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With Rowena Cross
141 Plays1 year ago
Sometimes on PEP Talk, you just need a pep talk! Our guest today is full of passion, experience and enthusiasm for sharing Jesus that will get you excited to do the same. Have a listen to her amazing stories of how God does unexpected works when we just say yes to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Rowena Cross experienced a dramatic conversion to Christ, along with her husband, when they were in their thirties. While he went on to become a Vicar, she has been a passionate evangelist, working alongside him sharing the gospel in all kinds of ways - street-work, door-to-door, Alpha and organising large-scale evangelistic events. She has recently released a book, which is daringly entitled, "Be Bold Stop Faffing About and Crack On For Jesus"
Also check out "Mission Shaped Grace" by John McGinley, which was significant in mobilising her church in evangelism.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk and Guest
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast from Solas. I'm Gavin Matthews and I'm presenting on my own this week. There is no Christie, there is no Andy. I think Andy is delivering online lectures for somebody in Canada and Christie's in the last stages of putting her PhD together, so she can't be with us this week. That's the trouble with working with in-demand people. They are always in demand.
00:00:33
Speaker
and you can't always get hold of them. So this week I'm left to steer pep talk on my own. But the subject of pep talk will be the same as ever. We are here to talk about sharing Jesus with our friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. But of course the content of pep talk is different every week because every time we're on we have a different guest. Always someone who's got an interesting story to tell about sharing their faith in Jesus
Rowena's Spiritual Awakening Journey
00:00:57
Speaker
Christ.
00:00:57
Speaker
And this week I'd love to welcome Rowena Cross. Rowena, are you there? Yes. Welcome. Hello. Hi. Where are you dialing into us from today? Today I'm in Bristol. And blazing sunshine like it is here in Scotland.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, I am, you know, menopause or woman not enjoying this heat. I'm very British and we like the sun and then we moan when it's too hot. It's too hot for me. So I apologize to all the people out there who are loving it. But if we can just dial it down the tad, that'd be great. Oh, I'm with you on that. I don't like their heat. Anyway, we're not here to talk about the weather. We are here to talk about some of the interesting things that you have been involved in, in terms of
00:01:39
Speaker
What we often in solace refer to is taking the gospel outside the four walls of the church. And that's something that you've been involved in for a long time. But you mentioned to me a while ago that you didn't become a Christian until you were well into your 30s. And that was the result of quite a long spiritual search. You said you found it hard to find the gospel. Tell me how you found Jesus in the end.
00:02:04
Speaker
Oh, well, we had to be, mine was a full on, I was in a coma and they told my husband, you know, uh, your wife won't survive. Um, and I was pregnant at the time with our daughter and, um, and I had a massive anaphylaxis and they, even though the anesthetist was sat next to me, he couldn't, it was so severe. It couldn't save me. So they told my husband I'd gone. I was just being kept alive by this machine.
00:02:31
Speaker
And my husband obviously was really traumatized and dropped to his knees. And at the same time, my parents who'd started going to church when I was an adult and I'd left home, he rang them and they got the people in the church to pray. And my husband dropped to his knees and said, if there is a God, if you're there,
00:02:50
Speaker
I'll do anything if you will save my wife. Now you should know you've got to be careful what you pray because he definitely got his money afterwards. But at that moment I opened my eyes and it still took a good
00:03:05
Speaker
two, three years for someone to tell us the gospel after that. The doctors kept coming into my room and saying, it is
Radical Life Changes and Evangelism Commitment
00:03:12
Speaker
a miracle. We need you to repeat back to us. It's a miracle. But if you don't know, you've never read the Bible, you're not a Christian, you've never been to church. You just think, oh, it's a miracle. I've got a parking space. It's a miracle. You don't understand what the word actually means and what it is.
