One day in March 1967, Kenneth knew the Lord was trying to tell him something, but he didn’t know what. He came home from school that afternoon, and decided to go down to the Arkansas River bed, just about a mile from his house, to pray and listen. It was there, standing in the dried-up Arkansas River bed, where Kenneth received God’s call to ministry.
“He told me exactly what He was calling me to do,” Kenneth recalls. “He was calling me to preach the gospel to the nations…He said nations would be won in a day—some of them even by this ministry.”
Kenneth meditated on what God told him in that riverbed for months. When summer came, all the fear he felt was replaced with faith, and Kenneth was ready to accept the calling.
Kenneth remembers, “I stood up before the Lord and said, ‘I’ll tell You what I’m going to do. I’m going to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m going to preach that He saves, He heals, He baptizes with His Spirit and that He’s coming again. I’m going to preach that Your Word is powerful and true. I’m going to preach it from the top of the world to the bottom, and I’m going to preach it all the way around the middle, and I am not going to compromise.’”
Kenneth Copeland Evangelistic Association, later to become Kenneth Copeland Ministries, was established in 1967. The 1970s were tremendous years of growth the ministry.
The first issue of Believer’s Voice of Victory magazine was published in 1973 as a four-page newsletter and distributed to about 3,000 people. Today, the publication has evolved into a 32-page, full-color magazine that is distributed free each month to more than 362,000 subscribers worldwide.
