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WORD ON THE STREET

IBIZA • OHIO • VANCOUVER • CALIFORNIA

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.

ROMANS 1:16

“Hey, Brian! Remember me?”

Brian did remember —he’d been praying for the security guy from the nightclub all week. They’d chatted and he’d accepted the gift of a Bible, but he’d been drunk at the time, so you never knew.

“Of course! Nice to see you again.”

“Yeah, well, you know that book you gave me?”

“Yep. It was a Bible. A New Testament —”

“It’s good stuff, mate.” The bouncer was grinning enthusiastically, clutching a well-thumbed copy of the Jesus Loves Ibiza New Testament, which the 24-7 team had been handing out all summer. “I mean, it’s a bit dull in places, but on the whole I thought it was very good.”

He offered Brian the book, pointing to some spidery handwriting on one of the pages. “I’ve made a few changes. Just suggestions. How you can make it better. Up to you.”

Brian laughed incredulously. “Let me get this right. You’ve read the whole of the New Testament . . .”

“Yeah, right.”

“. . . and you reckon you’ve improved it a bit?”

The bouncer nodded absentmindedly, watching a girl in a miniskirt walk by before offering his “corrected” Bible to Brian once more.

“You do realise that this isn’t just any book? We may have put a funky cover on it, but inside it’s still just the same old Bible, the Word of God?” Brian could hardly believe he was having this conversation, but he wasn’t getting through. As far as the guy in front of him was concerned, he’d taken the time to read the book, he’d got some great ideas about how to improve on it, and he’d kindly offered to help.

Brian took the corrected Bible and decided to be direct with him. “Look, I’m seriously impressed that you read it. I’m really glad you found it interesting, but . . . well, most people do agree that the Bible has kind of passed that whole editorial phase. It’s been pretty much untouched since the Council of Trent in 1546.”

The bouncer just shrugged and said that he didn’t care what the council thought, he was only trying to help. “See what you think about my suggestions.” He waved and disappeared into the crowd of young bodies flowing from bar to bar at the end of a long day on the beach, and the start of an even longer night on the town. Brian stood silently for a moment, watching the faces go by. Sometimes he wanted to shake them, to wake them, to tell them that there can be more to life than ten pints of beer, sex with a stranger, and puking on your shoes in the taxi home. He thought about the bouncer’s surprising enthusiasm for the Bible and wondered how many others knew the meaning of the story that had unfolded 2,000 years ago, not so far away, just at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea. Did anyone in Ibiza realise how this ancient story had shaped their world —how the town in which they were partying, San Antonio, had been named after St. Anthony, a missionary like him?

Brian sighed. Why should they care? In the broken-hearted words of Jesus, the crowds were “confused and aimless . . . like sheep with no shepherd” (Matthew 9:35, MSG). Every fibre of Brian’s being longed for them to find the Good Shepherd in the pages of these Bibles, the way that he had as a child, memorising its verses, and again as a young adult serving time in prison.

Pray, Play, Obey

The mission to Ibiza was growing from strength to strength under Brian and Tracy’s leadership, but it was a mission field unlike any other. They loved their new home and could see God’s presence everywhere: in the sparkling creativity of the culture and the natural beauty of the island, in the flamboyant fashions, the sheer exuberance of the party scene and its world-class music, in the evident desire to belong to a scene, and even in the spiritual questions people would ask when they were stoned. Brian and Tracy particularly loved to watch the crowds of partygoers on the beach at Café del Mar applauding the sun with liturgical reverence as it sank, flaming, into the sea. It was always a moment of transcendence, stillness, wonder.

But of course there was also a darker side to the culture. As they walked the streets befriending strangers, the 24-7 teams learned to refuse drinks with a smile and to guard their water bottles against the “date rape” drug Rohypnol. They adapted their body clocks to become fully nocturnal —you can’t reach hardcore partygoers by inviting them to a Sunday-morning service. But of course, while everyone else seemed to be taking drugs to keep them buzzing all night, the 24-7 team had nothing but coffee and Jesus. They would serve and pray, in any way they could, with promoters outside bars, with partygoers in various stages of disrepair, even with prostitutes caught between clients. When these unlikely missionaries weren’t on duty, they would dance the nights away to the hottest dance-floor anthems, celebrating all that was fun in the culture and wearing the latest and wildest fashions they could afford.

Our presence in Ibiza, and particularly our celebratory approach to mission, had attracted media attention —and some criticism too, mainly from Christians. This seemed strange, because it was really nothing new. Hudson Taylor had scandalised polite Victorian society 150 years earlier by growing a ponytail and donning flowing Chinese robes. “Let us in everything not sinful become like the Chinese,” he wrote, “that by all means we may save some” (see 1 Corinthians 9:22). Hudson Taylor understood that all societies host the good, the bad, and the morally neutral. Unlike bigoted colonialists, he believed in recognising, redeeming, and learning from all that was good in a new culture, whilst honouring and adopting its neutral facets, its music, food, dress, language —and even ponytails.

