About John Metzger

This is to introduce you to John Metzger, a Missionary Educator with Ariel Ministries based in San Antonio, TX. Ariel Ministries is a missionary faith work established in 1977, by Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. Dedicated to spreading the Gospel of Messiah to Jewish people and equipping Jewish and Gentile believers in the faith. Ariel Ministries believes that basic responsibility for reaching Jewish people rests upon the shoulders of the local church and individuals within the local Church to fulfill Romans 1:16 ”… to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Gentile)”. Ariel Ministries is doing all it can to reach, teach and train Jewish people in the Scriptures. Its thrust is to teach and train believers in all of the Scriptures so that the local church is fully equiped to minister to Jewish people and led them to Messiah Yeshua. The aim is two fold
:
  1. EVANGELISM: To make believers and local congregations aware of the tremondous needs in reaching Jewish people in their neighborhood and how to effectively witness to them.
  2. DISCIPLESHIP: To help make all believers both Jew and Gentile effective in their witnessing through sound biblical teaching from both the Old and New Testaments provided by the faithful teaching of Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum.
The Jewish People have been scattered around the world, and everywhere the Jewish people live, there are individaul believers and local churches who have daily contact with them. They need to be trained first of all in how to use the Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) in witnessing and also to understand Jewish culture and customs, as well as Jewish senstitvities so that they do not raise unnecessary barriers and turn them away from Messiah instead of to Him.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND & EDUCATION

John was raised in a Christian home and came to faith at age 14 through the ministry of the Christian Youth Crusade, then held at Riverdale Baptist Church in Riverdale, MD. He surrendered his life to the Lord at age 16 at the National Teen Convention of Youth For Christ held that year in Washington, D.C. He met his wife, Sharon, at Washington Bible College, was married in 1968 and graduated in 1970. They currently reside in Matthews (Charlotte), NC and have two married sons, Mark and Jonathan, and nine grandchildren.

John’s education includes a B.A. from Washington Bible College in Lanham, MD. Thirteen summers at Ariel Ministries Camp Shoshanah in upstate New York (see www.Ariel.org and click on Camp Shoshanah). In the spring of 1998, he took a five-week study tour in Israel under the direction of Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. In May of 2004 he completed his M.A. in Bible (Old Testament Studies) from Lancaster Bible College Graduate School in Lancaster, PA. He is currently taking courses from Tyndale Theological Seminary. He is also an author of two books, “The Tri-unity of God is Jewish” and a complete revision of that book which is about to be published by Ariel Ministries called “Discovering the Mystery of the Unity of God.”

His past ministries include the following: Child Evangelism Fellowship, the pastorate, and director of an American Indian Bible Institute. Also he has spent numerous years in the secular field, but these years were years of emptiness for him.

HIS HEART

Although John is not Jewish by birth or raised in or around a Jewish community, he has had an interest in Jewish people since he was a teenager. He was taught to love the Jews and Israel from Pastor J. Albert Ford, the first pastor of Mclean Bible Church. It was not until he went to Ariel’s Camp Shoshanah that he discovered by studying the scriptures from a Jewish frame of reference he was able to find answers to many questions that he could not found answers for prior to this time. During this process, God gave him a greater love and burden to see Jewish people come to faith.

Now it is his desire and burden to teach other believers the scriptures from that Jewish background and to train them in Jewish Evangelism and Jewish culture and customs. This includes teaching them how to witness to the Jewish people from the Hebrew Bible and to help Gentile believers understand Jewish sensitivities and why they have resisted the Gospel of their Messiah for 2000 years.

HIS MINISTRY

In the summer of 2000 while John was doing street witnessing in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he was overwhelmed by the need to reach the untold millions, of which one third are Jewish in the New York Metro area. That weight of burden is even greater now since the tragic events of September 11th. The burden now includes the untold thousands of Jewish people in other large cities, small metro areas, and rural towns. But how do you reach into the homes of Jewish people who do not want you, people who have successfully resisted the Gospel of their Messiah for 2000 years? This can be accomplished two ways:

  1. First, this can be accomplished through the training and equipping of individual believers in the local church who already have contact with Jewish people at their job, business, or neighborhood.
  2. Secondly, it can be done through the Internet by training and equipping Gentile believers through Ariel’s “Come and See” program (www.Ariel.org then Come and See). Also it is still his vision to use web-broadcasting to challenge Jewish people with the claims of Messiah in their own Hebrew scriptures through the medium of Internet.

