Sid Roth: The Supernatural Investigator

A Heart for the Jew

After his supernatural experience, Roth felt an urgency and a calling to share the Messiah he had come to know with others, especially his fellow Jews. Shortly after his acceptance of Jesus, a local newspaper, the Washington Daily News, ran a front-page story about him and a few other Christian businessmen, labeling them, “White Collar Jesus Freaks.”

“It’s a wonder I survived that first year,” Roth says, “I was a Jewish believer in Jesus, which is not so unusual today, but 40 years ago it was a unique phenomena.”

The immediate notoriety Roth received from the newspaper article took him by surprise. He admits that he was totally unprepared for the ministry opportunities that came his way. He soon became a regular on the Full-Gospel Businessmen’s speaking circuit.

“I knew very little about the Bible or Christianity at the time,” Roth says, “so I would simply share my personal testimony whenever I was asked to speak.”

The newspaper article also caught the eye of Kathryn Kuhlman, a well-known evangelist and faith healer in the 1940s to 1970s, who invited Roth to appear on her TV show. Kuhlman even offered to mentor Roth in the supernatural if he would move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was located. Roth turned her down because as a young believer he says he took the Bible at face value and assumed that all Christians walked in the supernatural.

“It is the biggest regret of my life,” Roth says.

Continuing to pursue his call to Jewish evangelism, Roth became the president of the Hebrew Christian Alliance in Washington, D.C., and also helped to start one of the first Messianic Jewish congregations in Rockville, Maryland, called Beth Messiah. In 1977, he launched “Messianic Vision,” a nationally syndicated radio show which was one of the first Jewish outreach ministries of its kind. It aired daily on stations throughout the United States for 38 years. Just last year, the show moved to the Internet and is now a one-hour weekly show which can be heard on Roth’s website, sidroth.org.

“Even before I went into full-time ministry, I used to listen to Sid Roth on the radio,” says Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, author of the New York Times best-selling books The Harbinger and The Mystery of the Shemitah. “He was one of the first major pioneers as a Jewish believer in media, a visionary and a trail blazer. He also has a heart for evangelism. When he was a guest speaker at Beth Israel Congregation, I would take him out to eat before or after speaking. I cannot remember one meal where he didn’t witness to the waitress about salvation, and more often than not, she would bow her head and pray to receive the Lord.”

In the early 1990s, when the Russian Jews were immigrating to New York City by the tens of thousands, Mitch Glaser, president of Chosen People Ministries, says Roth encouraged him, not only by what he said, but also by what he did.

“I consider Sid Roth one of the unsung heroes of the Great Russian Jewish messianic revival of the last 25 years,” Glaser says. “As a leader of a Jewish mission in Brooklyn at the time, I knew the harvest had been prepared, but I was not sure how to reach out since we didn’t speak Russian. But that didn’t stop Sid, who would fly to Brooklyn almost every weekend to encourage me, help out with the work and preach. Sid rented space for the meetings and helped start a Russian Messianic Jewish congregation in Brooklyn.”

In 1993, Roth was a co-speaker with Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Bernis for the first large Jewish evangelistic meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, that saw 2,000 people accept the Messiah. This festival of Jewish music and dance, with a gospel presentation, was organized by Bernis, who is now the chief executive officer of Jewish Voice Ministries International.

“Sid is the first Jewish believer I met after I became a believer and he’s had a great impact on my life and ministry for 30 years,” Bernis says. “Many of the key milestones in my ministry involve Sid Roth. He was there at the beginning of my pastoral ministry as a young Messianic rabbi. We teamed up together for the first outreach in Russia back in 1993 and Sid was a real influence in my decision to come to Jewish Voice. I consider him one of my closest friends and he’s the most committed believer I know. He’s more committed to moving in the power of God, in the authentic power of the Holy Spirit, than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Roth has continued to reach out to Jews with the gospel message through his lectures on the supernatural and in his books.

“In 1995, God instructed me in a dream to write a book of Jewish testimonies,” Roth says. “God said that more Jewish people would come to know Him through the book than anything I had ever done.”

That book, They Thought for Themselves (a collection of testimonies by ten Jewish believers), has reached millions with the gospel. It has been translated into nine languages and more than 1.4 million copies of the book have been mailed to Jews in North America as a part of the Project 77 outreach. Another estimated 1.3 million copies of the Russian version have been distributed in the former Soviet Union, Germany and the U.S.