The story of Joe, a jeepney (taxi) owner and driver in the Philippines, provides a vivid illustration of the way the Kingdom of God, the Church and the marketplace can interact to transform individuals and touch a city.

As Joe was driving his jeepney shortly after his conversion to Christianity, he heard God tell him to serve right where he was. Since he was a new believer and the marketplace was what he knew best, he focused on a bar called Sweet Moments. He decided to apply the principles of prayer evangelism as listed in Luke 10 to make peace with the lost, fellowship with them, take care of them and eventually announce that the Kingdom of God has come near them (see Luke 10: 1-8).

Everyday he would go into the bar, order a soft drink and pray peace over the place, its employees and the customers. After a few days of doing this, he befriended the manager, Brian, who was a homosexual, a gambler, a drug user, a drug dealer and a pimp to 35 prostitutes. This pedigree left no doubt that Brian was a certified, full- strength sinner.

The friendship grew. After just a few days Joe was able to lead Brian to the Lord and baptize him at a nearby beach. As Brian emerged from the water, the power of God came upon him and he experienced an instant transformation. All of his homosexual drives disappeared. He was also freed from gambling and drug addiction. He was delivered from all of the vices and stopped being a pimp, which had supported his sinful lifestyle.

Brian’s transformation became evident to those around him, and in a very short time all 35 prostitutes also became Christians. Joe and his wife decided to move into a neighborhood near the bar so that they could minister to this unusual congregation. His wife baked rice cakes, prayed over them and distributed them among their neighbors, using food as way of introduction. One of those neighbors was Teddy, a lawyer, who was also the owner of the bar. He later testified that when he ate one of those cakes something happened to him. He became interested in what Joe had been teaching his employees, joined the Bible study and soon became a Christian. As he grew in the Lord, he realized that his line of business was not pleasing to God and turned the bar into a Church. In less than a year Joe, the pastor of the bar – turned- church, established 12 cell groups in the area, and the Kingdom of God has come to significant portion of the marketplace.

The Key? Joe saw the church as the means to take the Kingdom of God to people in the marketplace. When sinners discovered that the Kingdom had come near them, they came into it, and once they did, he simply taught them how to have church in the marketplace!

I worked for an engineering company in Sheffield England, which made clutches, overdrives for cars, and certain garage equipment. The company had about 1,200 employees. My job at the company was a ‘setter’ and what I used to do was ‘set’ machines up or operations on machines for operators to command the machines and do a good job. At that particular time, the company was very union oriented (as were a lot of companies at that time). The union had an iron grip on the company and everybody that worked there had to pay subs to the union every week. The union did some silly things, because they had too much power.

Where I was based in the factory, there were two Christians. One was a very keen Christian and the other was a fairly keen Christian, but not quite as keen as the other one. This was because he kept on witnessing to his wife and tried to get her to go to church. She told him to cool it or she would go back to her mother’s. And so, from then on, he had stopped going to church. He played a big part in my becoming a Christian even so. The other lad was a more regular churchgoer. Lunchtimes were great times. We used to play cards or dominoes. These two Christians used to sit and read the Bible and discuss it. I became very curious about what they were doing. I’d had a church background, in that I had always been in

Sunday school, the Cubs, Boy’s Brigade, the scouts and the youth club, so I didn’t feel embarrassed to talk to them. I spent some time talking to them about the Bible and I came up with some very good arguments, because I knew my Bible stories. There was one thing that they shared more than once that I couldn’t get my head around and that was their own personal testimonies of how they had become Christians. I didn’t have an argument for that because it was their own personal experience.

God began to speak to me around the time my girlfriend’s father died. We used to spend a lot of time together working on our cars and I used to get along with him well. I had not been touched by any death on my side of the family so it hit me a big way. God started to speak to me more and more through that. At that time, God seemed to be in everything I did or said. I would look at the stars, and the wonder of creation made me think about God. I went to the coast for a day or so and seeing the sea made me think about God. I went to the country and God spoke to me, and I got to a point where there was nowhere to turn, everywhere God was prompting me to make a decision. I felt the Lord say, ‘Jimmy, it’s time to make a decision. You’re at the point of no return: repent and ask me into your life.’

One day when I got up early for work, I felt a bit weird. It felt as if it was going to be a ‘different’ day that day. It was while I was at work setting up a machine and operating it that God started to speak to me very strongly and I knew I had to make a decision – I couldn’t hold out any longer. So I stopped the machine right there, and

on the spot I prayed, repented and asked God into my life.

I went around immediately telling everyone on the shop floor. I was so excited, and although some people didn’t agree with what I was saying or didn’t understand what I was saying, they could see my excitement. People were saying, ‘Look we don’t know what’s happened to Jim but something has happened to him’. Within a few days or so, a dozen of my friends and colleagues had become Christians and, from then on, there was someone saved every single day. It didn’t just stay in the factory, but spilled out outside, because our girlfriends, wives, parents, brothers, sisters and cousins all started to become Christians. My wife became a Christian, and so did her sister. Since then, my wife has probably helped lead thousands of people who came from the factory to Christ.

