You tell about that young Catholic lady, girl I should say, on the corner there.
[Jess Hodder] Down by the canteen noodle restaurant was a young Catholic lady and we engaged with her and were talking to her. Then we realised she was a Catholic, so we just said to her well have you got a personal relationship, a personal faith in Christ? She said she didn't know, so we explained to her how to have a relationship with Jesus and she said I've never heard it put like this before. That young lady wanted to open her life to Christ, mm.
[Pastor Mike Connell] Wonderful, wonderful.
[Graham Hodder] There were a couple of young men, contractors by the railway line. This was about eight o'clock or half past eight this particular night and they were both - one was on crutches and the other had a broken arm. We went and spoke to them. They said we both had separate accidents. They are contractors out on the farms and they were from Chile. So straight away we had a fair idea they were probably of the Catholic faith, however we didn't say anything. But anyway they said look, we both had separate accidents and then so I said well look, did you get one of these? They both took one and we went through the million dollar question and they turned it over. They said well yeah, that's very interesting. One of them said well I must admit, when my car rolled I started thinking about God. I said are you both Catholics? They said yes, we are.
Then I said have you got a personal faith in Jesus? They sort of looked at each other not quite sure what I was meaning, and they said well - I can't remember the precise words but what do you mean? And so we explained what it is to have a personal faith in Jesus Christ. One of the men said I want that. He said I want that, and we went on a little bit further, to go further, deeper and just slightly more into it so that they fully understood what it was to repent of their sins and to receive God's forgiveness and receive Christ by faith into their hearts. I said do you want to do that? They both said yes, we do, and when do you want to do it? We'd like to do it now, and so those two young men - we don't actually lead people in the Sinner's Prayer. Over the two and a half years we've been doing this over 40 people have opened their lives to Christ. We don't count anymore now, but we said to them I want you to pray your own prayer.
As I say, we don't lead the Sinner's Prayer. So these two young men just simply said Lord Jesus, we want You to come into our lives and be our Saviour. That night those two young men were born again. Unfortunately they lived out on the farm about 20 kilometres out of town, but the following morning we posted them a Gospel of John each. We got their postal address and gave them a Gospel of John. We feel the importance of sharing Christ to these people, Christ Jesus is the one they need to know. That's how we feel about this, and so on the streets we uplift Him to the greatest of our ability.
[Jess Hodder] Mm.
[Pastor Mike Connell] Very good. What encouragement would you give people who perhaps like you were many years ago, would never have considered doing anything like that? What encouragement would you give people?
[Graham Hodder] I would say I know that in a church of our size, 300 to 400 people, I know that there are a number of you, probably quite a large number who really want to do this. You've got it on your heart that you want to go out and you want to share your faith with people. I know how you feel because this is how we felt. We didn't quite know what to do, but we've got a group started now and we've got a team of eight people who come down on the street with us and we've all learnt. We all start just at the beginning and learn how to do this. I would say this, that if you're interested we'll be down the back later after the service. Come and see us because we have on a Saturday night, which is our group night as a Dare to Share as we call it; Dare to Share group, we meet on the Saturday night at six o'clock. We have a DVD on one aspect of sharing on the streets by the Way of the Master people, excellent, excellent stuff and it helps you to overcome things that you may not have thought of.