Plymouth Evangelism: Five People Respond to the Preaching

Now that everything seems to be getting back to normal after COVID, I hope to once a month make my way up to Plymouth for an open-air outreach.

The weather in Plymouth was beautiful today. The skies were blue, and the temperature was not too cold, so this meant the city centre was busy.

I was a bit concerned that I’d be all by myself for the outreach, but the Lord provided a Christian family to work with me. This family sing hymns on the street, so they asked if they could sing before I preached. I was more than happy for this to occur, so they sung, then I proclaimed the gospel.

I can’t explain it, but gospel music can have a massive impact on evangelism. When it came time to preach, I felt as if there was more of a calmness and the gospel seemed to be preached more freely.

As I preached on “The Way to Heaven”, people stopped to listen. I don’t normally use amplification for preaching, but people asked if the preaching could be amplified so they could hear it better (I’ve never had this request before). I happily complied with their request, and more people stopped to listen.

At the end of the message, I challenged those who wanted to find out more about Jesus to come forward to take a free copy of the Gospel of John. Five people of different ages responded by making their way through the crowd to take a copy of the Scripture

Video of Jun Kwon singing before Josh Williamson preaches the gospel. Preaching starts at around the 19 minute mark.

After the preaching, I was able to have several one-to-one conversations, including one with a man who walked up to the open-air board to examine our literature closely. He told me that he doesn’t get on very well with religion as he is Queer. We spent time talking about God’s love for sinners, and how Christ can forgive the sins of all those who would come to Him. The young man seemed quite moved, saying, “I’ve never heard that before.” As we finished our conversation he asked for a tract and shook my hand.

Throughout the outreach we had many professing Christians stop by to listen and chat. Many of them told me that due to Covid they had stopped attending church, and they all soon admitted that their Christian walk had almost become non-existent. We were able to encourage them back to the Scriptures and tried to help these wounded souls. Some of them appeared to be genuine Christians who were in periods of backsliding, but some showed signs of false conversion. All of them were quite emotional by the end of our conversations, with every single one thanking the team for making the time to talk to them.

Towards the end of the outreach, the family that was with me sung a few more hymns, then I preached once more. Again, the Lord drew a crowd in to hear God’s Word; this time the crowd was made up almost entirely of young people. All of them listened and engaged with the preaching. At the end they all came up to ask questions and chat further. Every single one of them said they had never heard the gospel before.

The Lord was truly at work today in Plymouth. One of the most encouraging aspects of today’s outreach was that we ran out of John’s Gospels to give away. I only had fifteen on me, but all of them were taken by those who wanted to find out more about the Lord Jesus.

Please pray for all those who heard the gospel today.

SDG!