HOPE FOLLO CHURCH, NORWAY: STREET CHURCH AT NIGHT

Quote from regular Street Church visitor called "A": 

 A: I despise you, I spit on your faith, I wish I was able to kill you!! 

Me: yes, but I love you anyway. 

 A: Yes I know it!! 

We in Hope Follo Church in Norway have tried almost everything to reach out to those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. 

In September 2012, we started up a new project called "Street Church." The concept was very simple. We bought a tent which measured 3 x 3 meters, and placed this in a small backyard which faces the main street in the city-town of Drøbak. The tent was clearly visible to all passers-by who walked to and from pubs and discos. The timing was from 12 am until about 4 am in the morning, from Saturday to Sunday night.

I, Bent Marken, felt a clear guidance that we should neither be pushy and go after anyone, nor beg anyone. We should just be a blessing by serving free coffee and sausages, or give them a little chocolate.

They should be given time to wonder why we bear to stand there to serve them for free week after week without getting anything back.

The strategy was that we should not evangelize until they question us. We started the evening by praying together. One of our prayers was that the visitors should be eager to ask questions, be wondering and by this, start a conversation.

It worked!

As they took the coffee and sausages, they were waiting for us to say a few nice words. While we were waiting, they asked, what's the deal? What do you want to accomplish? Should you somehow try to save us, or what? We don’t want to hear about your Jesus! We replied: “You can still have free food and drinks.”

As they stood there for a while they suddenly said: “Why do you believe in Jesus, and how is it possible to base your life on a 2,000 years old fairytale book. We replied that we do not believe in a book that is 2,000 years old, we believe in a book, which is partly over 3,500 years old.

After this introduction they were prepared and hungry to know more. Then, the door opened for real evangelism and friendship-building.

We have not seen the expected result we hoped for of new believers and church attenders. But they keep coming back at night asking new deeper questions, little by little, week after week, month after month, year after year. Today, we have 40 consistent pre-believers coming back to visit the church. In total, several hundred have visited the Street Church, and almost the whole city knows and talk about it.

We do our best to evangelize or preach to the regular visitors individually according to their needs. 

However, there are three main areas that really upset people and the discussion often ends in trouble:

1. They may believe in God, but they will not believe in Jesus as their Savior, because they deny that they are sinners. They want to believe in Jesus as a guru.

2. They believe that we Christians hate homosexuals, and attack us because we do not accept same sex marriage.

3. They attack us aggressively because we believe in “young earth” / creation, and not in the “evolution religion”.

We tell them that Jesus loves the sinners but not the sins. He wants us to repent from our sins. With regards to the creation vs evolution discussion, we challenged them to watch the Creation seminars (1-7) by Kent Hovind on YouTube.

Sometimes, people come to the Street Church only to create problems for us with the purpose of attacking our faith. We often pray: "Help us Jesus!!" Many times we have experienced that God solves the problem by sending a person that is ten times worse than them. When this person turns completely insane, the rest begin to protect us instead of attacking us. The questions we receive then is; “Why do you let this insane man attack you? Why do you not defend yourselves? Why do you not throw him out? How can you bear to constantly being mocked for your faith? What made you begin to stand here? Why do you believe in Jesus? How can I believe in something I cannot see?”

We also hand out small tracts to those that seem a bit interested. Many have asked for a New Testament after a while. We pray that The Holy Spirit will touch them.

We will continue with the Street Church as long as God wants us to do it. We trust that God knows what He is doing and we are delighted that He uses useless people like us to reach people in Drøbak at night.

Bent Marken - Hope Follo, Norway