The Vision
The vision for 6:19 began in August 1982, at a youth camp at Lee Abbey in Devon. On 26th January 1982 I had for the first time made a real commitment to accept life from Jesus Christ, and dedicate the rest of my life to living in obedience to Him. As a young Christian I found the camp an amazing place to be, where the presence of God was often very tangible, and for the next few years the weeks that I spent on that field each summer were to be hugely significant in shaping who I was to become.
One night, on that first camp in 1982, I was lying in my camp bed waiting to fall asleep; when I heard very clearly the following words come into my mind, “Ephesians Chapter 6, Verse 19”. It was so clear that I immediately wanted to look up the reference, but was unable to do so as it was dark and I did not have a torch with me! When I woke up the following morning the words were still there and I looked them up - “Pray for me also that whenever I open my lips, words may be given me that I may fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.” At the time the words had some immediate relevance and spoke into a situation that had happened the previous afternoon, but I now realise that in that moment God was setting His agenda for the rest of my life. It is the only time that God has spoken to me in this particular way, and it was the beginning of a journey that has led, 27 years later, to the setting up of the 6:19 Trust.
Over the next few years I became aware of, and deeply concerned about, a mismatch that I saw between what I was reading in the Bible, and Christian books that I was given (notably ‘God’s Smuggler’ by Brother Andrew, and ‘The Hiding Place’ by Corrie ten Boom to name just two), and my experience of the local church. The former described situations where the things of heaven were constantly impacting the things of earth, and where there was an expectation that they should do so; the latter seemed to be a place where we rehearsed what God had done a long time ago, without much expectation that He would do so again. No wonder, I thought, that not many seemed to want to be part of the church, and why as a teenager there were few of my age represented.
So for the last 20 years my passion has been a simple one – to be used by God in some way to encourage the local church to be a place where the things of heaven regularly impact the things of earth; where the people of God are known: for the love that they show, for the attractive holiness that characterises their lives, and for the power of the Holy Spirit that flows through them; and to be a place where the sick are healed, the demonised are set free, the guilty are forgiven and the outcasts are welcomed in. When we are like that then we will find, as Jesus and his disciples did, that we are surrounded by a crowd; a crowd of people who want to find out what it is that makes us so different from them, and want to know how they too can become a part of what God is doing.
This is, of course, how the church should always be, but I believe that there is now a particular urgency about this task – the state of the world around us, now more than ever, requires the church to proclaim and demonstrate the Good News of the Kingdom of God, in preparation for a season of revival that He is preparing to bring in.
