Then on May 31, 2010, God spoke to me as I was reading the book of Daniel: “You’ve been faithful in reaching out to the local church in the English-speaking world. Now I’m sending you to the entire realm—the nations of the world.” It was a wow moment. I had no idea how this was going to happen. So I called a meeting with the directors of our ministry. I shared the vision that God had placed in my heart and told them that during the course of 2011, I wanted to give away 250,000 books to leaders in developing nations. Everyone was shocked. We had never given away anything close to this number of books in a single year. My Chief Operating Officer and other department heads questioned me repeatedly over this mandate. My COO finally asked if I would bring this objective to God in prayer.

I had clearly heard from God that we were to reach out to pastors and leaders all over the world, but God had not specifically told me that the first step toward this goal was to give away 250,000 books during the coming year. So I took this goal to Him in prayer. Sure enough, I had a peace. The Holy Spirit did not have to audibly speak to me because I knew this goal was in line with His original directive. I felt His witness with it. When I reported this to the team, they immediately got behind the vision. Sure enough, God moved in miraculous ways, and we were able to give away more than 270,000 books to pastors and leaders in 47 nations that year.

In 2011, I met with an Iraqi pastor in Beirut, Lebanon (I was in the Middle East speaking to 2,500 pastors and leaders). He led the largest church in his city and was a young man of thirty-six years. He told me, “Mr. Bevere, you are like a father to me. I’ve read as many of your books as I could get my hands on. I’ve even used my credit card to download resources from your website.”

When he said that, I wanted to crawl into a hole. Here was a man from a war-torn nation with very little finances doing everything he could to get Messenger International’s materials. It caused me to once again cry out to God for wisdom on how to help these local churches by empowering their leaders. By praying in the Spirit, I received an idea for how we could give pastors in developing nations not only books but entire curriculums. The next year, we gave 1.3 million resources to these pastors and leaders. That number has continued to multiply ever since.