From Atheist to Evangelist

From Atheist To Evangelist

I was taught about God at school. The first time I had ever heard the word. I had seen churches but had no idea what they were for. I had never been to church and had never met people like that. As a child I believed the stories in the Bible, although that's as much as we were ever taught. I knew the story of the death of Christ vaguely but not the details of the last supper, who betrayed him or why he died.

When I was 11 I decided that I didn't believe in God anymore. I had a book about evolution. I still remember the dates and technical terms like Cambrian period and pre-Cambrian period. I had been given a radio kit for Christmas and had begun to build my own radios. I was good at science, and would eventually go into the top science class at school. In 1979 I heard a particularly interesting radio programme in which an astronomer explained Stephen Hawking's theory of the big bang and the big crunch - he said the universe went in and out like a concertina. Scientists had really disproved God now.

My atheism was a moral decision. If God does not exist, there is nothing wrong with living in a way that is totally self-centred. There is no great cosmic being out there that we are going to have to give an account to for the way that we have lived. Most people only have a very vague idea of life after death. I imagined death like being under anaesthetic when I had had an operation, it wasn't like being asleep, you didn't know who you were, you couldn't think or feel anything. I remember some people on an Irish radio programme who described seeing lots of coloured lights and flying around at high speed during near death experiences. Either way, absolute silence and darkness or just flying around. I wanted no angry God to spoil my eternity, so he didn't exist.

I lived my life for the material things. Money wasn't the most important thing in life, it was the only important thing in life. My family weren't rich but they had a car, a stereo, a colour television, and a holiday somewhere in Britain every year. I remember listening to a religious programme on ITV, I had a VHF aircraft band radio that could pick up television stations. "There were no shops where you could buy friendship, so friendship ran out." What did I need friendship for? If I couldn't buy it, I didn't want it. I remembered that programme over the next few years when I was being bullied at school. I was subjected to very severe name calling. I had co-ordination problems and had a clumsy walk. Other children would follow me around doing monkey impressions and shouting 'Spaka!' I was frequently told about 'the hardest kid in the school' who 'threw a brick at someone and it missed him by this much.' I was not like him. I was soft. I was a girl. I was a puff. One of the boys actually spat in my pudding at the school dinner table. Another threw my apron into the toilet that I had been using. Another two boys used to follow me down the corridor, punching and kicking me. I remembered that programme on ITV. Friendship? Maybe you did need it after all.

In 1981 I went for a long walk. I walked along a dual carriageway where we lived and asked myself the question, 'If I walked out into this traffic and died, would anybody care about me?' I thought of a hymn we had sung at primary school, 'God is love, his the care.' That one line of it kept going through my mind. When I got back home I wrote down in my notebook that no Christian could ever survive in the kind of world that I lived in. Christians were soft. They could never live in a world without love. Nevertheless, something of that experience remained in me. I began to read the Gideon Bible I had been given at school. It had a section on 'Where to Find Help' when lonely, when friends fail. I began to read the book of Bible stories I had been given when I was a child. On a hot summers day I wrote a poem about God and the beauties of nature. I met some children that I knew from school in the park and decided to read it to them. I remember going car spotting, looking for X registration cars on the 1st August. I sat on a church wall. Turning around, I noticed the sign behind me. Sunday evening service at 6PM. Why didn't I ever go there? I decided I couldn't go at six o' clock because we had tea at six o' clock. I was only 14. At that age you don't really go out on your own and expect your parents to make an early tea for you. There were six long painful months of my life when I really wanted to be a Christian but didn't know how to do it.

In November 1981 I was particularly fond of a girl at school called Cheryll. I remember getting down on one knee in the school yard and asking, 'When you're sixteen, will you marry me?' She laughed and said yes. She was my only friend. I read the book, 'My Left Foot' in which a disabled writer, long before the days of computers, operated a typewriter using the only part of his body that he could move. Like him, I had one female friend who really cared about me. There is a scene where he is about to push himself out of the window but pulls himself back in, thinking of his one friend who loves him. Cheryll was very much like that. One day she ended the relationship with me and, in the school yard, she led me to another man and said, 'Malcolm, this is my boyfriend.' That was the last time I ever saw her. I was in deep depression. This was the darkest day of my life. The next day a pop gospel band visited the school. They were called the Reps and they sang a song called 999 about a woman called Mary who killed herself because no one loved her. If only she had known about Jesus. After I had heard that song I knew that I was special and I knew that I belonged to Jesus, but I would have to go to their concert at the school that Saturday night before anyone would actually explain to me how to become a Christian. A preacher came onto the stage after the music had finished. He told me that I was a sinner. I began to physically shake. Did God know about the trouble I had been in at school? Did God know about the hateful thoughts I had about Cheryll? He then told me something really amazing. He said that Jesus had died for my sins. I had never heard that before. A member of the band came on the stage and said that he was trying to get us away from living self-centred lives to living God centred lives. The band had given up everything and travelled the country for 3 years preaching the gospel. He led us in a prayer, repeating the words after he had said them. 'Father God, I accept that I have sinned, I thank you that Jesus died for my sins, and ask you to forgive me. From now on I want to live my life for you. Amen.' We were invited into the school canteen if we wanted to find out more. I walked down to the school canteen and said another prayer silently to myself, 'Please God, don't let me go back on my promise.' I sat down next to Michael Bates.
'Can God forgive me after all the bad things I've done?' I asked. He said yes, and led me through the Steps to God booklet. He said that he knew Sarah, a girl who was in my class. He gave me his telephone number in case I had any problems. I was invited to come to the church the next day and the band were there again. We had tea with cakes downstairs in the church afterwards, and I was introduced to the Bates family and for the first time I spoke to Sarah.

