Preaching to the Hungry: An interview with Evangelist Matti Wendelin

PneumaReview.com: Please tell our readers about your ministry.

Matti Wendelin: My ministry, Full Gospel for All Nations, was founded 1990 in Finland. I have been preaching the gospel since 1977. This is still a small ministry, but thanks to God we are wining many souls around the world, especially in Asia. My vision is to do mass crusades and I love when I see people being saved and healed. We often see that everyone attending our crusades wants to get saved.

 

PR: When did you sense that the Lord was calling you into ministry?

Matti Wendelin: When I was a child, the Lord spoke to me through many different ways about my calling to preach the gospel. I used to go alone to forest where I had collection of empty bottles. I preached to those bottles and at the end of the service, I pushed them down. When I grew up, I wanted to do something else with my life until Lord took me for a visit to Heaven. In Heaven, one angel took me to the room where there were a lot of crowns. He took one crown and came to me saying, “The Lord has prepared this for you.” I liked it and it was very beautiful in my eyes, but he put it back and took another crown and said to me, “This is for you.” Immediately I could see there was a big different between those two crowns, like night and day. He continued, “That first one was prepared for you, but because you did not want to do the will of God and you were not willing to go to Pakistan, India, Papua New Guinea, and wherever the Lord would send you to preach the gospel, so someone else is going to do what you were asked to do, and they will receive what was prepared for you.”

At that moment, for the first time in my life I realized I can be saved by the mercy of God and get in to Heaven. But Heaven is also a place of reward where I can forever lose what was set aside for me. That visit changed me for the rest of my life. After that, I started to seek and pray to receive an anointing to do God´s will. One night, the Lord woke me up and I could see with my eyes the glory of God and two big shining wings slowly coming on me. It was the Holy Spirit, I received my anointing. I was really “drunk” in the Spirit about two weeks, and I could mostly only speak with tongues. After this, the Lord came to me in a vision one night and gave me some paper scrolls saying to me: “These are your letters of attorney from God. Take this, eat it and go.” After few weeks I found in my Bible: “And he said unto me, Son of man, eat that which thou findest; eat this roll, and go, speak unto the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 3:1). The Pentecostal church in my city invited me to preach in 1977, and I have been doing it by faith ever since then.

 

PR: How did you know that the Lord called you into the specific kind of ministry that you are now involved in?

Matti Wendelin: The Lord showed me many visions where I was preaching to multitudes in many different countries and to many different peoples. Also the Lord spoke to me in 1980 that I should learn about what a German Evangelist, Reinhard Bonnke, was doing. I did not know anything about him that time. The Lord spoke to me, “The time is coming when you will do similar things.” In December 1986, I met him for the first time during his crusade in Africa (Accra, Ghana). That was the first time that I saw miracles like blind being made to see and the deaf made to hear. And the Lord spoke to me: “This is what you also are going to do.”

 

PR: Were you mentored in this ministry?

Matti Wendelin: One Monday morning the Holy Spirit came to me and all that day I was “drunken” in the Spirit. During the next few days He also came to me and started to teach me. I asked Him many questions and He answered me. He has been my highest mentor for my entire life. I also have a master’s degree in theology from university.

 

PR: What countries have you ministered in?

Matti Wendelin: My first mission trip was to Papua New Guinea in 1980. Since then, I have been in many different countries across Africa, as well as Pakistan, India, Poland, Australia, Russian, and Sweden.

 

PR: Is there one country that you feel has been a particularly fruitful mission field?

Matti Wendelin: There is a special place in my heart for Asian countries like Pakistan and India. Particularly in Pakistan, people are really hungry for God. They come in busses from different villages to my crusades. Last time, we had to say to over one hundred villages, who wanted take part of the crusade, “Please do not come, we can´t take you, because we do not have enough power in our amplifier system, and we do not have enough lights.” During that time I was really crying. People wanted to come to my crusades in a Muslim country and we had to forbid them. This is a question of money. Crusades are very costly and we can go to the fields for harvest only according to how we get finances. It is also a question of security, we cannot let people stay outside where there are no lights in the evening. The harvest is really ready and it is plenty! Please pray for us.

 

PR: What are some of the amazing physical miracles that you have seen take place through your ministry?

Matti Wendelin: I have seen miracles all over the world, but especially in Pakistan, India and Papua New Guinea. If we are speaking about healing miracles, we have seen the same miracles Jesus did. The blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak. In my last crusade in Pakistan there were two deaf and dumb sisters, and they both got healed. Hallelujah!

 

PR: Thank you for speaking with PneumaReview.com.