This past week our church participated in “Arise” where we helped an English church evangelize to their community. I visited for a short time on Tuesday and participated all-day on Monday, Friday and Saturday. Usually this program is sponsored by the Amnos church planting school with churches from Korea and America participating and after first receiving four days of training in evangelism, participants break up into teams to evangelize. The evangelism style is door to door evangelism.
Our church participated in this program since 2016. I first participated in the program during the year I spent as a student at the Amnos church planting school. At that time we brought a young homeless man by the name of Ian to participate. He had been evangelized to by our evangelism team and was just starting to attend our church. He along with two women from Daegu made up a team and they evangelized for an African church in Peckham.
The hosting church had planted a church only a few months before so preparation was lacking and we had many difficulties. The housing that they provided was a house that no one was living in so they had to clean the house when they got there and had to go out to fetch water as there was no running water in the house. When there was no water running they had left the tap in the “on” position before going out to evangelize and then the water came back on while they were out evangelizing. There was so much water that the fire department had to come and break through the front door to turn the water off. After finishing evangelizing for the day, they had to go back and clean up the water. When people heard about the unfortunate situation many church members came to help with the evangelism program.
From the next year we made an announcement and formed a team to participate in Arise. I, along with Pastor Gemechisa and Pastor Elizabeth whom I had graduated from Amnos church planting school with, evangelized for the two churches that they had planted. Although it was difficult, it was a fruitful time.
Because evangelism teams from Korea and America could not come due to the pandemic, the leader of Amnos, Pastor Jong Sang Choi, asked if we could participate in the Arise program form Gold Hill Baptist Church which had been made the responsibility of Pastor Steven who had participated in the Arise program from long before. We discussed it with the Evangelism Team and agreed to participate this time around.
Gold Hill Church’s Pastor Steven had hosted Arise for a long time and it is our church’s fifth time participating in Arise so it was great that we could just focus on evangelism. Pastor Steven had been the assistant pastor for many years and evangelised passionately through the Arise program and became the head pastor two years ago. On the first day he invited us to his house and treated us to dinner. I was touched watching him from morning to evening leading the program with humility and passion.
Even though it was only one short week we knocked on the doors of 1,200 households. Of course there were many houses where we didn’t get an answer, there were also many families we could meet while evangelizing. Even though I and our church are lacking in many ways I was thankful that we could serve a church in the United Kingdom in this way. “God, please keep using us.”
