton Hill.
This is part two of my interview with Dr. John Avant.
Thank you for being with us. I'm honored to have you here.
What is life action?
Yeah, the name of our ministry really kind of describes who we are.
We draw our life vertically from the Lord,
but it's supposed to spread out into action
and make a difference in the way we live.
So, ministry has been around for half a century.
It's based in Michigan.
We've got our offices.
We have a family camp, which is incredible,
and a leadership lodge to care for leaders.
But really, most of our ministry is spread out all over the world.
And so, I'm the president, but we have a CEO who runs the office.
So, I'm only there about four days a month.
I'm usually somewhere else, and a few days in the month actually in Knoxville.
How'd you come to this work?
Well, when I was past our first Baptist Concord,
I got a call out of the blue from the ministry that I'd loved for about three decades, really.
And I didn't know that my predecessor was in the process of retiring,
and he said, would you be interested in taking the role?
And he was CEO and president.
I'm not a great administrator. I didn't want to do that.
So, we split the role, and so I'm president now.
We've changed a lot of the structure now, but it was a huge life change for us.
Most people know us as a revival ministry,
but we say we help churches, families, and leaders pursue revival of vitality
and their mission with Jesus.
And we have young adults, young college age, gap year missionaries that travel with us,
so we get to mentor the next generation, do a lot of multi-day events in churches and universities.
I just got back yesterday from speaking at university, and we care for leaders, pastors, missionaries overseas.
It's a very diverse and widespread ministry, and I love it. I'm very thankful for it.
I know a lot of people that have taken trips with you to the Holy Land,
and they just rave about that experience. Say something about that.
Well, most of our trips are service and mission and ministry trips,
and are life-changing, but not quite as fun as what we do every year, pretty much in May.
So my wife and I take a group, either to Israel, can't do that right now.
We were there right before war broke out, but we'll also go to places like,
next month we'll be on a trip called The Journeys of Paul, so we go to Greece and Italy and Turkey
and land and sea, the journeys that change the course of history, and we experience it together.
It's really a revival journey. We live together like family and experience the places that change the world.
So people that follow Jesus, they see the places in the Bible where they've studied all their life.
Now they're there, and it's a stop. You go into the prison where Jesus spent his last hours,
where Paul spent his last hours. Those are some of the kind of places that we go to, and it really is life-changing.
One of the things you said in our last episode, and I would encourage anybody watching to go back,
if you haven't seen it, to see the last episode, you mentioned that you developed a heart for racial reconciliation.
Words like diversity, racial reconciliation, right now, are triggering.
They're toxic. They're over politicized.
Why did you decide to embrace that?
I mentioned in the last episode I was mentored by an African man, a Nigerian man, but it goes really back to my father.
My father was raised in rural Alabama. Everything around him was racism.
But he watched a young African-American teenager who he was working with putting up a circus tent in the summer,
and it was hot, and he watched this young man desperately needing a drink of water.
And when nobody was looking, he went to a hose where the water was just running and drank from it.
But some people saw it and came and beat him almost to death because he drank from the same hose as white people.
And my dad was changed from that. He knew in his heart something was desperately wrong with that.
And so he raised us. There was no such word then, but he raised us really to be anti-racist,
to say, how can we make a difference in this area?
And for me, it's pretty simple. There is no Bible without the shattering of racism.
There is no New Testament because Jew and Gentile, there's never been a more profound racial hatred than what's there.
We see it lived out before us right now in what's happening in Israel.
And yet the gospel tore that down. So for me, it transcended politics and everything else.
But did you run into resistance with that? Because within the constructs of American evangelical Christianity,
and especially with how things are politically, that's a third rail. That thing's hot.
You'll get accused of being woke. You'll get accused of being, I'm sure this is not new to you.
Yeah, I've been through all that.
You just don't care?
Well, I care, but I can't ignore that and follow Jesus.
I mean, again, I am saved and transformed because he broke those barriers.
And a couple of things that I've seen, when I was new to this as a young pastor, I was very naive about it.
And I just assumed, man, yeah, I'm pastoring this as an Atlanta, an all-white church in an almost all African-American neighborhood.
I thought, well, we'll change this.
And very naive, encountered terrible racism, lost a ton of people, and then God began to change it.
And we began to see African-Americans come. And to this day, that church is very racially diverse and supports our ministry.
We love them. But I started learning something.
I started learning that we should not take all of our cues from what we see on television, what we hear.
A lot of that is a very slender part of what's actually happening.