In approaching any new culture our first task is always to remove our shoes, recognising that we are standing on holy ground. We are not bringing the Lord somewhere new, because he is already here. Our primary task, therefore, is to identify God’s fingerprints and to trace his footprints in the new environment.

Of course, inevitably we will also spot ugliness. All cultures are fallen, and with our foreigner’s eyes these failings may well be particularly apparent and offensive to us. But whenever we do speak out against the evil behaviours embedded in a host culture, we are expected to do so with the “gentleness and respect” befitting a visitor, remembering that “love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 3:15; 4:8). We have no right to renounce all that is wrong in another person, place, or culture, until we have recognised all that is right, good, and beautiful.

The apostle Paul took this redemptive principle to shocking extremes during his visit to the Greek city of Athens, where “he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” He could so easily have vented his distress, railing against the Athenians for their paganism, but instead he held his offence discreetly and chose something very surprising indeed to affirm. It is astounding that a devout Jew like Paul, who would have recited the Shema since childhood (“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one,” Deuteronomy 6:4), should now choose to use a reviled idol to point the Athenians to Jesus. But this is precisely what Paul does. “People of Athens!” he says. “I see that in every way you are very religious . . . As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship [note that he doesn’t dismiss them as idols], I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship —and this is what I am going to proclaim to you” (Acts 17:22-23).

The “objects of worship” in Ibiza were every bit as obvious and distressing for Brian and Tracy as they must have been for Paul in Athens. But the apostle’s radical missionary method challenged them continually to recognise and celebrate what was right in Ibiza and, if possible, to use even its many idols to point its inhabitants towards Jesus.

“Oh ****! Sorry!”

Brian’s reverie was shattered by a girl in stiletto heels knocking the “corrected” Bible out of his hand. He picked it up slowly, smiling once again at the cover: Jesus Loves Ibiza. It was true! A security guard at the door of the club had recently taken to reading his copy whenever things were quiet, and his colleagues would sometimes join him for an impromptu, incongruous little Bible study group in the middle of the night. The other big hit that season had been cigarette lighters branded “Jesus, light of the world!” Whenever people asked for a light, the 24-7 team would grin and say, “Yep, sure,” whipping out the lighter and adding, “It’s Jesus!” It was toe-curlingly cheesy and yet it worked. Everyone laughed and wanted a Jesus flame. This one bad joke had actually started loads of great conversations about things that really mattered.

Our experimental approach to mission in Ibiza had been inspired, in part, by the pragmatism of the Salvation Army who once patrolled the debauched streets of nineteenth-century London. They would carry drunks home on stretchers from the city’s many gin parlours, primitive pubs which preyed on the poor, encouraging men, women, and even children to get “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pence,” and offering them “clean straw” for sleeping off the hangover.[52] Brian’s team had started operating a similar rescue service, affectionately known as the 24-7 Vomit Van. They used it to rescue hundreds of people who were dangerously drunk, wasted on drugs, vulnerable to robbery, assault, and even rape. Night after night through the long summer seasons, successive teams had been quietly caring for people in this unglamorous way, often kneeling in the gutter more than they knelt in the serene, candle-scented prayer room. The Heasleys would frequently drive their sons to school in the Vomit Van the morning after a night on duty, and it would still be reeking of bodily fluids. It was dirty, thankless, exhausting work, but they were seeing people saved. Not metaphorically, not just spiritually, but literally, physically saved. From sin for sure, but also from alcohol poisoning, degradation, and violence.

Of course, there were plenty of people who thought we shouldn’t be supporting drunks, praying with prostitutes, rebranding the Bible, and printing the eternal words of Scripture on cigarette lighters. We could understand their concern: The light of Christ is not a flippant catchphrase, the Bible is not just an ordinary book in need of a trendier cover, and sin is not to be taken lightly. We are told to “flee from sexual immorality” and not to tolerate any “hint of impurity” in our midst (1 Corinthians 6:18; Ephesians 5:3).

Yet Christ himself came very explicitly “not . . . to condemn the world, but to save the world” (John 3:17). He attended at least one party where there was too much alcohol, risked his reputation befriending prostitutes, and didn’t seem shocked at all when confronted with a woman who had just been caught having sex with a married man. In fact, he refused to punish her even though the Law said that he should (John 8:1-11; Leviticus 20:10). When the Pharisees questioned the company Jesus was keeping, he told them outright, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

Jesus commands us to engage with the needs of our broken world —not just to pray from afar, but to live holy lives in the midst of the mess, just as he did. “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world,” he told the Father, “but that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:14). Clearly it is possible to be protected from the evil one even in the jaws of his domain, and in fact it is here that Jesus wants us to remain.

