The Heart of the Ministry Grows
The story of Need Him Global cannot be told without a deep appreciation and significant recognition of all the volunteers that give their time to share the Gospel. From our very roots, the ministry model focused on sharing the Good News with all people and always including an invitation to discuss what it means to follow Jesus. This meant we would need volunteers that would be available to meet seekers.
For many of those early years, this meant people willing to drive to our office to answer phone calls and eventually online chats and text messages. Once we invested in the Echo Response System, this dynamic changed as we could then offer a safe and secure platform that volunteers could access remotely without leaving their homes or offices.
Over the past quarter century, we have had millions of Gospel-centered conversations with people from every corner of the world. This was only able to happen with faithful volunteers willing to sacrifice time to meet those who are hurting and broken.
The nature of a volunteer response model means there will be turnover as volunteers go through life changes. We are also fortunate to still see many of the same long-time volunteers coming online and connecting with those that contact us. We are always bringing on more people and we have now trained over 8,000 volunteers in our history.
We are also now blessed by a growing number of seminary students that respond to guests as part of their evangelism classes. We currently partner with eight different seminaries to provide their students with authentic and diverse Gospel conversations to prepare for their calling. In the past two years alone, we have seen 904 seminary students take over 16,300 conversations.
The growth from students is part of an interesting story of new volunteer growth. In the five years prior to the pandemic, we averaged 4.6 new volunteer applications every week. Over the past three years, we have averaged more than three times that number with 15.5 new volunteer applications each week! We also continue to receive more international volunteers with believers coming from over two dozen different countries. We are grateful for every person that partners with us to share the Gospel and could not have had the same reach without them.
