Joel Revalee, ministry blog

I thank God for the Pastors and Elders that He's placed in my life. Below is a true story about my very first pastor, Bishop Don Johnson at Grey Road Church in Memphis, TN. It was 2003, and I was 19 years old. Every Sunday night before evening worship started at 6:00, a small group of men would meet at 4:00 for the following purpose: studying and discussing The Word of God. Most of the minsters of the church attended, including the Pastor himself. The format of our Men's Bible Study was simple: each week, a different man was asked to present scriptures that God had laid on his heart. He would take 5-10 minutes, and then we would discuss; the meeting would usually last until 5:00. This week was my turn. I cannot recall what I presented that afternoon, but what I distinctly remember is the aftermath. When we dismissed and headed down to get ready for night service, Bishop Johnson motioned me over and asked a question: "Brother Joel, would you like to take part in

One day many years ago when I was still working in my old job as a scientist, I was crunching data that wasn't adding up. I was running statistics on tables of numbers from someone else's experiments, and the results were not reasonable. They were nonsense. They were confusing. I had run the same statistics on several other similar experiments, and they all checked out. Only this one didn't give the expected output. After about 6 hours of me checking and rechecking everything that I could, a light bulb went off. I realized why this one table of numbers in this one experiment didn't add up. Someone had made them up! The person who had given them to me had forged them, thinking "no one will ever check these." But I was that no one who was checking them, and I had discovered their fraud! I later met the people face-to-face who had done this experiment, and they admitted to cutting corners. They never thought their slipshod work would affect anyone: t