Fire in our hearts - Jesus Army

FIRE IN OUR HEARTS
NEW GENERATION
So ran the first Independent Magazine of 1996. 134 The front
cover showed a light bulb. Glowing at its centre was a red
cross. With a new millennium almost upon us, biblical Christianity
was now being hailed by the media as a ‘global revolutionary
tide’. Its explosive power was the cross.
We often wore red crosses and gave them away at meetings.
These bright, visual images symbolised a faith that had
lain dormant in Britain but was rising again. A significant
culture shift was underway with a deep desire for moral
change. Polls indicated that large numbers believed in God
and the Jesus of the gospels who was poor, selfless and spoke
their language. It was church they couldn’t cope with.
A major need was to break down the barriers with the people,
to ditch religious language and to talk sense with the
man in the street. We realised that effective outreach in these
days wasn’t blitzing the marketplace or standing on a soap
box. It was being friendly and sensitive to where people were
at.
This was a challenge to many of us who’d lived in a Christian
sub-culture for so long. As Mike ‘Rockfast’ warned in his
yearly report: ‘For some of us old-stagers this will mean coming
out from behind our walls of community tradition and
Zion-speak assumptions and engaging in real heart contact
with the rest of the human race!’
God told us to change our attitude towards our home town.
The idea that Northampton was ‘hard’ stemmed from own
pride. We now began to see the Northampton folk as our
friends. We belonged to them and they to us. They were our
people.
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