Cambodia | “The Game”
“This is the answer! It’s not going to be the same after this…”
Novo staff emeritus Dave Everitt has been a motorcycle rider all his life, so when he moved to Cambodia in 1998, he bought a couple of motorcycles. Dave would fall asleep in traditional prayer meetings, but on his bike he could ride for 8 hours and have crystal clear prayer times with the Lord. So, he began biking all over Cambodia, going where God led him, praying, and meeting people. Eventually, other believers in Cambodia would lean on Dave for “intel” about different regions of the country and ask him for help in accessing hard-to-reach areas. That’s how he got connected to a remote animist people group of 40,000 with only 150-200 followers of Jesus.
Dave would drive to this mountainous region a couple of times a month, praying and building relationships, and he became great friends with the head of the churches there. The Holy Spirit moved Dave to share simple tools for multiplying the good news with that leader, after which the leader exclaimed, “This is the answer! It’s not going to be the same after this … I have been the bottleneck [to church growth]. But if you unleash people to go and do this stuff on their own, it’s going to change the rules.”
Since empowering everyday people to share the gospel story, new believers and churches have been multiplying at an incredible rate. Many thousands have come to faith. They average two new churches started per month and are sending their own people as missionaries to nearby cultures.
After 24 years in Cambodia, God showed Dave it was time to leave, but he still visits once a year. Every time, that same leader picks him up at the airport and insists Dave play “the game:” They visit every new church started in the last year, and Dave pulls out the GPS log on his phone to check if he and his Prayer Circle group prayed in that village on one of their prayer rides. Nine times out of ten, they did—usually multiple times! After faithfully sowing seeds of the gospel through prayer and obedience, Dave now gets to watch the harvest come in.
