I don't mean to sound so negative but we have Christian bookstores jammed full of books that we read and we adopt other people's experiences and substitute that. We don't have our own experience with God. What is our own testimony? Not from ten years ago but from this past week. I think we are living a virtual relationship through other people and it's not quite real. I believe with all of our hearts we need to get back to the word of God. I think our preaching needs to get back to the word of God so that the preacher stands up and says, "Open your Bibles to such and such a passage," and he reads it and he goes through it and he's not just referencing it and then taking off to who-knows-where and never comes back to the passage. It needs to be exposition so he's not telling the audience or congregation what he thinks they need to hear; he's teaching them God's Word and teaching them what the Word means in their lives today, facing all of these pressures and stress and uncertain future.

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I just feel like we're in desperate shape to tell you the truth. If we're not getting it in church, where are we getting it? I know there are some great churches in America — don't get me wrong — but they're not in every city and they're not in every community and it's not every church. The world doesn't understand the difference — a church is a church and they paint us all with the same brush. I just feel like the church as a whole needs to humble ourselves and pray and seek God's face and turn from our wicked ways and maybe God would hear from heaven and forgive our sins and heal our land. I believe our church is in desperate need of a revival, a fresh touch from heaven and a fresh infusion of the Holy Spirit from the top down and from the bottom to the top.

Preaching: You lead large arena events speaking to people all over the country and all over the world. How did you get into this kind of ministry?

Lotz: I taught a Bible class for twelve years in my city and felt God called me out of that into just what I would describe as my ministry. He did it from scripture. Invitations came in from around the world inviting me to come to whatever the speaking engagement. So for twelve years I've done that. And then towards the end of that twelve year period I just began to be very restless, very dissatisfied in my spirit and one reason is because I'm always on somebody else's platform — it's somebody else's organization, somebody else's agenda. It can be wonderful and good and I'm honored to be a part of it but the restlessness began because I had never been on a platform where there was no other purpose other than the purpose of exalting Jesus.

In my father's crusades, the whole purpose of that platform is to bring people to Christ but past that is there a conference or something that would be offered to Christians where it was not to promote products or to promote a ministry or to promote a person on a platform but just to promote Jesus? What triggered it finally was I was on a platform where I felt very betrayed; I felt they'd used my name to draw in a crowd and it was for their own personal self-promotion and some other things. It just made me sick because of the way I had been deceived and the way it had been described.