In 2015, Celebrity Evangelist was created after Novak met Grammy Award-winning singer James Taylor. Novak said, “[Taylor] was doing some arena shows and a friend of mine really challenged me, ‘Why aren’t you gonna go try to give him a tract or give him some gospel material?’”
“The truth of the matter was,” Novak shared, “I wasn’t a big enough fan to go to the trouble. That’s what it was.” That was until, he explained, “I read an interview of him in Rolling Stone where he said, ‘I was raised by atheist parents. I’m agnostic, but I would be open to listen to somebody if they were to take the time to show me.’”
Novak said he remembers “sitting there reading that Rolling Stone interview and I’m like, my goodness, that’s such an open door. If my neighbor down the road would say something like that, we’d be tearing their doors down.”
“Why aren’t people tearing down walls to try to get to James? He’s obviously open,” Novak added. So, after encouragement from his mother, he wrote Taylor a letter.
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After missing him a couple of times, Novak was able to approach Taylor outside his tour bus and talked to him for about 30 minutes. “You’re the first person to come to me directly to tell me something,” Taylor told Novak.
“He gave me a hug,” Novak said, “and I remember driving home with the greatest joy in my heart because for the longest time, for those seven years, I kept wrestling with what I wanted to do.”
Said Novak, “And that never works with God…and that night I said, ‘All right, God, whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it.’”
“You want me to be a preacher, evangelist, missionary, just open the doors, show me that I’m doing the right thing and I’m not wasting my time,” Novak added. “And since then, God’s opened the door for me to be able to share the gospel with over 2,000 celebrities. Some of the doors he’s opened, some of the conversations, are truly unbelievable.”
Novak shared some of his favorite stories from over the years. One of them was when he met singer Jerry Lee Lewis. Novak discovered that Lewis would wake up every night worried that he was going to wake up in hell. “I got to have a very intimate conversation with him after, what ended up being his final concert,” said Novak. “And he admitted to me right there that he was not ready to die. And he ended up having to hurry and leave [because] he was afraid he was gonna miss his flight.”
“I said, ‘Well my contact information is in the material if you need to reach out to me, at any time, you’ve got that info,’” Novak said. Lewis then passed, but a week later, Novak shared, “I got a letter letting me know he had accepted Christ.”
