Year in and year out they travel the globe, ministering the Word of Faith and preaching the uncompromised Word of God. It’s God’s commission to them and to KCM, to bring people from religion to reality—to help believers renew their minds by taking them from the milk of the Word of God to the meat so they can become skillful in righteousness.
For the Copelands, it began as a journey of faith when, in March 1967, Kenneth stood in the dried-up Arkansas riverbed and received God’s call to ministry.
“He told me exactly what He was calling me to do,” Kenneth would recall years later of the commission from God. “He was calling me to preach the gospel to the nations…. He said nations would be won in a day—some of them even by this ministry.”
For Kenneth, preparing to preach to the “nations” would begin the summer of that year, but not in a pulpit or behind a podium. Kenneth took his first step toward answering God’s call by picking up his Bible and walking from the bedroom of the little house he and Gloria occupied in Tulsa, Okla., and into the living room. That was as far as he knew to go. He had no money, no meetings scheduled, and God had given him specific instructions never to ask people for money or a place to preach.
Sitting down to study his Bible, Kenneth announced to God, “LORD, I’m on call.”
Not long after that, the calls for Kenneth to minister started coming. And they have been coming ever since. Everywhere they go—from the top of the world to the bottom and all the way around the middle—Kenneth and Gloria continue to preach the uncompromised Word to the nations. They are bringing people from the milk to the meat of God’s Word and shaping the course of an entire generation of believers.
Growing a Ministry
The 1970s were years of tremendous growth for Kenneth Copeland Evangelistic Association, later to become Kenneth Copeland Ministries. The first issue of "Believer’s Voice of Victory" was published in 1973 as a four-page newsletter and distributed to about 3,000 people. Today, the publication has evolved into a 32-page, full-color magazine that is distributed free each month to over 400,000 subscribers worldwide, in 159 different countries and territories on six continents. KCM Africa has printed its own "BVOV" since late 2000, KCM Europe since 2001 and KCM Australia began printing its own magazine in March 2006.
As part of its children’s ministry, KCM launched "Shout! The Voice of Victory for Kids" in 1994 with a subscription list of about 5,000, only to see it grow to nearly 190,000 subscribers. For more than a decade, "Shout!" not only won awards, but it also brought the Word of God to tens of thousands of children regularly. When its run was complete in 2007, funds for "Shout!" were funneled to other children's ministry projects. Superkid Academy is now a mainstay each year at the Southwest Believers' Convention, attracting hundreds of children.
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