So, yes, Brian knew for sure that “Jesus Loves Ibiza.” Jesus loves guys like that bouncer trying to upgrade the Bible. He loves the flamboyant gay community, the businessmen trying to make a fast buck, the pushy club promoters, the West African drug dealers pretending to sell watches, the sex workers emerging from public toilets requesting condoms and prayer, and yes, even that drunk girl in the stiletto heels who had just knocked the Bible from Brian’s hand.

In the 1970s, when the Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan returned home after thirty-five years church-planting amongst the Masai tribe in Africa, he famously discovered “an exotic tribe called the young people of America.” As he began to apply the missionary principles he’d developed amongst the Masai with Western young people, the results were remarkable: “Do not try to call them back to where they were,” he was advised, “and do not try to call them to where you are, beautiful as that place may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before.”[53]

As they walked the streets of San Antonio and grew to love the island and its culture, Brian and Tracy realised increasingly that they had not been brought to Ibiza just to convert people to their own way of thinking, but rather to befriend and accompany them on a journey of mutual transformation into the likeness of Christ. Here in this strange new place and amongst these strange new people, they were finding Jesus and being changed into his likeness in ways that they could never have been changed had they stayed back home. “Christ in you,” says the apostle Paul, is “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

It never took very long to find the glory in the dirt. All around them they discovered surprising acts of kindness, gained new insights, enjoyed sparkling creativity, even from the most messed-up people they met. Brian and Tracy never forgot that they had in part been guided to Ibiza by the unwitting prophecy of a homeless transvestite, the lyric of a cheesy dance track, and a middle-aged lady in a swimsuit. And so, of course, it became a sort of game to spot Jesus moving in the most surprising ways and to hear the whisper of God emanating from the mouths of the unlikeliest people.

When we adopt this posture —seeking to love and honour God’s presence in other people —they tend to return the favour. They begin to recognise Jesus in us too. A mutual grace grows, and we welcome one another, more and more, into Christ’s likeness. The onus for initiating and developing such relationships must always rest with those who have the most grace to give, but it can become a reciprocal process. For too long evangelism has been a one-way performance, a soliloquy delivered from an elevated platform by an actor, hoping for applause. But Jesus shows us how to bring good news relationally, as a mutual movement towards beauty, an intimate invitation to dance.

We are sent out as missionaries to build relationships that are real, not just to preach but also to listen, not just to witness to Jesus but to worship with the lost, not just to save others but to get saved ourselves. Our own journeys of salvation and spiritual formation will thereby become intertwined with those to whom Christ is sending us. Our posture becomes one of humble confidence, in which we dare to acknowledge that the other person has insights we do not yet possess, and that our understanding of Christ is currently incomplete, inadequate, and in some parts probably just plain wrong without them. We go to the lost and make space for them to preach to us, to teach us, to minister to our unbelief. This requires stillness and humility, a deeply anchored assurance in the gospel, and the ability to ask gently disruptive questions.

When my friend Paul was studying theology, he was set an essay entitled “What Is Church?” He decided to go out into the street and ask normal, non-religious people to help him answer the question. He fell into conversation with a man in a café who described himself as a pagan. This man told Paul firmly that there was absolutely nothing any Christian could possibly do to make him ever want to step inside a church.

Paul listened carefully, asked a few more questions, and made a couple of notes. They continued talking until, after about twenty minutes, the pagan asked Paul what he was writing down.

“Oh, just the stuff you’re telling me: that you wouldn’t go anywhere near a church no matter what we ever did.”

“Right,” said the pagan. “Yes, that’s true.” Then he paused, studying my friend’s face. “But I think I would probably come to church if it was with you.”

Paul had simply listened with respect. It hadn’t been a method or a technique for evangelism. And yet, by asking questions for twenty minutes, he had broken through a lifetime of hardened prejudice.

This gentle approach was familiar to the team in Ibiza as they spent time each night talking with ordinary people in the street. By doing the jobs that no one else wanted to do —over years and not just months —Brian and Tracy gradually established a formidable credibility for the gospel on the island. No one dared to accuse us of being naïve do-gooders any more. In fact, local club owners and promoters came to consider 24-7 as Ibiza’s unofficial fourth emergency service, often phoning Brian for help with distraught customers. At the annual end-of-season party, as wild an occasion as you might imagine, the island workers started to give an unsolicited “offering” to help fund the 24-7 mission. By blessing and respecting those that others might curse, evangelism had stopped being something we were doing to them or for them. It had become something we were truly doing with them wherever they were on their own journey of faith.

