BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

“What’s going on with you?” Priscilla asked, bringing Kent back to the present. “I think I’m feeling overwhelmed by the burdens of life and the responsibilities of being a parent,” Kent admitted. “I had a great role model as a father but only until I was 11. After that, I had none. I feel like I’m missing some things I need to be a good dad, a good husband and a better person. It’s not that I’m unhappy. I love our marriage. I love our family. I enjoy my job. But something’s missing.” Priscilla kissed him goodbye, determined to pray. Kent worked as a field engineer for NASA and other high-tech companies. At the office, he was asked to install high-tech power supplies in a church. “A church? We’ve never worked on a church before.” “No, this is the first one.” When Kent returned home that evening, Priscilla took one look at him and said, “Where have you been?” “What do you mean?” he asked. “You don’t look like yourself. You’re…glowing.” A Big Change “I told Priscilla that I’d met a little man at a great big church,” Kent remembers. “The church I was sent to was Lakewood Church in Houston. The pastor, John Osteen, asked if he could pray for me. I was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. I felt as though I’d also been delivered from grief, loneliness and a lot of things that had happened to me as a child. “Priscilla asked me to pray for her. I tried to remember what Pastor Osteen had prayed over me, and I prayed that over her. It appeared that nothing happened. But the next day she took the kids to school and received the Holy Spirit. Although we were both Christians, the best way I know to describe it was that Jesus became very real to us after that. “I encountered John Osteen in 1994. We started attending a Methodist church not far from where we lived. That little church was on fire and amazing things were happening. Later that year, someone at church walked up and handed me a cassette tape. It was called "The Word Prevails" by Kenneth Copeland. “I put it in my cassette player and listened to it constantly.” When Priscilla asked him, “Are you going to turn that off?” Kent told her he intended to listen to the tape day and night. “I had a revelation that I was like a computer,” Kent said. “I believed that if I kept listening to that tape, it would reprogram my internal computer. “We started putting the Word of God in us, and it transformed our lives. My grandmother gave me a copy of the Copelands’ devotional, "From Faith to Faith," for my birthday. We started digging into it every day, and we still read it to this day. We’ve given away countless copies. We also watched Brother Copeland on TV and continued listening to his tapes. We were encouraged by all the stories in the "BVOV" magazine. “The first time we saw Kenneth Copeland speak in person, we felt connected. The things he said, his demeanor, the honor he expressed, the integrity and character were the core values we knew. We had no idea at the time that he had served in the military. Our lives had accelerated to a whole new level of hunger for God. We knew that we could no longer live a normal Christian life. We had a call to full-time ministry.” In 1995, Kent applied for Jerry Savelle’s School of World Evangelism. Without waiting to receive a letter of acceptance, he resigned from his job, loaded up Priscilla and their three children in their vehicle, and headed to Fort Worth, Texas. “I don’t know what I expected when I started school, but it wasn’t to be asked to become director of evangelism,” Kent recalls. “I had lots of training as a field engineer. I knew nothing about evangelism. I couldn’t figure out why God would put me in such a situation. “I felt stretched so far that I did a lot of praying. Me, the director of evangelism? We had 150 students. Some were pastors and were probably more qualified than I was. I felt very intimidated. The only thing I knew to do was to lay hold of the Word of God and refuse to be moved by my feelings. I kept doing what I knew to do and activating my faith on a daily basis. That experience stretched me so much that it forced me to grow spiritually at a phenomenal rate.” Leadership Activation At Jerry Savelle’s school, the Bible students ministered on the streets of Fort Worth, leading people to Christ. Visiting nursing homes, they found people who’d never met Jesus and made the introductions. They prayed for the sick in hospitals. They ministered to those in need at homeless shelters. 18 : BVOV

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