“We teach people to be respectful, not shove anything down anybody’s throat,” Sorensen says. “We always ask permission. We have real conversations and ask real questions. And in the process, we get to share Jesus with a lot of people.”

An estimated 300 million people have heard about Jesus through the Fort Lauderdale-based Evangelism Explosion method, including nearly 100 million who decided to become Christians.

And that’s just since 2000. How many have heard the gospel over the organization’s half-century, even its president can’t guess.

“The success comes from training people to train people to share Christ,” says the Rev. John Sorensen, who will keynote the organization’s 50th anniversary banquet on Feb. 24. “And we have no tracking method for people who were trained 50 years ago.”

The banquet is set for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 24 at the Westin Diplomat Resort, 3555 S. Ocean Drive, Hollywood. Besides Sorensen, the program will include talks by ordinary people who say they learned about Jesus through the program.

Visiting leaders will include Frank Wright, a Coral Ridge alumnus and current president of National Religious Broadcasters. Others attending the banquet will include Anne Kennedy, wife of the Rev. D. James Kennedy, who died in September 2007.

Kennedy developed Evangelism Explosion as the founding pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. As the story goes, Kennedy saw his tiny congregation shrink until 1962, when he designed his method of lay evangelization and training.
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