Our theology seemed to be turning full circle. By withdrawing in prayer to prioritise the presence of God, we had been propelled out onto the front lines of mission, not just in Ibiza but elsewhere around the world. And now, as we gave ourselves to mission, God seemed to be drawing us back into the paradigm of prayer and worship. We learned to encounter his presence in the places to which he was sending us.

We were discovering, I think, that prayer is more than a preliminary to evangelism; it can also be an effective form of missional engagement in its own right. People who don’t want to be preached at almost always still want to be prayed for. People who don’t believe in God may still believe in the power of prayer. In the dark forests of faith and doubt, honest prayer can be the clearing in which we meet, heart to heart, with those of other tribes.

One of the most breathtaking and tragic examples of this missional principle took place thousands of miles from Ibiza but in a similar cultural context: amongst partying students in a debauched American fraternity house.

Divine Appointment

When a church in the town of Bluffton, Indiana, launched a 24-7 prayer room, they had little idea just how powerfully God was about to use them to impact the lives of students at the local university, just across the state line in Ohio. A few weeks into their season of prayer, a girl called Aimee[54] was chatting to her friend John at the university when she realised that her slot in the prayer room was looming. “Oh, I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment with God!” Noticing John’s understandable surprise, she plucked up the courage to ask if he would like to join her. And so, a little later that day, John found himself stepping into a place of continual prayer.

He was blown away completely and unexpectedly by the presence of God. “During that hour,” he wrote, “I accepted Christ and I cannot tell you how life‐changing the experience has been for me.” John began to return regularly to the prayer room, and the Holy Spirit started to work deeply in his life. He’d grown up with an abusive dad, but as he spent time discovering the Bible’s teaching about God as a good Father, he would often leave the prayer room with a sense of peace he had never before known.

One day John noticed a simple card stuck to the prayer room wall requesting prayer for “THE LOST.” His mind turned immediately to the thirty-three frat brothers with whom he lived. “I couldn’t get them off my mind and Aimee explained how, now I was a Christian, I had been called to tell others about the great love I’m experiencing. So she prayed that I would have boldness and courage to do this at school.”

John began to pray diligently for his friends by name, asking that each one of them might encounter the love of the Father. Almost immediately he began to be given opportunities to share his newfound faith with members of the fraternity. One of them heard the gospel and gave an immediate response that, yes, he wanted to become a Christian. Overjoyed, and using the simple prayer he’d learned from Aimee, John welcomed his friend into the kingdom of heaven. Just two days later, someone else announced that he, too, would like to do the same.

Those two conversions triggered a domino effect. Another member of the fraternity gave his life to Christ just a few days later, and then another and another. “It was a little bit crazy,” recalls John, laughing. “Every couple of days one of the guys would come and ask me to pray with him, or tell me that he had already surrendered his life to Jesus on his own. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to watch salvation spreading like a contagious virus through our house.”

By the time everyone departed for Christmas, just less than six months after John’s first encounter with God in the prayer room across the state line, he’d led thirty-two of his thirty-three frat brothers to Jesus. Almost two per week for half a year. Every single member of that fraternity had now encountered Jesus, except for one particularly stubborn housemate called Tim. During the Christmas holiday, however, Aimee —whose invitation for John to join her in the prayer room had sparked this mini-revival in the first place —invited Tim over for dinner. He really never stood a chance. By the end of that night, Tim had also surrendered his life to Jesus. All thirty‐four frat brothers —the entire house —had turned to Christ in less than six months.

This story would be remarkable if it ended there. But Tim began to pray for his parents to come to know Jesus too. There was an unusual urgency and passion to the way he prayed for their salvation. “Little did we know how perfect God’s timing was in all of this,” recalls John. Just twenty‐seven days after Tim placed his faith in Christ, and a few days after his first Christmas as a Christian, he was involved in a fatal automobile accident.

It was impossible to process the news. Tim had died so suddenly, his whole life ahead of him, still so young. The fraternity was thrown into a state of deep shock. His parents’ grief was beyond articulation. They looked ashen on the cold January day of their son’s funeral. The church was packed with mourners, every eye fixed on the polished wooden box standing brutally alone at the front. Songs were sung, and then the pastor tried to describe Tim’s short life. Tim had been a Christian for less than a month, the pastor said, but he would now spend all eternity with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The earnest prayers that Tim had prayed for his parents were to be answered at his own funeral. Following in their son’s recent footsteps, they surrendered their lives to Jesus. So too did fifteen of Tim’s high-school football teammates. In total, over the six months up to and including that tragic day, fifty people had come to Christ. “Very truly I tell you,” said Jesus, “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24).

