Ever since I met Lora Keeth Online I have been fascinated by [1] their family ministry. Reading her testimony has been a great blessing to me. It is especially interesting to note that Lora was at first afraid to give out tracts; that made me feel a little better and gave me hope. The second thing I noted was that while ultimately God was working in her husband Gene’s life to start the ministry it began with their small daughter and then moved to Lora and on to Gene. I am going to post Lora’s testimony in two parts. I hope you have time to read them. In part 2 Lora shares practical information for our families.

Before I answer the questions, I wanted to give you a little information about my family so that you could have a better understanding of who we are. Gene and I have been married for 23 years and have 5 wonderful daughters. Lindsay is 22, and lives at home with us. Sarah is 19, and is our special needs daughter. She is deaf and has cerebral palsy and some other issues. Sarah will always live with us, and she has a huge heart for the Lord. Hannah is 14, she is really shy, but is coming out of her shell. Rachel is our bold 12 year old. I can see her standing on a preaching stool, preaching the gospel to all who will listen. She plays heavily into our ministry story, but I’ll share that a little later. Caroline is our 11 year old (this week) and she is our family comedian. We are in our 16th year of homeschooling. At this time we are attending a Bible Church that is comprised mostly of homeschoolers. In the past we have attended typical churches and we even home-churched for a few years.

1. Can you give an outline of your family ministry?

We have a family evangelism ministry where we hand out tracts, one to one witness on the streets (or whenever we get the chance) and Gene does open air preaching. Every Friday night Gene goes into Downtown Houston to witness to people and preach from 9pm - 12am. Often Lindsay, our 22yo daughter, or I will accompany him. We didn’t choose the downtown area as much as it chose us. Gene has been kicked out of many local malls due to private property issues. Laws vary from state to state but are relatively the same when it comes to private property. Here in Texas our rights are very easy to understand: you have none. You don’t even have the right to simply talk to people about God–it’s one-hundred percent up to the property owner. Public property? That’s another issue altogether. Being the U.S.A., we still do have the right to free speech (on public property) and we have learned how to use the law to our advantage. What’s funny is that most of the police officers we encounter are not even familiar with the law–we have to explain it to them. Downtown Houston offers two incredible opportunities for Friday night “seed sowing.”: The first is that it’s public property; the second is that the many night clubs and restaurants in that area draw tremendous weekend crowds, and because of the hard to find parking, people park their cars once and walk for the rest of the night. All we have to do is plant our feet at our favorite corner and pass out tracts as they stream past us. It couldn’t be any better. Also, we use some of the best gospel tracts in the world–the kind where people will actually ask for more in some cases because our tracts start in the natural realm, and then swing to the spiritual. We have some that look like million dollar bills. People love them and they are a great way to break the ice with a stranger. We will try to engage them in conversation, and if they’re open we’ll witness to them. We have not taken our younger girls Downtown as of yet due to the hour and the atmosphere, but our 12yo wants to go and we may allow her in the near future. Our ministry has been going through some changes, causing us to re-work how we do some things. We are excited about the changes that have come about. One activity that we are excited about is a family evangelism day. We will meet with other families near the zoo and have our children handing out tracts with their parents beside them to help them out should the doors open for a conversation. We have several other families who are wanting to get involved in this, so we are quite excited about it.

We also put on evangelism training classes at local churches to help encourage and equip others in the sharing of their faith. These classes are such a blessing for us to put on, and they have stretched us all, but we have seen the greatest benefits to be for our girls. The classes are one day training classes that last for 5 hours. During this time we show videos, and have discussion and role playing. The girls greatly contribute by baking all the refreshments for the class, helping to set up once we arrive, handling our registration table, selling books, and being willing to answer questions from those attending the class. When we put on our first class we were surprised at how much each of them were stretched. It was a great blessing to both Gene and I to see the Lord using them in such a way.

We also try to make ministry part of our everyday lives by ministering to our friends and neighbors, while our main focus may be evangelism, we try to minister and serve wherever the Lord leads.Every week when Gene goes Downtown we make sandwiches for the homeless. They often approach us asking for money, and not wanting to contribute to their addictions, we came up with the solution of taking them food and water bottles. I want to share a couple of incidents that have happened with the girls, in the hopes that they will encourage you, but also to show you the simplicity of our ministry and how anyone can do what we do.

Here are a couple of quick examples of how the girls particitpate in our ministry.

