Sid Roth

Sid: My guest by way of telephone at his office in Lynwood, Washington, the Head of the Centennial Group George Otis, Jr. Perhaps your familiar with his father his father started Middle East Television. He started TV and radio throughout the Middle East and radio throughout the world. George was raised in that environment and he had his own encounter with the Lord which in a very supernatural fashion. God has been directing him especially in the area of documenting where entire cities are impacted for the Lord. Not just a few churches on fire for the Lord, but entire cities… George I have to tell you most people, most believers feel that “That’s not going to happen until the millennium.” What would you say to them?

George: Well, the good news is that these examples that were documenting are places that they can visit. They just need to find a week of time or a few days time buy a plane ticket and they can actually go and walk the streets of these communities and see what community transformation looks like. It is a faith building experience more and more people are actually visiting some of the locations that we’ve highlighted. And the communities that we’ve highlighted on our videos represent only a fraction of the case studies that we’re presently aware of which are now somewhere in the vicinity of 170 to 180 different locations.

Sid: Okay you were listing yesterday reasons why here in the west we don’t experience what’s happening in other areas, and the one that I have to trigger of all of them is the one called lack of hunger. Why do we have a lack of hunger here in the west is it that we have too many toys?

George: Yes, that’s a big part of it Sid we… you know how sometimes people summarize the 10 Commandments down into the first two. We can summarize I think the obstacles the transformation down into 2 things external distractions and internal offenses. And if we can overcome those 2 problems then we will see in our midst the Lord working in the same measure that He’s working in many regions and nation’s cities today.

Sid: So what’s your scenario how is this going to be overcome; to have us become a 3^rd world country that will sure do it.

George: That sometimes is what God will do and we need to see this sometimes as the grace and mercy of God. C.S. Lewis put it this way once he said “God’s love marshals me where I would go if I truly knew what I wanted.” So often we only think we know what we want it really isn’t what we want. And if God graciously sometimes highjacks the direction of our lives and our ministries and says “Listen, trust me I know where you would go if you truly knew what you wanted and I’m going to take you there.” And I think that what is happening today, in this country, that we are… we’re we’ve seen religious inertia become more valuable to us than genuine spiritual change. In other words if we’re active, if we’re just busy if things are happening all around us and there’s a lot of sound and energy and bodies we slip into this deception that were actually making progress. I’ll tell you how I would put it, I think that we are suffering from a form of deism. We in the west are more products of the enlightenment than we are in the book of Acts. We think that God got things all started He wound it all up and then He’s kind of left the scene for us to go ahead and figure out all of the fine print and details on our own. See you’ve got 100’s and 100’s of men and woman of western church today that are running like chickens with their head cut off trying to figure out what ought to be done rather than realizing God has an intense interest in the details and is about the details. So I think this issue of hunger requires us to get alone with God saying “God would you increase my appetite for those things that are proven to attract Your presence.”

Sid: Because you can’t work it up yourself… you know the hunger even comes from God.

George: That’s right it does and when we do that maybe it’s a hunger for unity or for holiness or for humility or for faith or for prayer or whatever it might be. It’s not that we have no appetite it’s that we have a bird like appetite. It’s like going into a restaurant after we had fellowship with the saints and we sit down to a meal and the waiter or waitress comes over and says “What can I bring you?” And we haven’t even cracked the menu so we send them away and then the 3^rd time they come back we’re embarrassed because we still don’t know and we just say off handedly “You know just bring me a cup of coffee.” That’s the response in the western church to the Holy Spirit who wants to bring us so much more we settle on a cup of coffee and a spiritual caffeine buzz; it’s just not going to take us where we need to go and where we truly would go if we knew what God could do for us.

Sid: Well, for example whet their appetite if you will so that people would at least pray “God give me the desire for unity, give me the desire to pray with my brothers and sisters so I can see the same thing.” Tell me about one of the cities on your transformation video Cali, Columbia. When I think of Columbia I think of drugs.

George: Well, most people do and that the extent of the reputation that was generated several years ago in the city of Cali which became the epicenter of the global cocaine cartel. There were over 100,000 people in this city that were on the direct, not the indirect, payroll of the cocaine cartels. This was a multibillion dollar enterprise. And I’ve seen their compounds down there and unless you’ve seen it you just can’t believe it. They were small cities within the city within their own air strips helipads their own shopping malls, their own restaurants. These drug lords would go to a restaurant in a city find a place they liked and would hire the cook and bring him into their compounds to start these private little restaurants. They would have underground tunnels connecting up to 25 massive mansions. And that would be only one compound and there were multiple ones within the city. They owned the police, they owned the banks, they owned the sport franchises, they ran everything. And so you can imagine what life in this city would have been like and to make matters worse the Body of Christ was so disunified, disunited, that one person told me Ministerial Association in the city of Cali several years ago consisted of one box of files that nobody wanted. (Laughing) That’s where they were at. And so in the midst of all 15 people a day were being murdered it was a mess. A few believers got so desperate they cried out to God and they said “You know we have to move the church together to call out to God to repent because that’s our only hope.” So they called an event in the municipal stadium there and to their surprise nearly 25,000 people showed up for an all night prayer vigil and they asked…

Sid: But you know what? They were desperate.

George: They were.

Sid: And that’s what we were just talking, here in the west we’re not desperate!

George: That’s exactly right we… we’re under the mistaken assumption that like the church at Sardis, and like the church at Laodicea, that we are in real good shape. And you’ll remember that what the Lord said to the Church at Sardis “You have a reputation of being alive but in fact you are dead.” And then He goes on to say “Now strengthen that which remains.” And what He’s saying there is “Return first love, move away from program and back to presence.” Because only God is capable of doing the heavy lifting that is required to see the community transformed. I believe that human programming and human charisma are adequate to see church growth, but they’re inadequate to see community transformation. Only God can do the heavy lifting as I said to bring that about. In the city of Cali, Columbia when they gathered together to cry out to God they began to initially talk to God about the violence problems. And that very weekend there headlines blazoned “No homicides” for the first time and as long as anybody could remember…

Sid: Are you saying the weekend these 25,000 Christians gathered for prayer there were no homicides?

George: It was that very same weekend that they talked to God about that issue. The city newspaper “El Pais,” and this is a community of about 3 million people headlined “No Homicide.” There had never been in anybody’s memory a weekend where nobody had been murdered in this city…

Sid: Oh, they figured something out real fast. George we’re out of time today.