“Lord, let me know how transient I am,” prays the psalmist (see Psalm 39:4). “We were born only yesterday and know nothing,” laments the book of Job, “and our days on earth are but a shadow” (Job 8:9). Seven hundred years later, the apostle James is equally depressing: “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). The tragedy of Tim’s story reminds us of life’s fragility. But it also reveals the irrepressible and incomparable hope we have in Christ:

Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?

1 CORINTHIANS 15:55

The New Testament pulses with this energy and hope. It calls us to proclaim the good news of the gospel with a sense of urgency and opportunity. “I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields!” cries Jesus to his followers. “They are ripe for harvest. Even now . . .” (John 4:35-36). The apostle Paul echoes this same sense of urgency: “Now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). “I am compelled to preach,” he says a little later. “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16). And the very last words spoken by God in the Bible maintain this pace: “Yes,” he says, “I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:20). Tim’s story reminds us that personal evangelism is always urgent. When Jesus sent the twelve disciples out on their first evangelistic mission, “they preached with joyful urgency” and “didn’t even have time to eat” (Mark 6:12, 31, MSG). The apostle Peter says that we must “always be prepared” to share our faith. The Greek word he uses here, ephistēmi, is not used anywhere else in the Bible and literally means “be on standby” (1 Peter 3:15).

No one knows how much longer they have in this life —how many breaths, how many beats of the heart, how many opportunities to say yes or no. But we will certainly all stand before our Maker soon enough. And on that day we’ll be held accountable for the decisions we have made, and especially for the ways in which we have stewarded and shared the riches of the gospel. After just twenty-seven days as a Christian, Tim will have at least seventeen others rejoicing by his side. And after more than twenty-seven years as a Christian, I am ashamed to admit how few there may be because of me, how many gospel opportunities I have squandered because I was merely too scared, or too busy, or too uncaring to speak.

Many people will say, “Lord, look at all the impressive things I did for you, the churches I built, the miracles I performed, the injustices I fought.” But he will simply look each one of us deep in the eyes and distil everything we’ve ever said and thought and done down into a single, simple question: “Did we ever know each other?” (see Matthew 7:23).

Aimee will answer immediately and without blinking, “Yes, Lord, of course we knew each other!” And he will smile and welcome her inside. It’s as simple as that. She knows Jesus. That’s why she kept “an appointment with God” in the prayer room, and dared to invite John along too. From that one simple act she triggered a small revival. Thanks to Aimee’s witness and the persevering prayers of her church, an entire fraternity turned to Christ in six months, their house was totally transformed, and Tim will spend all eternity with Jesus, as will his parents and fifteen of his high-school friends. I have a hunch that, on the day when at last Tim sees Aimee again, he will throw his arms around her neck, throw back his head, and howl, “Thank you!”

Contagious Holiness and Unconditional Acceptance

From a fraternity house in Ohio, to the pubs and clubs of Ibiza, to Porky the Pirate’s porn-lined caravan in California, Jesus Christ sends us out with a sense of urgency to a dying world, to speak his words and shine his light in the weirdest, darkest places. The very environments that some Christians avoid for fear of corruption seem to be the very places that he most wants to be. Two thousand years ago Jesus interacted repeatedly with the type of people and situations that should, technically, have made him religiously unclean, and yet, as Craig Blomberg writes:

He does not assume that he will be defiled by associating with corrupt people. Rather, [he believes that] his purity can rub off on them and change them for the better. Cleanliness, he believes, is even more “catching” than uncleanness; morality more influential than immorality . . . The unifying theme that emerges is one that may be called “contagious holiness.”[55]

The contagious holiness of Jesus means that it is possible to dwell in the darkest, dirtiest places without being negatively affected and, in fact, that in these environments we can make a positive difference. Of course, we need to be discerning and wise. None of us is immune to sin. “Be alert and of sober mind,” counsels the apostle Peter, because “your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Before immersing ourselves in environments of extreme temptation, we should think carefully and seek the counsel and support of wise friends. Clearly, if you’re coming off drugs, you will need to avoid your old haunts for a while. If you’re struggling with lust, you’re probably not called to evangelise the porn industry. If you’re an alcoholic, don’t take a job in a bar.

But Blomberg argues that Jesus engaged with sinners very deliberately because his missional method was “transformation by means of acceptance.”[56] When we accept people as they are and where they are, they can be changed to something new. They can be healed (generally quite slowly) by the contagious effect of holiness. This relational, non-defensive, interactive ethos, which was displayed throughout Christ’s ministry, offended the Pharisees. It also challenges the idea that a person must always “repent” before they can be received by Christ. In fact, it’s the other way round: we repent because we have been received.

