Plymouth Street Pastors have sent this testimony and we would like to share it to encourage the work that Street Pastors teams are doing up and down the British Isles.

On Saturday (or rather Sunday morning) we were approached by a man who told us he had not only known about, watched and interacted with us since we started in Plymouth, but that he was very annoyed with us as none of the teams he’d talked to were prepared to take the credit for what they do. In his view, God didn’t exist, so we should take the credit for what we do.

As you can imagine we politely said that we respected his opinion and that while we weren’t there to argue with him, we couldn’t agree with him, but it was ok for us to differ.

That wasn’t enough for him and we went around the same loop several times, each time coming back to him insisting we should take the credit because there was no God.

Just at the stage when I was thinking we needed to move on as we weren’t going to agree, he suddenly told us that he was terrified of dying and some other deep personal stuff, which of course developed into quite another sensitive conversation.

What struck me about the incident was that it had taken almost eight years since we launched, with him watching and talking to us, for him to come to the point of such an admission and that perhaps he wouldn’t have if even one of the teams he’d talked to had not responded in the way that we should have. Well done everyone.

I was reminded that we never know quite what God is doing in other peoples’ lives through us, whether we’ve spoken to them or not and, while of course this scripture is for all Christians; I think it’s relevant here for us: “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation … that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9).

We love hearing testimonies like this so please continue to send them in to us so we can share them with the wider network, and continue to be encouraged that the Kingdom is growing here as it is in Heaven.