00:03:32
Speaker
We radically changed our lives because I had a breakdown because of it. I was really ill for quite a while. It was very traumatic, but we knew we'd been given a second chance at life and we both earned a lot of money and have really kind of, you know, London type jobs and lifestyle. And we just knew it wasn't what we were meant to be doing. Our daughter was also saved by God. And she is, she, despite the fact she had no oxygen for a very long time,
00:03:59
Speaker
She's just about to graduate university and she's bright as a button and feisty as anything.
00:04:07
Speaker
As we dial forward 20 years or so, your husband is now working for our friends at Open Doors. We do kind of stuff with them. We know them, love them. He's been a vicar and you're really involved in evangelism of all kinds with, you know, in different countries as well. I know that one of the things that you've done is to help to mobilize the church into evangelism because one of the problems we have is that we stick the gospel stuck inside the four walls of the church. It doesn't often get out, but you've been involved in helping
00:04:34
Speaker
whole churches, particularly in my old area of South West London where I grew up, and getting the church to mobilize and go. Tell us a little about how you've been involved in that. Well, when we finally found Jesus and our very lovely friends in North Devon where we kind of ran after the situation, when they finally shared the gospel with us, it was like
00:04:56
Speaker
coming home is what we said. We kept describing all these words that are in the Bible that we didn't know. We said it was like light. We could see light in them and we kept asking them, what is that light we can see in you? And so when they finally told us and we went to church, we made a promise to God that we would tell everybody we came across as many people as we could about the gospel because no one had told me. And we lived in London and I was
00:05:23
Speaker
34 by the time I became a Christian and it was the thing my soul had been searching for. My soul was hungry for it and we were looking in all these dodgy books that we just found in water stones. And so my heart and my passion, I don't know whether I'm just made that way and it would have been my heart and passion anyway. So everything I do kind of somehow ends up doing that in some way, shape or form. So when my husband became a vicar in Sunbury,
Vision and Execution of Evangelism Events
00:05:54
Speaker
It's this weird thing in the Church of England that it's just like, buy one, get one free. He starts working and you just kind of get roped in and you're like, hold on a minute. I used to say to people, if my husband was a doctor, I wouldn't go to work with him and help fix people's feet or whatever. But it just somehow happens that you just, the call is as a family.
00:06:14
Speaker
And so my husband said to me one day, God's told me our vision isn't big enough. What are you going to do about that? I said, sorry, why is this my problem? Okay. And I'd had this kind of flash of a picture of people worshipping at Kempton Racecourse, which was around the corner.
00:06:31
Speaker
And so I was like, fine, I'm just going to watch. So I literally asked this amazing woman that we knew at the council, do you know anyone? She said, oh yeah. So she introduced me to the director and I just said to him, no, I've got this crazy idea. I saw these people worshiping at your place. We're doing a whole weekend called Love Sunbury, where we go out and love sunbury and all these different ways.
00:06:56
Speaker
I'd love to finish it with a massive celebration. And we haven't got anywhere to hold that. We've got no money. No, I haven't got any budget at all. And there's nothing in it for you. And it might even not be great for you to have a load of, you know, God-bothers in your race course, considering we're doing quite different. We have quite different visions about what we're doing. And he came back to me a week later and said, no, I just love what you're trying to do. You can have it for free. We'll do all the parking and the health and safety. Don't you worry about any of that? And I was like,
00:07:26
Speaker
Oh, okay. So right, that really was a picture for you. And that just kind of snowballed into this thing that we did. It was like evangelism over six months. And this culminated in this huge event, but we knocked on every single door in the parish in the six months leading up, we went out on the streets, we did as we
00:07:51
Speaker
talked to, we had 180 churches on the database that I cobbled together. So we were communicating with that many, about 36 of them actually came and got involved, all different denominations. And we met and we worshiped together as churches and we did all this stuff leading up and it culminated in the event. And
00:08:14
Speaker
at Mandy who used to run Restored, which is now run by an amazing woman called Becca. But Mandy rang me and said, Ro, you've got to meet this bloke called Dave. And I was like, who's Dave? And she was like, oh, you've got to meet Dave. And it turns out Dave, so I rang Dave. No, he rang me back actually. And
00:08:31
Speaker
I said to him I have no idea who you are and he said I work for Lewis Palau and I'm like who's Lewis Palau because I'm not being funny questions always say to you do you know this person you like look unless they were an 80s rave I have no idea what you're talking about no I don't know who he is my husband only was very excited because apparently he did his thing at QPR in the 80s and my husband's a die-hard QPR fan and
00:08:56
Speaker
So anyway, it turns out Dave has just moved to the village in Devon where we found Jesus, that tiny village where we came to know Jesus. And that's where Dave had moved two days ago. He knew all the people who led us to Jesus. So I almost felt like it was God going, I know you, I can't, I haven't got time for you to faff about it. You just have to trust this man.
