By Hannah Oswalt
How do you know the hand of God is moving? How do you know you’re stepping out into the calling God has placed on your life? This week’s hero is someone who is living out the answers to both of those questions. A man whose purpose literally makes him cry.
Enter Levi Bradley.
A welder by trade who moved up on the corporate side as a Quality Control Manager who went from having a comfortable six-figure income to being called out into full-time ministry.
Bradley calls the type of ministry he runs “a street ministry.”
“Most people think of street ministry and they think of the homeless, and it’s not the homeless,” he said.“God did not break my heart for the homeless; God broke my heart for the lost and so that started about 2015 When God just completely wrecked my heart and got ahold of me.”
Bradley describes his calling to ministry as “fire in my bones.”
“I couldn’t hold it in so I found myself preaching and then teaching Sunday school classes and leading prayer meetings,” he says, adding that there was nobody more surprised than himself. “I was a punk, I mean, I was a rebel,” he said. “Chip on my shoulder, fight everybody.” He says he was arrested for assault and battery due to his rage issues, but God got ahold of him. “For God to take that and just completely melt you down and refine you to where there’s just a love that radiates out. I was as amazed as everybody else. And so I preached in the church for three years.”
He went on to describe those 3 years of preaching as “his Antioch.” Comparing that time to how Paul went away to Antioch for three years, “It was my Antioch for God to train me up on how to get into the Word of how to rightly handle the word, to know the word, and to feed his sheep,” he says.
He described his transition into street ministry as part of a growing burden to reach the lost “I was having such a hard time preaching to the same congregation while people are lost, dying and going to hell. I couldn’t escape that.”
He started walking the streets periodically, knocking on doors, talking to people, and handing out bibles. “God just broke my heart, not for the homeless, not for the religious because they’re hearing the gospel, just if they choose to accept it, the homeless are usually in a food line somewhere hearing the gospel in some form, because there are so many ministries doing that. It was for everybody in the middle of that, the working man and woman that don’t go to church, that’ll never darken the doorway of a church, that aren’t in a food line. How are they going to hear the gospel?”
Bradley said at first it was just him with a backpack, and then he and his youth pastor and how he would see God move in such mighty ways that he would go home and weep at night for the people that he saw who were hungry for hope and salvation.
“To watch salvations happen—to watch just the weeping and the tears of people just swing a door open and say, ‘I’ve been praying God would send me something and a sign because I’m just at the end of my rope,’ and it’s like, here’s this weird guy that just knocked on your door in the middle of what we would call ‘the ghetto.’ Now you’re seeing God, just loving all over you, and it’s no credit to me, but it’s just the obedience that God is calling us to, to go out and to make disciples.”
Bradley talked about how they would do what he calls “street worship,” setting up in different parking lots and areas around town and would just worship the Lord with a guitar.
“I got a speaker, and then God told me to buy a bus, and I bought a bus and I thought that was just to haul everybody around to do this, and then eventually we put a full sound system on the bus.”
The street ministry meets every Tuesday night at 6:30 pm around Sapulpa.
Bradley says that leaving the corporate world behind for ministry wasn’t always part of the plan.“I grew up with a dad as a police officer and a mom as a hairdresser in Sand Springs, so you know, we grew up in a single-wide trailer without much, so for God to bring me to a point in my life where I’m on a six-figure salary income with retirement was…I felt like I had made it. I just have to ride this out and retire.”
He says that for a man whose identity was wrapped up in his career, to walk away from that into ministering full time was difficult. “You can say it’s not, as a believer, but when you step away from that, you talk about having to be on my face before the Lord a lot because I doubted everything. Because I could no longer provide anything. It was all from God. And that’s a huge check on who are we really serving? Is Jesus Lord, or are you Lord of your life because you keep your hands on everything? Who’s really Lord in your life?”
Still, he says the call to full-time ministry was not a surprise. “I knew that it was going to happen,” he said. “For three years I was anguishing in prayer over when. Because some days I just wanted to (jump in and) do it; a bad day at work. It’s like ‘God, just tell me today and I’ll go,’ right? And then there are good days at work and times when you really know you need the money and you’re able to go on vacation or whatever, and you’re like, “man God, I don’t want to give this up. I don’t want to give this up.
“So when he called me out of that I was actually in a parking lot doing worship and it was just a moment with the Lord, and he was like ‘Now.’ and I, melted because I’m like, ‘no, like, seriously?’”
Bradley explained how he gave a month’s notice at his job because he believed that was what God told him to do, and he says that although normally, they would’ve had someone pack up their office that day and be escorted to the door, yet he had favor and he was able to work throughout the month, even though he was in a company full of atheists and had told them what God was telling him.
Bradley recounted the owner’s answer: “He said ‘You can stay, I trust you.’ So I knew it was affirmation to me that God was in it.”After he went back to his office, he was so moved, but he was also scared. “I’m in there crying, because I’m just moved by what God is doing. And as I’m in there praying, I got my door shut and I’m like, ‘God, what? This is blowing my mind. I’m scared to death.’”
Bradley says God told him: “‘I’m gonna do more in a month than you’ve seen happen in eight years of being here.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, God.’”
Bradley recounts the story with tears in his eyes and goes on to share about how his coworkers he had previously shared the gospel with who were sworn atheists came to the Lord. One of the experiences he had went like this; “One of them specifically came into my office, shut the door and sat down and went, ‘What are you doing? This is insane. You have the dream job. You’re never going to be replaced. You don’t have to worry about being fired. Everybody would kill to be in your position, and you’re quitting to go drive around in a bus in the streets?’”I was like, ‘man, let me tell you,’ and so like I would just pour my heart out of the gospel and through tears I would watch the Holy Spirit wreck these men, like I would watch them turn red. I’d watch them shake. I would watch them just weep and give their life to the Lord, right there in my office. And I was so blown away.” He said the experience solidified his confidence that he was making the right decision. “There’s no way I can doubt,” he said.
The decision was made, and Levi Bradley was officially following his calling into full-time ministry. Stay tuned to see how that act of obedience resulted in one of the most impactful ministries in the city of Sapulpa: Shoulder2Shoulder ministries.