All we had to share with people was our testimony, because we didn’t really know the Bible. We didn’t know anything about the Holy Spirit, the ‘Second Blessing’, renewal, revival. All we knew or had heard of was God. A friend of mine at the time said, Jim, I don’t understand this – it’s like a massive wave of God over which we have no control, no control at all’.

We felt it was quite important to learn a bit more about the Bible, and found out about something that was called the ‘Topical Memory System’, from which you would get Bible verses through the post on little cards to memorize. So, each day we would get our memory verse and stick it on our machine, on the workbench or drawing-board, and we would learn the scripture. Then at lunchtime we would test each other and discuss what we had learnt that day, what we had learnt that week and what we had learnt over the past few weeks and months. So we learnt a lot of the Bible and it did help us in our witnessing.

Each person discipled another person. I had someone disciple me and I would disciple another, so that everybody was discipled by somebody else. There was much to do in the evenings because that’s when we would do the discipling. We were happy to be so busy, because we were doing what God wanted us to do.

It was getting very exciting at work. I can’t explain the experience of work – it was absolutely incredible. There were a lot of us by now, so the company gave us the boardroom to meet in to have prayer in the mornings and Bible study in the evening. Actually, we had our Bible study as soon as work finished at 4:30p.m., so we didn’t go home until after it had finished.

We started to print our own magazine and put testimonies in that magazine. These were very relevant, because they were read by guys who were working next to the guys who had their testimonies in there. We used to put in tips on things like gardening, fishing and cooking, which people found really useful. The company bosses gave us permission to be at the gate five minutes before everybody else, so that we could go outside with big cardboard boxes full of newsletters to give out. Everybody used to take one, because the topics in there were the topics of discussion on the shop floor for the rest of the week. We never found any on the floor

– that’s incredible isn’t it – everybody used to take them.

We prayed every morning. I used to get up at about quarter to five. All sorts of people were saved – from labourers to managers – no grade was excluded. All the ‘girly’ calendars came down and the company let us put Christian posters up. Also the toilets were repainted to cover up all the rude jokes and pictures. Christians took over all the positions of shop stewards, because there were so many of us now. So, as all the shop stewards were Christians, there were no more strikes.

About half of the workers at the company became Christians. Production levels went up by 60 per cent, because we were working harder, and scrap levels came right down. The ceiling was taken off the bonus earnings and our bosses doubled our wages overnight without us even asking, because we were doing so well.

The company began to supply free overalls and free safety wear. They built us a sports club, tennis courts, bowling green and children’s area. This was the new environment God had created for us to work in. The company started a fishing club, cricket club, arts teams, cycling teams, bowling club, archery and football club and probably others that I can’t remember as well. They even organized and paid for trips to the coast for all the families. We began to get sent work from other factories within the group, because we were so efficient. The company built the finest training center for apprentices in the country and, in fact, the finest in Europe (although I must be modest). The company took over our magazine: produced it, paid for it and it went with our wages. You couldn’t get your wages without getting one of our magazines.

We decided to send people out to churches because there were so many of us and thought we should get them to church. I suppose we were already a church in our own right, but because the church had no influence in

what God was doing we started to get people into churches in the area, in the city where they lived. Unfortunately, the church didn’t seem to appreciate what God had done and told us that they should have been saved at church and not at work. But we carried on trying to get people integrated into churches. This caused many problems but that’s another story.

Reflections…

Jim’s testimony above is a powerful and classic witness of the transforming power of the gospel of Christ Jesus. It shows how the transforming work of the gospel of Christ Jesus in not limited to just changing individuals, but has power to transform businesses and even an entire industry.

Another key thing we observe from Jim’s testimony is the power of mission-driven disciple- making friendships. Jim’s life, his colleagues, their families, their company and eventually their entire community were all impacted by the gospel of Christ because a friend of Jim took the effort to disciple Jim, and Jim in turn caught the vision to engage in disciple-making friendships.

If we were to feature your life and your friendships as a Christian today, how would it compare with Jim’s life and friendships? Are you regularly engaging the Word of God? Are you passionately sharing your faith? Is your life a witness to those around you of the transforming work of Christ?

What about your friendships: Is the kingdom of God being advanced through your friendships? Are your friends engaging the Scriptures more as a result of their association with you? What vision have your friends caught as a result of spending time and sharing life with you? Has the life-transforming power of Christ spread to your friends’ lives, their families and their communities by any measure as a result of your friendship with them?

One way to ensure that you progressively answer YES! to the above questions is by prayerfully deciding to become a CWM Associate. A CWM Associate is a believer who, out of recognition and obedience to the witness of the Holy Spirit, has chosen to enter and engage in a ministry partnership with CWM for the purpose of nurturing faith and casting vision in the life of one or more of his/her Christian friends. These friends constitute his/her Mission Cluster – his/her set of Mission-driven disciple-making friendships.

For more information about starting your own Mission Cluster and the benefits of a partnership with CWM, visit us online at articles.covenantwords.org