K.P. Westmoreland is chronicling his adventures in ministry in a TV series called Rev’d
K.P. Westmoreland isn’t sure how he ended up in a remote village in the middle of China. Stranger still was the fact that he found himself sharing his testimony with a burn victim who happened to be a fortune teller. As Westmoreland’s missionary companion led the woman in a prayer of repentance, he looked on in utter awe.
“I watched my friend lead this Chinese fortune teller in the sinner’s prayer and accept Jesus and denounce all the demonic stuff she had been involved in,” he said.
To this day, the 39-year-old is amazed by the way God has used a former drug addict from Yukon, Okla., as a national evangelist and occasional world traveler.
After his parents divorced just before he entered junior high school, Westmoreland started experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex. Even though he was raised in church, he said he never made any strong, lasting spiritual connections with Christ.
“I questioned everything,” he said. “I never really doubted that there was a God and that Jesus Christ was real. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with Him.”
Things worsened while attending a nearby Christian college, where he was on a basketball scholarship. Westmoreland flunked out after his first year and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where his mother had moved to care for his grandmother.
“That’s when I got to the end of my rope and called out to the God that I’d heard about as a kid,” Westmoreland said. “This doesn’t happen for everybody for some reason, but miraculously He removed the addiction from me. It was immediate.”
Westmoreland returned to school a changed man. After graduation, he used his basketball skills for youth and prison ministries. He also met his wife, Teri. The couple’s 11-year wedding anniversary also marks another important milestone.
“We were miraculously called into the ministry and God confirmed it through others and through some pretty supernatural circumstances,” Westmoreland said. “We’ve never looked back. I went full time into the ministry. Financially it’s been hard. I’m not running Focus on the Family here. But 11 years later I’ve never looked back.”
But Westmoreland found that one of his old desires was still hanging around. He had a motorcycle in college but sold it to buy a car. Westmoreland searched everywhere looking for a way to create his own custom bike, but his wife didn’t like the idea. She eventually told him, “You can have a bike when God gives you one.”
The next morning, Westmoreland was meeting one of his ministry’s board members who had brought along a friend. That man proceeded to tell Westmoreland that God had prompted him to donate a custom bike to the ministry.
Commonly referred to as “the faith bike,” Westmoreland’s motorcycle has an elaborate portrait of Christ, custom crosses and “Acts 4:12” stitched on its seat. The bike looks like something that came from the popular TV show American Chopper and has opened doors for Westmoreland to minister to a whole new group of people.
“Since having this bike, I started noticing the hard-core biker dude or the trucker going out of their way to come over to me and ask me questions and look at this bike,” Westmoreland said. “Normally they … wouldn’t have looked at me and thought, Hey, that’s a guy I can relate to. But as soon as we got the bike, boom, it just happened.”
Westmoreland takes his bike most everywhere he travels. He recently chronicled some of his encounters for a TV pilot called Rev’d, which he plans to turn into a series that will air on TBN. Westmoreland is also developing a DVD curriculum geared toward young adults called The Journey in which his ride takes a central role.
“In the grand scheme of things … it is just a motorcycle,” Westmoreland said. “It gets dirty and oily and dusty, and I’ve had to repair it. It’s a wad of metal. But it’s all about what impact you have with that tool while you have it.”
Westmoreland’s impact has been widespread and at such varied places as Christian music festivals, Native American reservations, churches and of course, a remote village in the middle of a communist nation.
Westmoreland says he simply wants to go wherever God leads him. “I don’t want to be on this planet in 10 years and not be hearing from the voice of God,” he said. “That would be miserable.”
Chad Bonham in Broken Arrow, Okla.
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