Answering 200 phone calls in a year isn’t hard to imagine. But for Michael Procella, an undergraduate student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s Leavell College, each call came with an eternal significance.
Many of the callers had just heard a Billy Graham sermon or watched an evangelistic television program.
When the toll-free number was given at the end of the program, they stepped out on faith to call, and Procella was waiting.
What connected Procella to those callers? That’s where the Evangelism Response Center (ERC), a ministry of the North American Mission Board, comes in.
Procella has been a telephone encourager with the ERC since January 2007. The ERC partners with Christian ministries in order to make telephone encouragers available around the clock to viewers or listeners who want to respond to a message or invitation.
Reaching thousands
“Phone numbers come from various ministries,” said N SRK Ravi, director of the response center. “We have a partnership with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. We get about 20 percent of their calls.”
Ravi said the ERC also partners with local campaigns or short-term ministry work. In one evangelistic outreach to Mormons by evangelical churches in Utah, the ERC received 4,100 calls. “We had 32 decisions from Mormons,” Ravi said.
The ERC also has aided Oklahoma Baptists in a statewide radio and television campaign and the Operation NOAH Rebuild project in New Orleans, an ongoing Baptist ministry to aid in recovery and rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
Both on the local level and nationally, the ERC needs more volunteers. Anyone can volunteer to be a counselor — either a telephone encourager or Internet encourager. The ERC simply requires that volunteers undergo a two-hour training course, which is provided by the organization.
Volunteers needed
Once the volunteer receives training and is certified, he or she is asked to make a 30-hour commitment for a year. “That is about two and a half hours a month,” Ravi said.
Volunteers receive a password upon completion of their training. When volunteers are ready to receive phone calls, they simply dial the ERC phone number, input the password and type in the phone number where they can be reached. The ERC then forwards calls to that phone. When the volunteer answers, a voice identifies which program the call is coming from so that the telephone encourager can know how best to greet the caller.
Volunteers are asked to report decisions made by callers to the organization, and the ERC forwards that contact information to a church in the caller’s area. “Covenant Churches,” as they’re called, are then asked to follow up anywhere from three hours to three days after the call.
Since the ERC was established in mid-2006, the center has fielded more than 41,000 calls that resulted in 8,000 decisions. Of those 8,000 decisions, 900 involved first-time decisions for Christ. A team of about 200 counselors received all of those calls.
Ravi said the ERC has an ultimate goal of 8,000 volunteers in order to adequately meet the needs of callers.
For more information, visit www.erconline.net. (BP)
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