00:09:16
Speaker
And they just servant-heartedly got involved. They provided all the artists. Andrew Palau flew over and preached. And we had nothing, there was nothing to gain for them apart from helping us on this crazy journey. So we put on this massive event with hardly any money. And every time we needed money,
The Role of Prayer and Faith in Evangelism
00:09:38
Speaker
because we had an amazing bloke called Ollie in our church who was a sound and light guy and that's what he does as a job so he took care of all the production and some bloke drove a van which was a stage in the middle of the night that turned up and every time something costs money someone would walk in and go gods just told me you need this amount of money it was
00:09:56
Speaker
crazy and the most faith-stretching thing that me and the, I think we had 300 volunteers did and all the churches, all of us, it was just, it was amazing. And it taught me so much about how mission is how we really helps us to become good evangelists because mission, you know, it's that faith without deeds, it's not faith at all. If you just stay inside the church,
00:10:22
Speaker
your faith doesn't grow. You have to go outside what you're capable of doing and allow the Holy Spirit to lead you. There's no way we could have done what we did. The Holy Spirit did all of it. And we just had to have the faith to say yes and join in. And that's essentially what it taught me. And I just loved every minute of it, even the hard bits. It was awesome. So yeah. Some people say things like, you know, big event evangelism,
00:10:51
Speaker
or even door-to-door work are, you know, they're out of date, they're not of use anymore. What kind of reactions did you get doing sort of a door-to-door work in a place like Sunbury? I have to say, I'm glad that someone's doing love Sunbury. I spent the first four years of my life in Sunbury, so it delights me that somebody still loves Sunbury. I think that's wonderful. But going around those streets that I can picture, that I can see in my mind because I knew them as a child, what reactions did you get knocking on doors?
00:11:14
Speaker
and seeking to do that kind of what might be considered an old-fashioned approach to evangelism. Is there still an openness out there? Are there people still willing to talk and engage if you just knock on the door and invite them to something? Well, you would think, I mean, even me, and I'm pretty bold, was thinking, what are we doing? But we knocked on every single door.
00:11:36
Speaker
Most people, I cannot tell you any stories of being punched in the face or chased off, get off my land. There was none of that. Most people, we did, we started to just practice doing treasure hunting. So we would sit and listen for God and go, where, what do you want? And we'd see pictures of doors and literally behind those doors, I remember one where there was a door I'd seen and I was like, convinced, this is the door I saw in my mind. I opened it.