Three Christian teachers had witnessed in that school for thirty years. During the weekend the Reps held two concerts, one in the school and one at Chowdean Chapel, the church I joined. One hundred children became Christians that weekend. Most of them had left the church by the end of the year, but a girl at the school spoke to me years later and asked, 'Do you remember when we went to your church? Do you remember when everybody went?' Perhaps it wasn't wasted.

One of the first people I really got to know well at Chowdean Chapel was David Welsh. He was a manager at United Biscuits. He told me that he had been a Christian for 13 years and had been a committed Christian for 6 weeks. He had a tape of an American woman which he played on his small radio cassette recorder in the kitchen. "I give to God all my pots and pans," the woman said.
"Look, she's committing her life to Christ," said David. David had committed all his money into the hands of God and had added a basement to the house. That was where we held some of our meetings. That weekend, after the concert, there were two hundred young people in that basement. The Friday night Bible study continued in his living room for a few months afterwards. I was introduced to the idea that money wasn't ours to keep, that the comparitive riches of a manager belonged to God and were to be invested in ways that would further God's work. Houses, cars and cassette recorders could be used to serve God. They were tools in his hand.

A few weeks later I had a conversation with a visiting youth worker at the Thursday night youth club.
"I gave my life to Christ a few weeks ago. I'd be interested to know, what is the next step?"
"When you became a Christian, Jesus promised to forgive you for all the sins you'd committed in the past, but he didn't say anything about the sins you'd commit in the future. You need to keep on confessing your sins to God. How long is it now since you came to the Lord?"
"Six weeks."
"As time goes by, the weeks turn into years." The first six weeks of my Christian life did seem like a long time. Not because they were particularly boring, but because it was as if time had started all over again. I had been born again, and for me it actually felt as if I had physically begun a new life. As time went by six weeks did become six years, then ten years, then twenty years, then twenty five years. Time began to pass more quickly.

As Christians we receive the Holy Spirit when we believe, and many people would give good Biblical reasons for believing that. I don't wish to question this, but when I believed I did not really understand what the Holy Spirit was. Only when you understand the Holy Spirit can you really experience it. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is a more powerful experience than just receiving and may be experienced some time after conversion, as it was in my case. I remember listening to Ian Smale on a Saturday night at the city hall in December 1981. We sang the song Let God Speak, which I have only heard once, but I was very glad to find the song and the music in one of our hymn books and played it on the electronic organ, even though I had forgotten the tune. 'Let God speak and I will listen, let God speak, there's things I'm needing to put right. Let God speak and I will obey what he says, Lord I want to hear your voice tonight.' That night God spoke to me. Ian Smale was talking about the Holy Spirit. It had put a new voice in his prayer life and had enabled him to pray for two hours. I was very interested. I had never heard anything like that before. I went to his counselling session for people who wanted to know more about Holy Spirit baptism and water baptism afterwards. There were about twenty people there when Ian Smale came around the corner into the room. 'When you get home tonight ask God, 'Am I baptised in your sight?' If you still remember what he said in two weeks time that was God, if you forget it, it wasn't.' That night I did ask God if I was baptised in his sight, and decided that I wasn't. I needed to be baptised in the Holy Spirit and I needed to be baptised in water. A very strange thing happened the next day after the Sunday evening service at Church. Michael Bates asked me, 'Malcolm, have you ever thought about being baptised?'

