Street Pastors in the London borough of Hackney teamed up with New York urban mission team TRUCE to make major inroads into the borough’s gang culture as over 1000 turned to their message of the love of Christ.
TRUCE, a part of Nicky Cruz Outreach, joined the Hackney Street Pastors and around 400 young volunteers on some of the borough’s most notorious estates as part of an anti-guns campaign to kick off the major summer-long mission event Soul in the City 2006.At the Saturday night launch of Soulweek, a week of intense and creative evangelistic outreach across London, the two ministries celebrated the estimated 1500 young people from across Hackney and Waltham Forest who had turned to Christ over the month of July alone.
Patrick Dow, CEO of TRUCE, said that the New York group was “bringing a message of hope to the streets of London” this summer.
A documentary shown at the launch also revealed that 51 per cent of the more than 1000 newcomers to Christ indicated they wanted to leave gang culture altogether.
Rev Joyce Daley, Coordinator for Hackney Borough Street Pastors, gave testimony to the countless people who had found Christ through the ministry, including women abused by their partners and the members or leaders of some of the 150 identified gangs operating within the borough.
“We believe in the power of prayer, we believe we’re called by God to go on the streets”, she said. “Jesus said, ‘Go there and preach the Gospel’. It is something we should not be afraid of.”She added: “We are out at a time when no other organisation of help is there.”
Street Pastors face dangerous situations daily as they go directly into gang strongholds and onto the streets brandishing nothing but their Street Pastor shirts and caps and the message of the love of Christ.
Rev Daley admitted: “Sometimes we have been in a situation where we we’re not quite aware of the depths.”
This never shook her faith, she added, but only “made my heart pour out more”.
Superintendent Leroy Logan of Hackney Borough Police, also a Christian, praised the work of the Street Pastors within the borough for changing the perception that churches were simply “self-searching centres for the found” to one that acknowledged the role churches play as a “relevant and real outreach for the lost”.
Vanessa Turner, a fellow Street Pastor in the borough of Hackney, said: “God gives us the courage to do this. You have to pray that God will intervene.”
