Tag Archives: Evangelism

The Story of Victor Cross–International Missionary (part 2)

See part 1 here

Victor Cross has left the church.  He has no intentions of ever going back.  He’s incredibly cynical and jaded because of the way he’d been treated by some preacher.  But let’s fast-forward a couple decades.

Victor has been without the grace of God for twenty years, despite his wife’s best efforts to encourage him to come back.  One day, as providence would have it, Victor met a couple men.  These men were kind, sincere, and godly.  They also happened to be elders in the church.  After learning Victor’s story, they said they understood why he would make that decision, from a human standpoint.  But they also encouraged Victor, and told him, “Don’t give up on Jesus just because someone else treated you that way.  Jesus didn’t do that to you.”

And Victor came back to the Lord.

His desire to work for Jesus came back fiercer than ever before.  And in his very first prayer after coming back to Christ, Victor uttered these words: “Lord, make me a fisher of men.”

Because Victor knew that he had to help be the answer to his own prayer, he began to study the Bible, and collected a modest library.  He wanted to preach, but knew that he would also need to work a “regular” job to pay the bills.  He bought a film projector and a set of filmstrips, and showed them to anyone who would watch.

But again discouragement struck.  He tried many times to get people to take a Bible correspondence course, but every time he did, the same question was asked, “what denomination?”  He learned quickly that regardless of how he said it, as soon as the words “church of Christ” left his lips, the door was shut, and people’s minds became closed.

To be continued tomorrow…

The Story of Victor Cross–International Missionary (part 1)

Quick!  Who is Victor Cross?

Here, I’ll give you a hint: He’s a powerful evangelist whose influence has been felt around the entire globe.

Still don’t know who he is?  That’s just how he’d prefer it.  You see, Victor Cross doesn’t want to be a big name.  He wants Christ to be the focus.

But the way that Victor has gone about it—the way he has influenced people all over the world—is something incredible, because it is so simple.

And you can do it too.

Victor came from a family of Christians.  Both of his grandfathers were gospel preachers, and he wanted to follow in their footsteps.  When he was 18, he was baptized into Christ and in less than a week, he announced that he wanted to preach for Jesus.

But then discouragement hit—and it hit hard.  The local preacher laughed at him for wanting to preach.  Laughed in his face!  This same preacher (who was also the one who baptized Victor) later accused him of stealing the typewriter that Victor had loaned to the church.  Then Victor had to watch the drama unfold when it came to light that the preacher had actually sold Victor’s typewriter so he could buy himself a better one.

As a result of these constant discouragements, and seeing this poor example of a preacher, Victor left the church, and therefore left Jesus too.

As Providence would have it, Victor got married.  He started going to church with her, and when she decided to be baptized, he went forward to publicly repent for being unfaithful to the Lord.  But the preacher demanded that Victor itemize all the sins he’d committed while he was away from the Lord.  This didn’t sit well.  Victor left the church, and this time it was for good—so he thought.  He was bitter.  He was angry.  He was resentful to all things related to the church.

To be continued tomorrow…