I asked God to give me the Holy Spirit every day for the next week. Not brilliant theology, as I have already explained, but God did not care. I was walking from our house to the park and back again when I really felt the power of the Holy Spirit. It was intoxicating. It was a feeling of peace and joy. I had had that feeling sometimes when I was in the church, although it seemed to come from other people. Now I could feel it myself. I had decided to be baptised as an adult in water. The elders visited the house and explained to my parents what kind of church they were and what baptism would be like.
'We're Open Brethren, not Exclusive Brethren,' said one. 'Exclusive Brethren are nice people. If I worked for them they would make me a cup of tea with buns. But they don't really mix with anybody else.' I was baptised in an extremely busy meeting in the baptismal pool downstairs at Chowdean Chapel in January 1982. The women wore white robes. The men wore a spare set of clothes. I was asked the question, 'Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?' My mind went back to a scene on the Benny Hill show where a man is getting married and shouts, 'I do, I do, I do!' so I shouted, 'I do!' very loudly. Everybody laughed, but it meant something. I was getting married to God. For years I cherished my simple cardboard baptismal certificate and kept it with my driving licence and educational certificates until it was quite tattered and torn.

A few months later I was sitting on a chair with the youthworker from Tyneside Youth for Christ, Phil Blandford, with several other young people who had been invited onto the stage. I said, 'Six months ago I gave my life to Christ and I thought, what are you going to do with my life? But God has given me two things, the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit. Those are the two most precious things you could ever have.'

One of the other people I knew well at Chowdean Chapel was Alec Maclennan. He gave me a big green Bible, the New English Bible translation, and I was excited by this as I had never had a Bible before. I had had a Gideon New Testament and a Hamlyn book of children's Bible stories and had assumed that that was the only Bible there was. It was fascinating being able to read Genesis and the original stories of Moses instead of just the simplified children's Bible stories that I had been told. Alec Maclennan was also a travelling preacher and I used to travel around preaching with him. He was notorious for getting lost. One night we actually walked into a girl guides' meeting and the male leader said, 'Oh, I didn't realise you had men and boys.' We went to a church in Ovingham that had six old ladies in the back row and they were the evening congregation. 'The people here have no vision,' Alec said. I wasn't sure what he meant, but he meant that they didn't have the kind of ideas that help a church to grow. I read some Bible verses from a little book in which I kept notes whenever I was reading the Bible. I also gave a few words of explanation. " 'I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world any longer but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.' So we have got to offer our bodies to God to do his will, we have got to offer ourselves to him in service. Then God gives us the Holy Spirit and it will transform our minds." One of the old ladies smiled at me afterwards and asked, 'How long have you been saved?' I told her I had been saved for a few months. We went back there the next year and the church was quite full. We met a couple who had moved onto the estate and were doing youth work. Perhaps Alec had been wrong. Maybe they had vision.

I asked Alec about doing some evangelism. He said that if I wanted to do that I must give people a leaflet. One of the other elders gave me directions to the CLC shop in Newcastle. For several years I bought leaflets there and gave them out in the streets around Low Fell. I used to write an invitation on the back in pen to come to the Sunday evening service at Chowdean Chapel. To the best of my knowledge no one ever did, although that is not surprising when only giving out a small number of leaflets. Many serious literature campaigns give out 80,000 leaflets. I was discouraged by this experience and discussed it with Brian Hall, a preacher on Northumberland Street. 'I feel like this is a waste of time. They don't take any notice.'
'You're sowing the seed,' Brian said. 'I remember a man who preached the gospel to me when I was a young man. I didn't become a Christian, but I never forgot him.' I said I was concerned about the price of the leaflets. Brian gave me the address of a company in Scotland that provided them more cheaply. If it hadn't been for that conversation I wouldn't have continued doing evangelism on my own. Brian died from a massive stroke when he was in his 50s. It was a very painful illness and it was a very slow decline. He spent several years in a wheelchair and had an infection in a leg that had to be amputated. I was giving out leaflets on Northumberland Street, the same street where he had preached in happier times. I visited him shortly before he died and tried to explain how much he had inspired me to carry on the work that he had begun. It was hard to get him to understand. 'Why is it all thanks to me?'
'Because I was going to give up doing this evangelism because nobody listened, but you encouraged me to carry on. You told me I was sowing the seed.' I showed him one of the leaflets. 'It's got a little piece of paper stapled in it so that you can look at Christian websites on the internet.'
'I don't know what you mean.' I'm not sure even how much he could remember of the visit but if I got across to him for just one minute how much he had encouraged me I achieved something. One night a man rushed into the prayer meeting and said that Brian had had another stroke. He was so ill that he actually wanted us to pray for him to die, so that he would be spared any more pain. Having worked in a hospital I had seen stroke patients who spend several years sitting in a chair unable to do anything, staring into space. I appreciate that this request was meant in kindness. Brian died a few hours later. I was asked to speak at his funeral. I read a verse from the book of Acts in the Bible,
'He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a good many people were led to the Lord. The apostles called him Barnabas, which means son of encouragement.'