Battle Log

This week, there were four street outreaches in Christchurch:

 

Tuesday: Roger and Graeme were in Riccarton in the late afternoon.  (By the way, Roger is continuing to lead the Tuesday outreach, while I switch to Thursday to start a new outreach on that day.)

 

Thursday: Andy and Corin joined me in Riccarton in the late afternoon.

 

Friday: Roger, Andy, John B, and Corin joined me in the city in the early afternoon.

 

Saturday: Corin joined me in Riccarton over the lunch period.

 

I’ve included a picture Roger sent me from the Tuesday outreach.  Graeme is in full swing!

 

As I arrived at the outreach location on Thursday, Andy and Corin were already there, and Andy was already into a chat (that went long).  So Corin and I decided to set up the flipchart on the other side of the street.

 

The flipchart can be great at attracting fish, but on this day, it was a bit slow - no bites.  I could see heaps of fish down a bit, by the bus stops, and so, I decided to leave the flip chart near Andy (who was still deep in conversation) and Corin and I moved out to where the fish were.  We put our tracts in our pockets and started to approach people.

 

We had a short chat with a couple of young guys, and then we found ourselves at the bus stops on the other side (I have a usual circuit I walk down both sides of Riccarton Road), where I got into a chat with a young Afghan guy.  It was a great chat.  He was a Muslim, so the conversation focused on the false ways: being good and asking for forgiveness won’t remove the punishment.  I had an opportunity to move to the gospel, and when I started talking about someone else taking our punishment, he became very adamant: Someone else can’t take our punishment.  And so I calmly replied, then we would all have to go to hell.  It was at this point that he started insisting that we would go to hell for a time, and then go to heaven.  But I pointed out that that wouldn’t be merciful. And then I showed him 2 Surahs from the Quran that say that hell will be eternal.  He was struck.  He took photos of both of my quotes so he could auto-translate them to read in his own language, and then he went very silent as he opened an app on his phone and started to hunt for some information.  He was so focused that my attempts to continue to talk to him were ignored.  That’s okay, we need to be patient.  Eventually, he gave up, and we continued to talk for a little bit more, but he hardened: “I will never stop being Muslim” – and apart from the grace of God, that’s true.  We parted on good terms.  And I’m glad he had received a gospel tract from me early in the conversation.  Maybe, under his initial hard exterior, his heart is softening?  I hope he keeps that tract.  When he is ready, it will be ready to tell him the gospel again.

 

Corin really likes the flipchart, and so, she left the conversation long before I finished to go back to it.  Later in the outreach, I snapped a shot of her using it on her own.  So good to see her growing in confidence.

 

I also encountered Andy’s daughter down at a bus stop.  She honoured me by introducing me to two of her friends from school, and the four of us were able to talk about the gospel and related questions.  It was so good!

On Friday, two of my chats stand out in my mind.

 

The first was with a Seventh-day Adventist leader.  He was excited to encounter people doing evangelism, but then, he became really angry when I started evangelising him.  He couldn’t give me a straight answer to my question: “Do you have to be good to get to heaven?”  Instead of reasoning with my argument, he started attacking me by saying I wasn’t listening to him (I was, I just wanted to talk about the deeper issue he was avoiding).  In the end, I had to walk away.

 

But then I encountered 2 engineers (1 mechanical and the other software).  With a technical background myself, I love talking to engineers – we seem to click when it comes to logic.  So, using logic alone, I was able to explain the gospel.  The mechanical engineer was humble enough to say he couldn’t fault the logic (very rare), but he wasn’t currently willing to accept it.  What a great chat that was!

 

The team had a robust conversation about “the sinner's prayer” over coffee afterwards.  Iron sharpening Iron!

 

Saturday was really warm!  It was like summer in the middle of winter!

 

I had a fascinating chat with a young man who was using very Catholic language, and yet he claimed to be going to a Christian church close to the university.  The longer the chat went, the more Catholic he seemed.  I was trying to work out where he had learned the language he was using (mortal sin, Eucharist, penance, etc), but he wasn’t willing to tell me.  It fascinated me that he was both engaged in the conversation and yet at the same time didn’t want to be there.  In the end, I let him go.

 

Corin continues to grow.  I took a couple of great pics of her sharing the law and the gospel with a young guy.

 

Glory to God alone!

 

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