Mission Spotlight: Healing On The Streets

As part of our ‘Riverside Story’ blog post series, this post specifically spotlights mission that Riverside is helping to facilitate here in Birmingham, the UK and around the world; supporting our vision to bring LIFE to every generation in every commuity.

Have you silently absorbed an expectation that God doesn’t heal today? We’re here to change your mind. Ahead of the Commonwealth Games previous Healing On The Streets (HOTS) team members, and plenty of new and enthusiastic participants, were trained in how to pray for members of the public and to effectively point them to Jesus. Youth With A Misssion (YWAM) sent a team of 60 young people. We caught up with David and Linda Isgrove from Riverside, who have been activley involved with HOTS for many years.

Throughout the 10 days of the Commonwealth Games some of the team walked round the city centre in pairs, getting into conversations and offering prayer where there was need. Other members of the team were positioned first in Edgbaston Street by the markets and the Smithfield Arena, and then the High Street. Here we chatted to passers-by, offered New testaments supplied by ‘Good News for Everyone!’ (Formally the Gideons), and offered prayer. One member told us how she had been there on every day; and would have carried on for another month if possible as it was so joyous and life-giving, albeit tiring.

Stories of Healing:

At the start of the games on Friday 29 July, over 100 people were prayed for. One lady gave her life to Jesus, another received her sight back in one eye, a man had his knee healed, and another’s broken foot went from blue to flesh coloured and then regained the ability to wiggle his toes. This man went to A&E to get his foot checked afterwards and was told it wasn’t broken, just bruised!

It wasn’t just physical healing, but also emotional and spiritual healing too. We were surprised by people asking for prayer for lost phones and iPads – and then returning to tell us that God had heard their prayer and answered!

So many testimonies every day that showed that people were encountering Jesus. Here are just a few highlights;

• Man with pain across his shoulders – pain left after praying for him.
• Elderly lady on way to look at a smaller property to downsize because her son had died. The prayer moved on from praying for God to open the door to her moving to praying for her in her grief. Prayer then moved on to ‘aches and pains’ and God worked an amazing miracle – I’d placed my hand on the exact spot she’d had backpain for 2 years and the pain left.
• Seeing a man freed from demonic oppression and giving his life to Jesus.
• A lady sat for prayer for a sore knee. Had cartilage removed and has had constant pain since. The pain went. She came and spoke to me the following day and had no pain or painkillers since.

Bringing LIFE to every generation in every community:

For the duration of the games, a total team of over 40 people from 20 local different churches, plus the 60 from YWAM, prayed together at different times for over 500 people from 35 different nations.

Among those asking for prayer were athletes, coaches, government officials, including two MPs from Uganda, families of athletes, police, security guards, people of many faiths and no faith. Of course, there were many people from across the Birmingham area also.

God At Work:

Working in partnership with others; YWAM, Birmingham City Mission, Good News for Everyone (who gave out over 12,000 New Testament Bibles), and Burn 24-7 (praying and worshipping for 24 hrs a day for 2 weeks as a protection over all of Birmingham and the outreach plus sending out teams themselves), brought a strength and resilience to what we provided. Many copies of The New Testament and the ‘Why Jesus?’ booklet were given out alongside praying.

On the last day many of the athletes were out shopping. We were able to pray for 21 nations’ athletes and officials, every one of them saying they’d really like to have a New Testament: one of the Pacific Island’s coaches came back with another athlete who asked if she could have two!

It was an immense privilege to see God at work, restoring, healing and saving lives. As a result we (David and Linda Isgrove) are sensing that God is asking us to start again this autumn working with St Martin in the Bull Ring.