00:12:05
Speaker
This is the greatest thing I've ever heard in my life. How cool are you? And I was just like, what did I just say? And it was just such a thing that there are people waiting behind the doors. Our job isn't to convert them. Our job is to open our mouth and just say,
00:12:27
Speaker
Jesus loves you and he loves me and this is what he did for me and he wants to reach out to you and let you know that whatever pain or suffering or whatever joy or whatever it is that you have in your life, you don't have to go through it alone. We here are here to stand with you and he sent us out today. There are not many people who don't want that or don't want healing or don't want someone to listen and so
00:12:52
Speaker
we just went out in the power of the Holy Spirit, even though we were all scared, we weren't sure, you know, it wasn't perfect, it wasn't slick. And it all came about, if you want a book to encourage you, it was John McGinley's Mission Shaped Grace book. That's what started it. So we got, he came and actually preached, he launched the whole thing because his book was so powerful. And I just said, everyone needs to read this book. So we got him in to preach and
00:13:22
Speaker
that he kind of kicked it off in the January. And I think, you know, I'm not sure about big evangelism myself. I'm going to be brutally honest. I am actually not sure. The Joy at Kempton bit wasn't the thing. We all thought it was the thing. And it was almost like God knowing his people went, I'm just going to give him some dangly carrot to get him to do what I actually want them to do each and every day of their life. And so actually,
00:13:51
Speaker
The thing was what we did in the six months, what we did, what the food bank people did, that they organized to feed the 5,000 and did an amazing job being led by God under really stressful circumstances. That was what he did. It was the six months leading up. It was the small amount of people that grew and grew and grew the more we came back with stories that would come out on the streets. That was actually the thing. The thing was never
00:14:20
Speaker
Joy at Kempton, that was the shiny thing that God dangled in front of his Christians to get us to turn up and do something and so that doesn't sound very like cool but it kind of it it was the thing I absolutely believe that the work we did in the food bank
00:14:39
Speaker
Actually, my favorite thing that we did, and I think was the most effective thing we did, was we launched a church service in the middle of the food bank. Now, to call it a church service would be grossly over selling what it was. It was much more like a flash mob, but it was raw and it was beautiful. People gave their life to Jesus every week. It was
00:15:02
Speaker
that was where he moved. And I think if we hadn't done Joy at Kempton, we wouldn't have set up that service and we wouldn't have been as bold as we would. So I think the more you do it, it's like you become God's human snowball and you kind of, the more you see him move, the more you want to see him move and the more you look at your life and go, what am I doing? Stop faffing about and just get on with it. And so it's like a
00:15:25
Speaker
all the people that helped, all the volunteers, the beautiful people that were in our church and other churches, I watched them all grow in different ways, individually and uniquely. But they all kind of grew and came to life as they were serving. And that is what mission does. You know, I don't think we've been very helpful in the church going, well, evangelists do that,
00:15:49
Speaker
and prophets do this. So we've driven those two out the church and intellectualized the church. So we've kind of driven the Holy Spirit out because he causes a bit of trouble. It's like, well, it's the trinity of God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. You can't have two thirds of it. You've got to worship the whole lot. And it's all about our need to control really as humans. The more you have a church that submits
00:16:13
Speaker
to whatever Christ is leading them to do, the more you're going to see them go out and lead people to Jesus, because the more your fear will die down and the more your only fear will be the fear of the Lord. So it's like, that's what I
Love-Driven Evangelism and Personal Reflections
00:16:28
Speaker
saw. It was in the doing and the leading up. It wasn't the big thing. It was what he did in all of us. He started with us and then that's spilt out into the area we were desperate to serve.
00:16:40
Speaker
I googled before we came on air, I googled Joy at Kempton to see what I would find, because I wanted to find out about this event that you've done. And the first thing that came up on Google was a picture of a prayer meeting, not of a big event in the church. And how significant is that in terms of launching the church out in evangelism and engagement? And why did you start with prayer? Well, I'm going to be honest, I didn't understand then what I understand now about the importance of prayer.
00:17:09
Speaker
Now, thankfully, my husband did, but as an on fire kind of evangelist type person, I was just a rush out and worry about it later kind of person. God has done a lot of work in me to help me understand that everything we do is rooted in prayer. It's rooted in our relationship with him. It's not whether you can sit there for seven hours a day and say the most eloquent prayers.