And I've got thousands of friends and partners around this country who believe there is a third way.
There's a third way that's not either Christian nationalism or a far, far left approach that also often leans toward hatred.
There's a third way, and it's a gospel way, and we can find it together.
And I'm going to pursue that. For me, people, how do you do this in a political world?
Kind of a political cynic.
Like, as a follower of Jesus, I believe I have a kingdom calling, which is far bigger than a national calling.
And I love my country. I'm a patriot. I'm not apolitical.
But I've got something far bigger than that.
And really, the history of cultural change has not primarily come through politics.
It's primarily come through the movements of the Spirit of God.
And I still believe that, and I believe it can, and in many ways is beginning to happen in this country.
Do you think politics is going to break the American church?
No. Jesus said that the gates of hell won't prevail against the American, against the church, any church.
But if the church decides not to be the church, then politics or anything else will break it.
And I think there's an important question in the American church.
How little can you actually follow Jesus and still be a church?
I mean, we are, I don't like the word Christian. Nobody knows what it means anymore.
If I use the word I pronounce it Christian. I follow one named Christ.
And to follow him together with others must be different than what the culture looks like.
So I'm a part of a church that's multiracial, multiethnic, multi-economic status.
And I believe we should be pursuing that. Not every church can or will.
But why not? This is what the gospel does if we'll pursue it.
What does it mean to follow Christ?
It means to be as a apprentice.
Often in the American church we think it means to learn more knowledge.
So I'm going to study the Bible more. I believe every word of the Bible is true.
So did the Pharisees, and they killed Jesus.
So I want to learn it. I want to teach others the scripture.
But Jesus taught by taking people with him on a life journey.
And it was still hard for them to get it.
Until the Spirit of God filled them they still didn't get it.
And so in life action in our ministry we believe that following Jesus being a Christian is being his apprentice.
It means we want to know him, know his word, but then we become more like him and we bring others with us.
That's the movement we're a part of.
For much of the American church being a Christian means if it's convenient we show up at church and sit and listen to a monologue.
That's nothing like what we see in the scripture.
So we're a little radical in what we teach at life action, but in some ways we're just old fashioned.
We want to return to the New Testament church and help others do that.
When you were finding your faith, when you're stomping out doobies and going in new direction, right?
No longer truly a doobie brother, right?
I love that. Because I was a walker-over too. We did some doobie brothers.
Great group.
Jesus is just all I have in me.
Did you imagine you being this you?
No. For instance, we're so involved overseas.
We have one of the primary ministries in the country now ministering to missionaries on the field.
One of our leaders developed something as a missionary himself called 5D Thrive.
How to thrive in the five dimensions of your soul.
It's particularly for missionaries, but pastors or anybody.
I didn't even go overseas until I was in my 30s. To have a global ministry, it's something I never would have dreamed.
As a young Christian, I just loved Jesus. I wanted to tell people about him.
I can't really believe the life that God has given me. I'm very grateful.
What's been your greatest struggle?
The ministry is hard. I tell young pastors today, prepare for a two-pronged ministry.
Pastors are quitting at a record pace. Missionaries are as well.
Why?
Well, the leading reason that pastors and missionaries are quitting is conflict.
Often among Christians, which that's pretty sad.
Anxiety, depression. When you take on other people's pain for years and years and years, if you don't process that well yourself,
you end up making mistakes yourself. Also, you're a part of often unhealthy systems.
Most churches are not healthy today.
For me, it's been saying, Lord, I'm not you. I'm not the Holy Spirit. I don't have to fix everything, change everybody.
I'm just one person. But I do want to be one person who is completely given to the Lord.
One of the great evangelists in history, D.O. Moody, said something like this,
the world has yet to see what God could do with just one person fully devoted to Him and by God's grace, I'll be that person.
And in this season, I mean, I get to preach thousands of people, but it doesn't matter as much to me anymore.
I want to love Jesus and the person in front of me. And if I'll do that, I find the Lord opens doors I could never open.
Larger doors than I would kick open on my own efforts.
I'm a preacher's kid. I've lived a fairly public life.
What I have discovered is that anything that's always on burns out.
It doesn't matter what it is. Anything that's always on burns out. Anything that's always on breaks.
And I remember my brother recorded a video of my father giving final thoughts to each of his children.
It was about 57 seconds long. One sentence each.
And when he got to me, he looks in the camera and he says, balance, Haloran.
Balance is the secret to success.
And I know that he saw in me a fear driven ambition.
I was afraid of poverty. I was afraid of trauma and abuse that I had experienced.
