Within a few hours his Philippine housemaid asked if she could speak to him privately about his illness. She explained that in the Philippines she had often seen people instantly healed of all kinds of diseases following prayer and asked if she could pray for him. To cut a long story short he was instantly healed and became a Christian.
The Church he joined was quite a large one for the UK, it had about 300 members and a youth group of 100 or so. One Saturday in the summer the youth leader had arranged for a street witnessing day as part of the lead-up to a series of meetings to be held by an evangelist. Will was interested to see how the young people would do at what he knew best, street marketing.
The Saturday arrived and the witnessing group met in a corner of the town square. There were plenty of people about, it was a market day, there was street theatre and there were buskers, the sun was shining, an excellent day for street work. Will watched from the side of the square, he didn’t want the youth group to know that he was there. After a few minutes discussion they dispersed about the square in groups of three or four. Some of them looked in the shop widows or watched the street theatre, others silently handed out invitations to the evangelistic meetings, most just stood around looking embarrassed. Will was disappointed and a little angry but he had an idea. He would get them motivated.
Quite near to where he was standing was a Big Issue seller. Will called him over and bought all his magazines, the guy was flabbergasted! Then Will asked him if he would do him a favour………
One of the youth group was a little more bold than the others and right in the middle of the square approached a couple who were listening to a busker, she asked them if they were at all concerned about what would happen after they died and then was able to share the gospel with them, and to finish, gave them an invitation to hear the evangelist speak. Shortly after she had finished she was approached by a rather scruffy looking bloke who told her that God had seen what she had just done and was very pleased and by way of reward gave her a ten pound note! She was so stunned that she stood there open mouthed and accepted the gift. The scruffy bloke disappeared round a corner and she rushed over to her friends to tell them what had just happened. Someone suggested that it could have been an angel; others said that the scruffy bloke was probably just a nutter. As they were discussing this one of the group rushed over to report that the same thing had just happened to him, and then another. One of them had three tenners and she said “it only happens when I stop and talk to people, if I just give them an invitation nothing happens, but if I witness to them within a few moments this scruffy bloke appears from nowhere and gives me a tenner”.
Suddenly quite a few of the group had started trying this out for themselves, they didn’t always get a tenner but now and again they did, the best thing though was that they had found that witnessing was not that bad and tenner or no tenner they could do it and they could sense that God was with them and was pleased with them. Will said nothing but a few years later the Church was a thousand strong, sending out groups to start new Churches and young people were going into ministry. Not a bad investment, Will thought.
What had Will found? Was it that reward could overcome fear or was it that their God was not Yahweh but Mammon? Perhaps it would be kinder to say that they had two gods, Yahweh and Mammon, or perhaps three, Yahweh, Mammon and Self. In the story they are initially motivated by their love of money following the reports of cash received by the few brave ones who were rewarded first. What was holding them back from witnessing in the first place? Self? Thoughts such as; ‘these people will think me stupid if I tell them about Jesus, I will not appear ‘cool’ if I associate myself with ‘religious’ people, they may reject me and be rude and possibly offensive’.
All of the above may be true, if we take our self esteem from the society around us. But if our self esteem comes from, at best, God’s view of us, and at worst, the Christian community’s view of us, we will probably see ourselves differently. How has this skewed, world- centred, self image crept into the Church? The answer, I would suggest, is false conversion or poor ‘birthing’.
Throughout the New Testament, entry into Christ was always, like a natural birth of the time, fraught with danger. It began with the recognition that the wrath of God was focussed on the sinner, followed by repentance, baptism in water and in the Spirit. The accounts in Acts of Peter’s preaching major on his reminding the Jews that the Messiah, whom they had just killed, was now at the right hand of God and was coming to set up his Kingdom and put his enemies (those who had just rejected him) under his feet! Scary stuff!
No ‘come to Jesus and have a better life’, no ‘God has a wonderful plan for your life so just invite him into your heart’. This was ‘repent, you Christ-killers, before he comes to destroy you’! Read Acts 2:22-39 and check it out for yourself. We are all ‘Christ-killers’; it was because of our sin that he died. Those first century Jews had to turn their backs on the prevailing culture, risk disinheritance and possibly death at the hands of their own families just as Moslem converts to Christ do today. Why do we try and ‘make it easy’ for people to ‘become Christians’ out of a western culture? Are numbers more important than quality? Is it better to have thousands with a ‘slight touch’ of Christianity than just a few with it ‘real bad’? Didn’t Jesus start with just twelve and keep the bar to joining really high? Are large numbers of vaccinated ‘Christians’ any good to anyone or are they not ‘at the feast in the wrong clothes’. Vaccination means that you get a dose of dead ‘bug’ so that you can fight off the live ‘bug’. Isn’t that exactly what we are doing in our Churches today? In other words our weak version of Christianity has vaccinated us against the real thing!
What sinners need is a strong dose of the live Christian ‘bug’, strong enough to kill them. We can then safely bury them in baptism and birth them into a new life in the Spirit! A life in which we have but one God and one Lord for whom we have a burning fever of love which expresses itself in obedience and rejoices in suffering with him.
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