00:17:33
Speaker
prayer is just a conversation with God. It's prophecy is just listening for God's word and speaking that over people instead of our muddled opinion. And so he's taken me on a long journey of that. But thankfully, we had prayer warriors who did get that. And so they prayed. And that's why people turned up and said, you know, this wonderful young couple in our church who
00:18:00
Speaker
It's difficult, I don't want to tell their story, but this young, wonderful young couple just came and handed me a check and just said, bro, we know God told us you need this. And I'm like, it literally, it was the day when I was like, I don't really know what we're going to do. All of that was because of prayer. We had a prayer room that was 24 seven prayer that some amazing people set up in our church. I think it was Nisha and Rick set it up. And they, people were praying throughout the whole event before, during and after, because
00:18:29
Speaker
We need to war in the spirit for evangelism to work. I am just being honest with you and saying, because I don't want anyone listening who is part of it thinking, yeah, Roe was always banging on about prayer because I wasn't. But this is what I'm talking about. The more we do with God, the more he teaches us about why it's important for us to do this.
00:18:52
Speaker
I've been ill for three years and like at death's door ill and I've just had to sit at the God's feet because I physically can't move. That's kind of how he obviously needed to get me to live. There's a theme. I can hear there's a theme from how he got us into Jesus and how he's moving forward. But it was the most beautiful time of him teaching me. The most important thing we all do every day
00:19:16
Speaker
is our time with Jesus, is to grow in our relationship with Him. And then everything you do flows out of that instead of fear or our own, otherwise we only ever do what we're physically capable of doing. And evangelism requires most people, even gifted evangelists, to step out of what they're capable of doing and rely on the Holy Spirit.
00:19:38
Speaker
I have seen so many people, hundreds of people come to Jesus over the years and not one of it is because I'm particularly gifted or somebody next to me is gifted. It's because it was their time. God knows. People say no and people say yes. That was how God showed me it was a spiritual battle because I was like, he said to me, but Ro, if it wasn't a spiritual battle, everyone would say yes, just as like an insurance policy to cover themselves. And I was like,
00:20:05
Speaker
That's so true. But because you know it's a soul thing, because people say no, as well as yes. So you've got to be prepared that your delivery has nothing to do with whether they say yes or no. Because between your mouth and there is, is the Holy Spirit. So even if you say the worst thing in the entire world, He will still turn that and take it into something beautiful. You've just got to open your mouth.
00:20:31
Speaker
And if it's their moment and you are that person in that journey, it's down to the Holy Spirit. He does the convicting. We just have to ask because we don't know which day it is. And that's all me and Ron did. It wasn't like we were anointed. He literally, we were just like, we're just going to ask every service, every service we do, everything we do. When we do Alpha, we're just going to ask.
00:20:55
Speaker
So we just asked, don't you want to give your life to Jesus? And I remember this young bloke running down. He'd never even been in the Sunday service before. He took his shoes off and he ran to the front and now in front of Ron and just sobbed.
00:21:10
Speaker
with his shoes off. He'd taken his shoes off. He didn't realise what... I just ran to him and he gave his life to Jesus there and then in front of the whole church because he'd been asked, and God was speaking to him that day. And so it takes all the pressure off us to know what to say, to be any good at it.
00:21:34
Speaker
because all we're doing is working on our relationship with Jesus, which enables him to work on our ability to love. And that's what makes you want to go and tell people about Jesus is love, a love of humanity.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yes. It's the love of Christ that compels us, Paul says, doesn't it? That's
Conclusion and Farewell
00:21:53
Speaker
wonderful. And our time has gone. Where has the time gone? In a split second. So thank you so much, Rowena, for that lively, a wide ranging conversation. I told you listeners that every pep talk is different. A unique story we've heard today. It's really wonderful and really encouraging.
00:22:08
Speaker
We'll be back in two weeks time. I don't know whether it'll be Andy or Christy or Andy or I, or which combination of the above, but there will be another guest to stir up your thinking as we talk about getting the gospel outside the four walls of the church. Well, that's all from us for this week. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you, Rowena, for sharing your story, your testimony, your faith, and your enthusiasm with us. Thank you, everybody, and goodbye.