We aren’t accepted by Jesus because we apologise for our sins on a particular day at a particular time. It’s the other way round: we apologise in response to acceptance. Paul says that it is “while we were still sinners” that Christ died for us.[57] So we have already been accepted. Similarly, the parable of the Prodigal Son describes the father outrageously embracing his ritually (and literally) unclean son. Holiness has nothing to fear from the dirt. The traditional idea that we must articulate a coherent confession in order to activate Christ’s forgiveness may well be unbiblical. The flow of the gospel is this: The Prodigal Son is embraced and reinstated before he properly apologises. “I was hugged,” he might testify, “until I cried, held so close that the excrement wiped off me onto his white robes, listened to until I had no more lies inside me, accepted until I was changed.”

Christ’s response to a Samaritan woman with five husbands is a case study in transformation through acceptance. As a righteous Jew he probably shouldn’t have engaged this despised foreign woman in conversation, and certainly shouldn’t have allowed himself to be alone with her. Most definitely he should not have asked her for a drink. But he reaches out to her, showing radical acceptance to someone who has been rejected again and again. Jesus certainly doesn’t gloss over her sin —in fact, he deliberately exposes her shame with a provocative question, neither pretending nor condemning. Eventually he commissions this despised woman as his witness, sending her home to share good news with the entire town. At no point has the Samaritan woman formulated the kind of apology we would generally prescribe as a condition of conversion, let alone a commission to preach.

Jesus calls us to accept people unconditionally, whether it’s on a university campus in Ohio, or at a club in Ibiza, or with a challenging colleague at work. We are called to love people indiscriminately, not as a technique for “saving their souls,” not as a manipulative exercise in “friendship evangelism,” but because we like them and consider them lovelier by far than all their ugly choices.

Vancouver

A beautiful embodiment of this principle of transformation through acceptance emanates from a Boiler Room run by the Salvation Army in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside. This radical community in one of North America’s poorest postcodes once prayed non-stop for three-and-a-half years. Everyone who visits the 614 Community, even just for a day, can see how deeply they have embraced their neighbourhood, and that the motivation and methodology at the heart of their mission is nothing more complicated than love. Aaron White, who co-leads the Boiler Room there, explains his motivation very simply: “The people we love are being left to die from AIDS, drug overdoses, violence, or just plain old poverty.”

When Aaron and Cherie’s son Noah was born, they decided to invite their entire neighbourhood to help them dedicate him to the Lord. A small crowd gathered in Crab Park beside Vancouver Harbour, respectable family members mingling with recovering addicts, prostituted women, the lonely elderly, those who were mentally vulnerable, and homeless men with dirt under their nails. Aaron and Cherie passed their newborn baby around this maverick circle, asking each person in turn to hold him and to give little Noah their personal blessing. Some of them, especially some of the men, held back, feeling too dirty to touch the baby, too unreliable to be entrusted with holding him, too sinful to speak anything good over his pristine life. They tried to exclude themselves from praying. But Aaron and Cherie were adamant, insisting that everyone should touch the little boy and give him their own unique benediction. “Some of the men wept as they held our baby and prayed their stumbling prayers over him,” recalls Aaron. “In fact, years later, some of them still talk about that moment with tears in their eyes.”

Aaron and Cherie entrusted their precious, perfect baby to all those broken people that day because they believe in transformation through acceptance. It wasn’t a gimmick or a technique. They were seeking to give dignity, recognising relationship, invoking goodness, and practising the power of contagious holiness in a simple yet radical way.

Campus America

The story of contagious holiness sweeping through that fraternity at Bluffton University emerged at a significant time. Students had always been integral to the 24-7 movement. Prayer rooms have always found fertile soil on campuses around the world. Our very first prayer room had primarily been populated and led by students, as had the summer mission teams heading out to places like Ibiza. To this day we recognise that campuses are the single most strategic key to mobilising this generation and reaching the next.

But God was about to turn up the volume on campus in a big way, initiating one of the most exciting and difficult chapters in our journey so far.

It began when we were living in Kansas City. I was invited to speak in Redding, California, at the famous Bethel Church and at one of their early Jesus Culture conferences. I’d flown there with my friend David Blackwell, the wiry epicurean from Chicago who had accompanied Floyd on that fateful trip to England.

Students at the conference had flooded forward at the end of the talk, requesting prayer. But as we began praying for them, David’s hands had become extremely hot. The Holy Spirit had started working particularly powerfully, visibly, through him.

Early the following morning, I was woken by a voice. One moment I was fast asleep, the next I was flung bolt upright, adrenaline pounding through my veins, with the words that had woken me still echoing in my head: “Campus America,” the voice said. “Call Campus America to pray.”

My heart was pounding. The hotel room was dark, and I glanced across at David in the other bed, wondering if he’d heard the voice too, but he was still fast asleep. Trying not to wake him, I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed my journal, and crept out of the room, blinking in the bright lights of the corridor. “Campus America,” the words were still reverberating in my mind. “Call Campus America to pray.”

