Date: 26-Apr-1995 12:01pm EST
Subject: Transformed Lives and Witness to the Community
In his reply to my comments in response to John Stackhouse, Larry Hurtado said that the power of transformed lives and communities under the impact of the Gospel and the Spirit will be the most winsome witness to the reality of what we testify to in the Gospel. I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I also believe that some of the manifestations that we've seen in the current revival have precipitated these very transformations. Here's a typical example of how this happens; in this case, one person trembling under the power of God in the streets caused many members of a gang of teenagers to come to Christ:
At the CATCH THE FIRE Conference at the Regal Constellation hotel, Wednesday evening, October 12, 1994 sponsored by the Toronto Airport Vineyard, Stephen Witt, pastor of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in St. John, New Brunswick, said: "The final thing of this phase is that we're beginning to pour it out now into the streets. And last week we heard about--I call that a prayer walk to MacDonald's. That was my destination. And I got there and there . . . the manager of the MacDonald's was arguing with some teenagers--about 12 or 13 of them out in the parking lot. And they were giving them a real problem, so I walked up, and said, 'Is there a problem?' And she said, 'Well, there's always a problem.' And I knew about the problem she was talking about. Every Friday night there's about 150 to 200 teens that gang up at the MacDonald's--there's been gang fights--there's been all kinds of drugs and everything else that takes place and they can't do anything about it. The police have tried to get rid of them--they can't get rid of them. So I said, 'You know what?' The Lord gave me a plan at that point. I said, 'I've got a plan that will get all the teens off this property.' She said, 'What's that?' (Well, first of all, she said, 'It's impossible. We've tried everything.') I said, 'We'll send a team up here and tell them about Jesus.' She said, 'That might work.' [laughter from the audience].
"So last Friday night during our renewal meeting, this, at the advice of John Wimber, actually began to pour it out. We called a team forward of guys--I thought we would send the guys first, since it was a pretty rough situation. We laid hands on them. They were not a macho-looking group at all, but we sent them over to MacDonald's. They got to minister to over 150 teens in the MacDonald's parking lot. One came to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then one of our other prophetic-type individuals--he started ministering and praying for people, and they started trembling, and all the kids started saying, 'We want that! We want that!'
"So--there was a real touch of the Spirit of God and . . . thisFriday now we're doubling the team; we're sending men and women out to go back. The police came up to our building because that night a gang of kids had run in to our renewal meeting, fleeing another gang of kids that had baseball bats. We had just prayed the week before that God would make our church a refuge and that the teens would come in. So we ARE a seeker-sensitive church. They're running in now. And the police showed up with their lights going and everything, and I thought, 'Oh, no,' you know, this is--they had showed up before--but they came this time and he got out of the car and he says, 'I can't tell you guys how much we appreciate what you did at MacDonald's tonight.' He says, 'You'll never know.' This is the policemen in our city. 'You'll never know the impact that made.' This morning I called my secretary and she said, we've got a call at the office today-- one of the mothers of one of these teens who the parents were concerned. They knew they were down there but they didn't know how to stop them from going and she says, 'you know, he came home, he told us all about what had happened,' and she says, 'Do you have a youth group that I can get him involved in?'
"So we're just seeing now a real breakout in evangelism and you know for us, that wasn't even the ultimate thing. The ultimate thing for us is to develop a passion for Jesus. That, to me, is higher than evangelism. But when you get the heart of Jesus Christ, something of evangelism comes into our heart because that's His heart, so hopefully that's beginning to pour out in our church more."
Richard M. Riss
RRISS@DREW.EDU