Born To Serve The Lord

It’s a miracle that Dr Michael Youssef is alive, let alone impacting tens of thousands of lives across the globe. He speaks to Pete Wooding about how his mother’s pastor was sent by God to tell her of her son’s impending importance in the Kingdom and how that prophecy has come true.

- Pete Wooding

“I have a face for radio,” jokes Dr Michael Youssef, who says he would have laughed if you’d told him he was going to have a worldwide television ministry many years ago.

“I had half-seriously said that I would never go on television,” he explains.

“My impression of Christian television was that to hold people’s attention you had to be half-comedian, half-gymnast. I didn’t believe audiences would respond to the serious-minded preaching of the Word of God.

“My wife, on the other hand, used to say, ‘You will be on television over my dead body.’ She had a slightly different reasoning from mine. She felt the over-exposure that television created actually reduced the effectiveness of a ministry.”

When Dr Youssef first became pastor of The Church of The Apostles in 1987 with just 40 members in Atlanta, Georgia, he never planned to launch a global broadcast ministry.

But almost 30 years after his first broadcast in 1989, Church of the Apostles has grown to 3,000 members and Dr Youssef’s teaching programmes under the ministry of Leading The Way are now heard on radio and seen on television in more than 190 countries in 25 languages.

You could say it was destiny that Dr Youssef has become such a significant Christian leader.

Even before he was born in Egypt in 1948, it was evident there was a calling on his life. His mother was in poor health at the time she became pregnant with Michael, and because her life would be jeopardised by the birth, her doctor recommended terminating the pregnancy. An abortion procedure was scheduled.