[This is a series designed to bring you into the the unique A.P.E stories of each writer on this blog. We hope each one of you can find a little of your A.P.E story inside of one of us. Read the other stories]

Growing up, my sisters and I were the only kids in our school openly from a churched background. My family went to a small church of about thirty people, and there was only one other bible-believing church in our whole town. It’s the kind of background which programs into you the assumption that most people don’t know about Jesus and unless you talk to them they won’t get to know him.

Initially I had just a dull awareness of the need to speak about Jesus, but as my teenage years wore on I became increasingly frenetic in my attempts to talk with others about Jesus: I would bring him up in conversation with friends, I initiated a regular street outreach in my home town and I spent every summer involved in short-term mission projects.

The strange thing was that for all my activity and enthusiasm I didn’t see a single person open their life up to Christ.

Shortly before leaving for university, I read a book called The Cross and the Switchblade written by a man from rural Pennsylvania who nervously stepped into the heart of New York’s gangland and saw hardened criminals hand their lives over to Jesus. The book amazed me because it was told by somebody who actually seemed to know God.

It began to slowly dawn on me that for all my efforts to introduce others to Jesus, he was really little more than an idea or a doctrine for me.

I realized that the person most in need of God’s transforming power was me.

Inner-City London

Later that summer I was working on a project in inner-city London and I was taken around to a series of different churches and prayer meetings. The people I met there seemed like the people in The Cross and the Switchblade – they talked about God as if he was real and he was doing things in their lives.

It was beautiful and attractive.

One evening, as I was in central London pondering these people I had met and the story of The Cross and the Switchblade, I was approached by a Swiss homeless recovering drug addict. During our conversation I saw him as someone to whom I was ministering. As we parted, though, he turned the tables and began ministering to me: He told me that God had just told him that he had something to say to me and that I should read a particular passage of scripture.

Never having previously received a prophecy or word of knowledge – least of all from a homeless man – I was hardly bursting with expectation when I got home and read the bible passage he had suggested. I was quite shocked, then, when every word leapt off the page at me and spoke so instantly and incisively into my situation that I ran to find a friend and read it to him. It had the same effect on him when he heard it. We both looked at each other and just dropped to our knees. We cried out to God together and told him that we needed him and we were helpless to change ourselves let alone others. Opening your life to God doesn’t have to be emotional or intense, but for me it was.

Over the next two weeks, three remarkable things happened. Firstly I began to love and serve God out of an inner compulsion rather than an external sense of obligation or guilt. Secondly, I began to have conversations with God which were real and alive, not forced and dry. Thirdly, and amazingly, I prayed with fifteen people to receive Christ in the two weeks after inviting him in for myself. God was in me and was now able to work through me.

I’m looking forward to sharing more with you on this blog about what God is doing now as I figure out how to share Jesus in secular Europe and as I help launch a new organization devoted to helping others do the same. But every period of fruitful ministry I have experienced since those early days in London has been marked by the awareness that evangelism is not something we do for God, but with him.

[This is a series designed to bring you into the the unique A.P.E stories of each writer on this blog. We hope each one of you can find a little of your A.P.E story inside of one of us. Read the other stories]