Finding my way to the hotel lobby, and nodding at the night receptionist, I began scribbling notes furiously in my journal. What, I began to wonder with mounting excitement, was the Lord planning? And how on earth were we going to galvanise American students to pray? And why was God speaking to us about it? There were so many other great student ministries out there, far better resourced, with a far bigger reach and way more experience than us.

Eventually, I stumbled back to the room with pages of journal notes and my neural pathways still buzzing. Nothing, it seemed, could ever be quite the same again. Finding my roommate still asleep, I snuck into the shower. That was when God spoke to me a second time. This time it was just four words, almost laughably mundane: “David’s had a dream.”

I got out of the shower excitedly, wrapped a towel around my waist, and stepped out into the bedroom to find that David had woken up and was writing in his journal.

“So what did you see?” I asked, as casually as I could.

“Huh?”

“In your dream. The dream you just had. What did God show you?”

David stared at me with his mouth open. “How did you know I had a dream? I just woke up and I’m trying to write it down. I don’t want to forget it. I never normally dream. How did you know, Pete?”

“Um, God told me,” I said, trying to sound relaxed, when really I was freaking out inside. “I bet it was something to do with students, too.”

This time David let out a little yelp of surprise. “That’s exactly what it was about.”

“Students and college campuses, right?”

“Yes! Pete, this is crazy. Would you mind telling me what’s going on round here?”

At last I allowed myself to laugh. “Come on then,” I said. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what you saw —every detail —and then I’ll tell you what’s been happening with me.”

David began describing his dream. He had been standing, he said, in a busy foyer area. It was the lobby of a sporting arena, and he could tell that a college football team was preparing to play. He had noticed an old friend from high school, a guy called Donni West.

“Donni West,” David repeated. “Remember that name.”

Donni was standing alone to one side, wearing all the correct kit for the game, clearly about to play. Yet he seemed vacant, disengaged, totally unprepared for what was about to happen. David began to bombard him with questions, trying to fire him up for the game. As he did so, Donni began to stir, becoming animated and engaged.

The dream continued, and now David found himself on the playing field. The whistle was about to go, and David was psyching up the team like a coach. Then, in the dream, there was a voice: “Call the dead to get into the game.”

David stopped talking and stared at me. He repeated the phrase as if I was failing to understand: “Call the dead to get into the game.”

“OK, wow!” I said, feeling slow, wondering if I was missing something. Secretly, I was a little disappointed that David’s dream didn’t seem to connect more directly with campuses.

“No, you don’t understand, Pete.” David was staring at me intently and began to speak more slowly.

“First of all,” he said, “Donni West is dead. He died in our senior year. It was a drugs overdose. Really tragic. He never graduated high school. I haven’t thought about him for years and suddenly here he is in my dream and he’s playing football but he’s not really alive —he’s some kind of zombie.”

“And God’s telling us to get the dead in the game, right?” I chipped in.

“Right! I reckon Donni represents a generation of people like the living dead. Zombies. They’ve got all the right kit, but they don’t know why. They’re just going through the motions. But Pete, there’s another thing: It was college football. Donni was wearing a black-and-gold strip. So it was Purdue . . .”

David was looking at me, laughing, but I hadn’t a clue why. I’m British. I know nothing about American football. For me football is soccer, a game involving a foot and a ball. My limited knowledge of American football stops a long way short of college teams and colours. But David is a sports fanatic and had recognised it immediately.

“OK, it’s like this,” he said good-naturedly. “Purdue is a university based in Lafayette, Indiana. Its football team is pretty good, they have a black-and-gold strip. They’re known as ‘the Boiler Makers.’”

“Wow,” I said. And then, as the meaning of it all began to sink in, I grinned at David and shook my head. “Wow,” I said again. Boiler Makers seemed to be a reference to our “Boiler Room” communities. And as for Donni West, his tragic life and death made sense of so many of the questions scribbled in my journal. The call to prayer on campus was for the sake of a generation merely sleepwalking through college, with all the right kit outwardly but an inward emptiness. It was a Lazarus cry to raise the dead, to rouse the church, to awake and “get in the game.” As the apostle says:

Wake up, sleeper,

rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.

EPHESIANS 5:14

It was my turn to tell David about God’s seven electrifying words to me: “Campus America. Call Campus America to pray.” We began to wonder how we might obey the unexpected commission God had given us in the night. Might it be possible, we wondered, to plant prayer rooms and even Boiler Rooms on American campuses? Was this to be the shape of our next great adventure, the army I’d seen arising all those years ago as a student on the cliffs of Cape St. Vincent?