Recently I was at Wal-Mart, it was after dinner time and Rachel and Caroline were starving. I gave them some money and told them they could walk over to the McDonald’s that was near the checkout lines. Before they left Rachel asked me if she could have some [2] Christmas Cash They ordered their fries, paid, and then gave the cashier the Santa money. As I walked up, Caroline was literally bouncing and saying, “He’s reading it! He’s reading it!” She was so excited that they had been able to share the gospel in such a simple way.

There was also another incident at Wal-Mart where the girls were putting tracts in anything that wasn’t moving. Their hiding places included beer cases, socks, bras, panties and anywhere else they could find to stick them. Being the great evangelist’s wife that I am, I repeatedly said to them…”You are going to get us kicked out of here!” They had a blast. We pray that when the tracts reached their final destination, the Lord was able to use them in someone’s life.

2. When did you begin to think about these things? What set you on this path?

Four years ago we were in a church that talked a great deal about handing out tracts. Rachel, who was 8 at the time, has a great heart for the lost and kept bringing home tracts. I’m not talking a few tracts, I’m talking over 100. I had taken evangelism training classes years ago, but I had never been in a church that handed out tracts. Most of the churches I had attended had a rack of tracts, but they were all dust covered from lack of use. So, when Rachel brought these things home, telling me she wanted to give them to people, I was thoroughly petrified. I didn’t know what to say to a person when handing them a tract; what if they asked me a question, what was I to tell them?! That sent me to my knees, an act that would change our lives more than I could have ever imagined.

Over the next few weeks a couple of names kept coming up in my conversations and my reading. They were Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, yes that’s the Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains fame. After doing research I found that they used the Ten Commandments in evangelism and their ministry consisted of training others to do the same, along with selling these amazing tracts I mentioned earlier. I also found that there was a family at church that knew Ray. At this time Gene was working about 65 hours a week and was on the night shift. Due to this, we had little time to talk, and he wasn’t really sure what was happening to his wife and oldest daughter. He only knew that for some reason we were obsessed with Kirk and this other little man with the strange accent.

One Friday I talked to my friend who knows Ray, and the following Sunday she brought us a couple of videos, which you can see on our website. They are [3] Hell’s Best Kept Secret and [4] True and False Conversions. Both of these videos are life changing. When watching them I saw that my feeble excuses for not sharing my faith were an affront to God. He told us all to share our faith, and He told us when to do it… in season and out of season. Those are the only two times we should share our faith.

As for Gene, his life was thoroughly and forever changed.

3. How did your life change?

My life changed in that I saw my responsibility to share my faith. I also saw that I had to put aside my fears and be obedient to His call. Becoming the wife of an evangelist after 19 years of marriage was very stretching. I had to re-define who I was and to change my thoughts and expectations. God put on my heart that our first love is to be Him. I try to be an encouragement to Gene and a helpmeet in his ministry work. He is on the streets more than I am, and figuring out the balance of wife/mother/evangelist has not been an easy journey. I have made many mistakes along the way, but my prayer is that God has and will continue to grow me.

For Gene the changes were of eternal value. He had been raised in church his whole life and made a profession of faith when he was 9. This teaching changed his whole outlook on life as a Christian. We didn’t realize it until recently, but 4 years ago when Gene saw this teaching was when he was truly soundly saved. Before this he had been a false convert, and sadly, the church is full of them. There were times that I wondered about his salvation, but I always dismissed those thoughts because he was such a good guy. One of the reasons we are so passionate about our ministry is that we realize there are many people all around us who are professing Christians, but who are in all likelihood bound straight for hell. Matthew 7:13-14 tells us that the gate that leads to destruction is wide, and the path that leads to life is narrow. Our primary missions are to awake Christians to their call to evangelize the lost, and to share the gospel with anyone and everyone.

4. What benefits have arisen in your family life from your ministry?

We see our efforts to lead people to Christ as being in battle on the front lines. Whenever you share the gospel with a lost sinner, whether through a tract or a one to one encounter, you are on the front line. Being in battle together has had a very unifying effect on our family. Our hope is to instill in our girls that all Christians are in this battle, and that we all have a responsibility to fight the good fight.

We have also seen growth in the girls as they get outside their comfort zones to minister to others. It has taught us all to put aside our own personal desires and agendas and strive to do what our Lord desires. We have by no means arrived, and I don’t want to give that impression. We still have much to learn, and for us it’s exciting to see what the Lord has waiting. At times, the lessons we are learning are hard. We’ve had a lot of those as of late, but the Lord has encouraged us when we needed it most, through His word, His Spirit, and through friends.