Perry Stone bases his ministry in a small Tennessee town, yet he impacts the world through television. He is a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher whose largest group of followers are Baptists—and Roman Catholics are in the top four.
Best known as a teacher of end-times Bible prophecy, his biggest pleasure is poring over the Scriptures—he claims to have put in 60,000 hours of study.
Before he retires, he wants to finish a copious study Bible. But he also has a vision to build a youth camp that would look like a city in Old Testament Israel.
Stone also defies nearly every stereotype leveled at Pentecostals. Affiliated with the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), he can preach like a Pentecostal but usually teaches in a more academic style. He’s on thousands of TV stations, yet he never asks for money—he says God told him not to. Instead the Lord instructed him: “Trust Me.”
As one of America’s foremost experts on biblical prophecy, Stone often is invited as the keynote speaker at internationally attended prophecy conferences. But don’t expect him to agree with those who dub his prophetic teaching “end-times theology.”
“I just call it New Testament theology,” he says. “It’s basically three main points.
No. 1: There comes a time of end; not the end of time, but a time of the end. Our basic theology is to understand there is a time of the end and an end generation.
No. 2: There are specific signs [in the Bible] indicating when that generation is come.
No. 3 is to preach those signs to encourage people to come to know Jesus Christ. Those are the three simple ways that I look at what I do.”
Stone has also produced videos and DVDs, hundreds of audio teaching series, and films a weekly television program, Manna-Fest, that’s seen nationally and internationally via cable and satellite on TBN, Daystar, INSP, LeSea and other networks.
So how has a self-made Bible scholar been able to build one of the biggest ministries of its type in the world? “Prayer,” he says.
It was while in prayer at age 18 that Stone says God gave him the name of his ministry, Voice of Evangelism, and his television program. His vision was considered a joke at the time because he wasn’t the voice of anything back then; he had no ministry. When he told friends about his dream, they made fun of him.
About the same time, again in prayer, God revealed several thrusts his ministry would have: a magazine, radio and TV, crusades and camp meetings, and world-missions outreaches. All have come to pass.
