Thinking about Reading Rock Festival put me in mind of some other stuff that happened in Reading. I remember visiting my family and running into a group of people who’d parked a double-decker bus next to a park in the middle of town. This park had a reputation as a place where druggies hung out (if you decided to sit under a tree in the summer, it was always best to make sure you didnt sit down on a discarded drug needle!)Evangelism on wheels
Use of a bus as a means of Christian outreach
© Evangelicals Now - November 1997
These buses have been to so many different venues, such as a New Age travellers’ site where the local church involved did get permission to park, a car boot sale, outside Anfield Park Stadium during Euro ‘96 or for a children’s holiday Bible club, with thousands of people coming on board and hearing the gospel, for example over 3,000 primary school children have visited the Liverpool bus in just one year. Through all this Christians have been able to take the message of the Christian gospel to people where they are, rather than expecting people to walk through the doors of their church buildings.The article mentions that Carey Baptist Church in Reading managed a bus. This was the bunch of people that I managed to get involved with - I returned several times to help with their efforts to share the good news of Jesus with people in the park and around the centre of town. I was invited to be part of their outreach to the Rock Festival in 1991 - the year that “Sisters of Mercy” was headlining.
A half-dozen church people arrived on the festival grounds, outnumbered at least 7,500 to 1 by rock fans. With numbers like that, fans felt “safe” and were incredibly open in sharing their beliefs with us! I know many church-goers would be intimidated but I have to admit that I felt truly alive there. We’d taken the walls off the church and gone where the people were rather than waiting for them to come to us. We were being obedient to what Jesus commanded in Matthew 28:18-20:Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”We had gone and it was good. Yes, we saw every tattoo and piercing known to man while we were there. Yes, people were drinking heavily. Yes, (to so many things that run counter to the culture of the church) but YES we were following the example of Jesus too.As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?”
On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
I am so glad that today I am part of a church with an outward focus, a church with a vision to plant other churches and reach out to those who dont yet know Jesus (and to do it on their terms, on their ‘turf’, not forcing folks into the church). The object lesson learned on the Rock Festival grounds in 1991 are still with me today … they will be with me for life. I cant avoid the call: Go into “the world” and make disciples. Who wants to come along with me for the ride? I can promise it’ll probably be pretty wild!