While being involved American Indian work, the Lord opened his eyes to the identity crisis that Native Americans have been caught between two cultures and the tremondous struggled that insued in their hearts. So with this background, John now has a better understanding of the identity crisis that a Jewish person faces when he or she is considering embracing Yeshua as his or her own personal Savior.

It is John’s desire to be used by the Holy Spirit to implant in the minds and hearts of God’s people a love and burden to reach Jewish people for Yeshua. He is especially concerned about the believers in Christ, the Church. It is a fact that most Jewish people come to faith by the witness of informed and loving Gentile believers. For over 17 centuries the Church has neglected the Jewish community with the true Gospel of Messiah and instead became the most anti-Sematic organization on the earth. It is now the last days and the Churches urgently needs to respond to this great opportunity to reach the Jew before it’s Rapture, wherever they are, with Messiah`s heart and love.

Within the Evangelical and Fundamental church who are theologically receptive to Israel, there is far to often a hardened heart within believers in witnessing to Jewish people. That hardness of heart toward to salvation of Jewish people in their Messiah must be broken up, cultivated so that the seed of evangelism can take root and grow within the hearts of individual believers and the local church.

Then there are others who have missed placed their love for Israel by giving large sums of money as to one Rabbinic organization who has received in the last two years nearly 200 millions dollars to help Jewish people who are coming to or currently living in Israel with physical needs. But all those funds as they are given to Jewish people or given in the name of Rabbinic Judaism (those who reject Jesus as Messiah and God) and not in the Name of Jesus Christ. Not one penny given by those believers is used to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Jewish people in Israel or around the world with the result bdeing the salvation of Jewish people in Jesus Christ (Yeshua haMoshiach).

SUGGESTED PROGRAMS
John is able to give a broad spectrum of educational and inspirational messages, as well as demonstrate from a Jewish Christian perspective, how to equip congregations to reach Jewish people in their own local area. His presentations can be incorporated into a Sunday church service, Bible, missionary, prophetic or bible conferences or even a retreatas as he uses the King James Version of the Bible. Some of his presentations include the following:
  1. A Jew as he dresses for Worship – The Sh’ma
  2. Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants
  3. Arab/Israeli Conflict
  4. Are Jews still saved under the Law?
  5. Basis of the Second Coming of Messiah
  6. Basis of Jewish Evangelism?
  7. Hanukkah Presentations
  8. How the New Testament quotes the Old Testament
  9. Indentity of the “Arm” of the LORD
  10. Is the Church – Israel?
  11. Israel, God’s timeclock!
  12. Israel, a Fossil Nation
  13. Jewishness of the Scriptures
  14. Memra or Logos in John 1?
  15. Messiah in the Tabernacle
  16. Messianic Christology in the Old Testament.
  17. Passover Seder Demonstration
  18. Prophetic Significance of the Feasts of Israel
  19. Romans 9 – 11
  20. Sermon on the Mount from a Jewish perspective
  21. Teaching the Jewish roots of our faith
  22. The Forbidden passage - Daniel 9:24-27
  23. The Neglected Passage – Isaiah 53
  24. The Place of Israel is God’s program
  25. The Seven I Am’s of the Gospel of John
  26. Three Messianic Miracles
  27. Tri-unity of God in the Old Testament Scriptures
  28. Was being Born Again new to Nicodemus in John 3?
  29. Was God in the Old Testament interested in the Salvation of the Gentiles
  30. What is the Unpardonable Sin?
  31. Who is the Rock in Matthew 16:18
  32. Why are Jews so Difficult to reach?