Newquay Evangelism: God’s Gospel in Weakness

Over the Easter period, I was reminded of God’s total sovereignty over the affairs of humanity. I had planned to conduct three outreaches in the lead up to Easter, but the Lord had other ideas. For the past couple of weeks, I have been laid low with a nasty head cold that has drained all my energy; whenever I attempted to do anything too physically strenuous, I would end up having a coughing fit for several minutes. This meant all outreaches were cancelled. However, today, I finally felt well enough to go out for a short time.  I’m not up to open-air preaching yet, but I felt strong enough to hand out gospel tracts.

At just after 2pm, I made my way down to the town centre of Newquay. The high street was jammed full of people enjoying the beautiful spring weather and their holidays. People were friendly, so soon tracts were being handed out. Despite feeling weak, the Lord was working – the gospel was spreading.  

As I handed out leaflets, I noticed a familiar face heading toward me. The man who approached me is a friendly atheist that I’ve been speaking with for the past two-and-a-half years. We exchanged greetings and caught up on what has been happening in our lives since we last chatted. He said it was good to see me out on the streets again, and even though he doesn’t believe, he likes our chats. The last time I spoke to him he told me he was reading a John’s Gospel, but today he didn’t really want to go into that. It was good to reconnect with him. Please pray for his conversion.

After my atheist friend left, I went back to handing out tracts. As I did so, a man stopped and looked at the leaflet quizzically. In broken English, he told me he doesn’t speak English. I managed to find out that he was from Romania, and that he is a worker here in Newquay. He seemed interested, so I pulled out my phone and showed him a short gospel video in Romanian. The man was fully attentive as the gospel was shared in his own language. After watching the video, he asked if he could come to our church on Sunday. I assured him that he is more than welcome. Between now and Sunday I will be looking for gospel material in Romanian!

By now my energy was almost gone. I had only been out on the streets for half an hour, but the Lord worked in that time. God’s gospel will advance even in my weakness. I am so thankful that our God is sovereign.

SDG!