Counties Evangelist, Colin Johnson, Shares how God encourages him as he evangelises on the streets - as a Jewish stallholder turned from an angry opponent to a joyful friend.

COLIN JOHNSON

Colin works with Hockliffe Street Baptist Church in Leighton Buzzard, sharing the gospel through community visiting and market outreach. He also does community outreach for Langdale Church in Dunstable. Since the Pandemic Colin has been involved with online outreach, producing videos on how the gospel is relevant to our life issues and running online groups, including Alpha and The Wellbeing Journey. He has been leading a Neighbourhood Chaplains team for many years. Colin is a trained Christian counsellor and is married to Linda, they have three grown-up children and three lovely granddaughters.

COLIN’S STORY

Much of my work is giving out Good News newspapers and I am part of the Gideons - so I give our New Testaments. A lot of the time people take the newspapers and I don’t get any response at all but, recently, I was out in Dunstable giving out good newspapers at a small market stall and one of the stallholders is a Jewish man, Aaron, who runs a menswear-type stall, got quite aggressive and angry. Previously, he has told us not to give our papers near his stall as we are: “Putting off his customers.”

My colleague ignored him and carried on, which made him more aggressive and angry, so the following week we stayed away. I decided to pray for him as I realised he was troubled. I was also upset that he was upset because other people in the market liked him. Anyway, he came over to me one day as I walked around, and he said: “Colin, I have heard people talking about you. I am not against you, it‘s just that I have been under a lot of stress.” Then he told me that his business had not been doing very well and we chatted for a while. After that, I didn’t think very much more about it.

Since then, he has been so friendly. Last week he wanted to make us a cup of tea and he gave out newspapers to the people walking by. Although he isn’t a practicing Jew, he believes in God and has faith. He respects Christians, and the last time I saw him, he took a New Testament and when I spoke to him about Lebanon, he was on the phone with his wife saying: “There are some Christians here and they are my friends.”

So I gave him a card that linked to my website containing my testimony. I just thought it was such a turnaround and such an encouragement to me.

The other encouragement was at Leighton Buzzard market, where I give out Good News newspapers a couple of times a month and I get a lot of resistance. It’s a very white middle-class area, unlike Dunstable, which is very mixed-race. And people can often be more secular here. On this particular day, I was standing by a flower stall and I chatted with a lady. I gave her a newspaper and she said she wasn’t sure what she believed. She didn’t go to church but said: “I know this person who’s a nun or something and she told me this prayer which is: ‘A pray the light of Christ will come in my heart’ or something.”

She has been praying that every day and she has been feeling better. We then discussed how the world isn’t as kind as it used to be anymore. Then she said she would like to buy me a pot plant. I told her there was no need but she insisted. So she bought me this lovely pot plant with miniature daffodils. And then she took a Gospel and some other bits and bobs, and I told her I would pray for her. Again this was a great encouragement for me. I feel God was and is in both situations.