And I was running from something, not running to something.
And in that running, that continual running, feeling the hounds of depression and anxiety and fear always gaining ground on me.
I never stopped to rest. I just was running and running and running.
And you break. You burn out.
I don't know if you've experienced that at all, where you're doing so much for the world and doing so little for yourself that it finally all...
Yeah, I think I'm kind of workaholic. And I think eight years ago I kind of hit a wall.
That's why I tell young pastors, look, we may not be designed to be a pastor for 30 years.
If you called to ministry, you called for life. But I'm neck deep in ministry now, but I'm not a pastor anymore.
And I think for some people that may be the way to go if you're going to be in ministry.
But for all of us, if our soul's going to thrive, we have to stay balanced.
And we teach how to thrive in the five dimensions of your soul, spiritual, physical.
What are they?
Spiritual, physical, emotional, cognitive, how we think, and relational.
And we have a way of teaching people how to do a, we call it a vector check every month.
And to say, where are you struggling and where are you going in the wrong directions?
And how do you focus on those things?
And from my wife and I, we're probably healthier in our soul than we've been most of our life.
We're older, we're learning, and we're learning that balance.
We can't be on all the time. Every quarter, every single quarter, I go off.
It's either a vacation or a writing retreat, a writer, get away.
Something that takes me away from the stress, and that's helped my soul stay healthy.
Talk to me as we wrap about possibility. The possibility of life change.
New beginnings. What have you learned?
Well, my whole ministry, I've seen that. My life is that. I've watched, I don't know,
thousands, maybe an underestimate of the impossible lives I've seen change.
Last two years ago in our family camp, the chief of the vice-lords gang in Chicago came to faith.
Now he's helping change the city of Chicago.
We have an adopted adult Iranian daughter who are baptized in a hotel bathtub.
Anybody's life can change. But I think the only real agent of change is Jesus.
And I don't know how to help anybody change apart from him, but he changes everything he touches.
And so whoever you are, whatever you're dealing with, there's incredible possibility for life change.
And then, if what we believe is true, our life changes forever, and we get eternity with him, and that's good life.
Books you've written and resources that you have?
Yeah. My wife and I wrote a book called Yes, Changes Everything a few years back.
All of our books are available on Amazon. My first book was called The Passion Promise
about a life with passion. How do we live with passion?
We have a book called Revival, The History of the Revival Movement in Texas.
A book called Authentic Power about the power of God that we see, particularly in the persecuted church,
and a book called If God Were Real. How would we actually live if we really believed God were real?
And then LifeAction.org is our website. All kinds of resources from our ministry that can help people thrive in their soul.
You are in your personal prayer and study time. What are your habits and rituals there? What do you read? What do you study?
Yeah. I try to stay very diverse. So I usually am reading three books at once.
So I'll read a book that is something out of my field, something historical, or something, I like to read crazy things,
like quantum physics, or something that is completely out of my field, just to continue to be a learner.
And then I'm always reading some worthless novel just to clear my head.
And then I'm always reading something to edify me. So my wife and I are trading books right now.
I've been reading a book called Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer.
And he's reading a book called Lead Through Prayer, and we'll trade that off.
And then my wife and I'll talk about it. Every morning and every night, my wife and I pray together.
It saved our marriage. It's kind of odd that we say we believe in prayer, and as husbands and wives, we don't pray over each other.
So we go to war. Ministry is war. And so we go to war for each other.
I've already done that this morning, even though she's in Michigan.
And then I love just quiet time with the Lord when nobody's bothering me.
But I also want to maintain the Bible says to pray without ceasing. And so I believe I'm praying right now.
I'm hearing from the Lord. I'm hearing from you. And you belong to Him. So I can hear from Him through you.
So for me, prayer also is a deeply tied to relationship.
Are you still doing any singing?
Well, sometimes I funny story, I entered a contest on a cruise ship on vacation and won it called The Voice of the Ocean.
And it was associated with the show The Voice. And this was right before COVID.
And they were supposed to take the winners of that. And one of them would go on the show The Voice and then COVID killed it.
So I lost my chance for fame. I'll sing it on karaoke night or just occasionally here and there, but not much.
Have you thought of doing an album?
Oh, no. That would be no. I did one as a part of a Jesus movement band when I was a teenager.
But I think that's another life.
Well, I just think I heard something over the loudspeaker and you're being called to the office this time for music.
Dr. John Avant, thank you for being a representative of possibility, not only just possibility, but the greatest possibility.
Thank you for joining us.