Our conversation turned to Tim and the prayer room at Bluffton where that entire fraternity had turned to Christ. What might happen, we wondered, if similar gospel movements occurred on other campuses? What if Bluffton, amazing as it had been, was just a sign, a prophecy, some kind of firstfruit of a transformational movement God wanted to roll out throughout the nation? Might this be why God had spoken to us both so dramatically in the night? For the sake of an entire generation of students like Tim and Donni West, whose short lives were suddenly speaking with such urgency to ours?

Ambassador Charles Malik, one of the authors of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, issued a rousing call to universities almost forty years ago at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College:

At the heart of the crisis in Western civilization lies the state of mind and the spirit in the universities. Christ being the light of the world, His light must be brought to bear on the problem of the formation of the mind . . . Therefore, how can evangelism consider its task accomplished if it leaves the university unevangelized? This is the great task, the historic task, the most needed task, the task required loud and clear by the Holy Ghost himself.[58]

America continues to be the greatest missionary-sending nation on earth, and most church historians trace this legacy back to a single student prayer meeting on a university campus in August 1806. On that day, a group of five Christian students at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, got caught in a brief summer rainstorm and decided to take shelter in a haystack. They passed the time by praying for other nations. Just as a prayer meeting in Herrnhut had launched the first great missions thrust of the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the previous generation, so this little prayer meeting was to launch something even bigger in the United States. Within ten years that little group of intercessors, under the leadership of Samuel J. Mills, had established America’s first Missionary and Bible Societies and was sending evangelists and church-planters all over the world.

Call of the Wilder

One of the first missionary couples to be sent was the wonderfully named Royal Wilder and his wife, Eliza. They raised their children, Robert and Grace, in Kolhapur, India, before sending them back to America for university. Having grown up on the mission field, Robert and Grace began to pray together every single night for their fellow students, that they would not just bottle up God’s blessings for their own benefit but strike out to other nations carrying the gospel, just as their own parents had. Those earnest daily prayers were heard and answered by God on a remarkable scale; it is estimated that as many as one in every thirty-five American students of Robert and Grace Wilder’s generation went on to commit themselves to some kind of missions work.

This dramatic generational mobilisation found its tipping point in the summer of 1886, when the great evangelist D. L. Moody gathered 251 students at his Northfield base in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts. Robert Wilder, egged on by his sister, effectively hijacked Moody’s conference and turned it into one of the most significant gatherings in the history of American missions. With apostolic urgency, he persuaded twenty-one of his fellow delegates —almost a tenth of the conference —to join him in prayer every morning for those millions in other nations who had not yet been given the opportunity to receive Jesus. On the final night of the conference, Robert laid down a specific challenge to the whole conference. Ninety-nine of those present that night solemnly put their names to a document that came to be known as the “Princeton Pledge”:

We hold ourselves willing and desirous to do the Lord’s work wherever He may call us, even if it be the foreign lands.

Robert’s sister had been praying for one hundred to sign this pledge. He hoped she would not be disappointed with ninety-nine. But then, just as he was about to leave the gathering, one more student came running out to ask if he, too, might sign the pledge. Grace’s prayers had been heard in heaven and answered exactly.

Robert proceeded to tour America with the Princeton Pledge. Fuelled by his sister’s daily intercessions, he visited 162 campuses on horseback, personally recruiting 2,106 of the brightest and the best to give themselves to the cause of world evangelisation. Many of the greatest mission leaders and statesmen of that generation were first recruited to the kingdom cause on that early university tour. In fact, it was this tour that launched the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), an extraordinary missionary body which —in its first forty years alone —mobilised more than 20,000 young people to go overseas as missionaries. It was a vast army, but they had an even bigger vision: “The evangelisation of the world in this generation.”

The leader of SVM for twenty-five years was a remarkable man called John Mott, one of the original signatories of the Princeton Pledge at Mount Hermon. Mott later also led the YMCA through the war, founded the World Council of Churches, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for his lifelong work with students.[59]

The heroic accounts of Robert Wilder and John Mott at the turn of the twentieth century, and Jon Petersen’s stories of the Jesus Movement in California during the 1970s, left us in no doubt that America’s students can be mobilised by the Spirit of God to change nations. Of course, David and I had no real idea how to “call Campus America to pray.” But we did know that the Lord had spoken, and we were determined to obey as best we could, come what may. For the sake of thousands of students like those in that frat house in Bluffton, for the sake of places like San Antonio in Ibiza and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, for the sake of a sleepwalking generation wasting their precious lives, we knew it was time to sound some kind of bugle, to rise up and call the dead to get into the greatest game on earth.[60]

SELAH

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.

JOHN 17:15

• What might contagious holiness mean for me this week?
• If God’s embrace and acceptance is more powerful than sin, why is it so hard to accept his acceptance and love?
• To whom might I show unconditional acceptance today?