Being a street minister for the gospel of Jesus Christ is not easy work. In four or five hours of any one day I would meet a variety of people and I never knew what to expect from any one them. Some were warm and welcoming to Christ’s gospel message, others were indifferent to it and still others were downright antagonistic towards the message.
Even those who appeared to be the nicest people at the start would turn in a second to become the nastiest. I tried to make no judgments on the latter (sometimes I failed) because I knew that many (not all) people in life have bitter memories of hurts and experiences under Christian ministers, priests, parents and the church in general.
I too had a religious upbringing and whilst nobody ever did me any physical harm, the church doctrines I was taught did me a lot of mental and spiritual harm. When I began to read and study the Bible many years later I found out that those doctrines were perverted and twisted by religious men – the result of all that being that I had developed faulty concepts of God. My problem was, I used to be scared of God, but because of what’s happened to many others they now have downright hatred for Him.
When I met someone who would share with me their concept of God, it was nice to be able to say to them that I hated that god too! Those who allowed me to show them the true God as He reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ through the Scriptures were then enabled to develop more accurate concepts of Him.
Most of the meetings with people on the streets are very brief. One day I shared Christ with a young lady in her twenties. Immediately she told me she believed in evil spirits. She felt one crawling on the floor a couple of years earlier and told it to go away in the name of Jesus Christ and it did. She then informed me that her Christian friend told her to do exactly that if she ever encountered one. Naturally she was feeling pleased with herself because it confirmed her friends’ chat with her that Jesus Christ was real and very powerful.
So I mentioned to her that if she was to invite Christ into her life and allow Him be Savior and Lord, then she would get to experience a lot more of Him, all of which would make for a very productive, creative life for her. She was all smiles and thanked me very much, we shook hands and I never saw her again.
Standing at his letterbox at the gate was an old man who nodded and he stopped me for a chat, when it’s usually the other way round. He told me his name, he said he was 86 years old and a world war two veteran. He also informed me that he was an ex-prisoner of war in Singapore. I had known that these men suffered most inhumanly under the Japanese so I asked him if he had ever experienced the reality of God during that time. He said that he had not. He told me he’d never prayed himself but he watched the Catholic boys pray and, according to him, they never got any answers so they gave up and died.
He then said he was willing to be convinced that there was a God. I asked him if he thought it was coincidence that we were speaking about such matters here and now or did he think that perhaps God was revealing Himself to him in this conversation. He said he’d never thought of it like that before but would now go inside and do so. He thanked me for talking with him.
I met a very talkative 75 year old visitor from England, an ex Army Colonel. He was a very religious man, he spoke about his Church of England prayer books and hymnals, he said he was a regular church-goer and because he was staying just down the road from the Catholic church, he attended there rather than have to drive to the C of E, further away. He had a lot to say about God, but he also asked me why I was doing this work, remarking that he’d not seen such for years even in his own country.
I simply told him a little of what my first personal encounter with the Lord had been, that He’d instantly physically healed me a couple of times, that He’d taken away my desire for swearing and drunkenness etc, and the Colonel was fascinated. I told him that as a young person, I too used to go to church but never had I experienced the reality of God – for me it was just a religious duty. I explained to him that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ makes all the difference, then shared the gospel with him and encouraged him trust in Christ’s promises as revealed in the Scriptures. He genuinely thanked me for my time and told me He was very glad I called in to talk.
Some of the rudest and nastiest people I encounter in my work are church-goers. This the account of one of them. One day I knocked on the door and an old lady answered. She looked to be a gentle person with a smiling, welcoming expression on her face and I told her I was from the local church up the road. The next moment a car pulled up outside her home. The lady told me it was her daughter. She looked to be in her 50’s as she came striding up the path and she asked me what the purpose of my visit was. I explained her it was to pray for people and to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. She told me she had her own church that she attends.
As I spoke on, I could see she was very irate (that’s the reality and power of Christ) but was doing her best to cover that up. I could also see that this message was setting her up for a bad day so I thanked them both for their time and then left. Moments later as I was making my way to another home, a white panel van pulled along side – a police white panel van. The policeman in the passenger seat beckoned me over and asked me what I was doing in the street so I told him. He asked me for my name and address and some identification. He looked to be satisfied with everything and was about to send me on my way, but I asked him if he’d mind turning their radio down, which he did.
I then said to both him and the driver that we’d all agree that the job they do is a very dangerous one and that police often die in the line of duty. I asked, if that should happen to be them today, what would they tell Jesus Christ when they stood before Him. The passenger policeman said that they’d be ok because that wasn’t going to happen. Simultaneously, he turned the radio back up, wound the window up, the driver slipped it into gear, planted his foot on the accelerator and got away from there as quickly as he could!
The police (rightly so) asked me about my physical activity, God (I believe rightly so) used me to ask them about their spiritual activity. That too was a demonstration of the reality and power of Jesus Christ. Later on one of the pastors got a call from the daughter informing him that a very rude man from his church had called to her mother’s house and upset her mother. “And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved……..” Joel 2:32.