Church of the poor - Jesus Army

“I FOUND myself at the front on the last
night of RAW. My friend prayed for me and I
started crying – really crying and crying and
crying. And he hugged me and I started crying
again and he was crying too.”
For 20-year-old Gideon Clark it was his
breakthrough moment. RAW (Real and
Wild) is a three-day Christian youth event
first run by the Jesus Fellowship in Northampton
in August. Gideon was just one of
hundreds of young people who experienced
God’s power there. Some had barely known
anything about “God” or “church” before.
Others had grown up in Christian families,
but needed their own encounter with the
reality of Jesus.
Gideon – and his 18-year-old brother Jake
– are definitely in the latter category. Their
parents met in the early days of pioneering
the Jesus Fellowship. In the ‘70s they had
both been part of the then recently-started
New Creation Farm in Northamptonshire.
In the ‘80s, when the Jesus Fellowship
spread to other areas, they moved to East
Anglia to start a church there. They also
started a family. The church grew – as did
the family: Gideon and Jake are now the
second and third of six children.
Their childhood may be regarded by
some as somewhat extraordinary: living in
a large shared Christian community house
with many different kinds of people. But as
Gideon and Jake reminisce, their memories
are not dissimilar to many other brothers.
Gideon is the more reflective and careful
of the two. He weighs his words as he
speaks and describes himself as “a planner”.
(His plan is to move to a Jesus Fellowship
community in the Midlands after having
completed his degree at the local university.)
Jake is all eagerness and talks nineteen
to the dozen about his enthusiasms most of
which revolve around some of his friends
who are finding God.
Nevertheless, Gideon is clearly moved
when he speaks about his experience at
RAW:
“It was deep and – unlike me. Tears and
snotty nose just aren’t me! I wasn’t expecting
to cry. I’d seen people have ‘shakyshaky,
laughy-laughy, bouncy-bouncy’
experiences. That isn’t very ‘me’ either, but I
guess I was open to something like that. But
this was different. It was uncontrollable.
“I thought about it a lot later. If God’s
Spirit is inside you – His amazingly clean
Spirit – if He touches you even the slightest
bit, because human nature is so impure,
you can’t help it – the slightest touch of God
If God’s Spirit
is inside you
– His amazingly
clean Spirit
– if He touches
you even
the slightest
bit, because
human nature
is so impure,
you can’t
help it – the
slightest touch
of God is just
overpowering.
is just overpowering.”
Unlike Gideon who had always been
“quietly interested” in faith (“quietly” until
RAW that is), Jake has, characteristically,
had a somewhat more colourful, zigzagging
journey into belief. He describes – rather
cautiously for Jake – a stage of “rebellion”
he went through in his early teens before
Gideon blurts out – rather incautiously for
Gideon – “You were drinking at 12!”
Around the age of 15, however, Jake was
very affected when he saw, at close range,
someone being powerfully freed by prayer
from the oppression of an evil spirit.
“It was the first time I’d really taken it in
and saw it. Over the years I’d heard screaming
and stuff in meetings sometimes, but I
saw it and – wow. Something started to click
and I started to feel like maybe I’ve got to
start doing something about my own faith.”
“Doing something” didn’t take long for
Jake. Days later, in a Religious Studies lesson
at school, he found himself telling his
school friend, Perry, about what he’d seen.
He also started to enjoy worshipping, learning
the guitar in a matter of weeks so that he
could sing Jesus songs.
Most exciting of all for Jake, his friend
Perry started coming to church with him
and finding faith for himself. He shared
Jake’s passion for music.
“He really likes the ‘One way Jesus’ song,
absolutely loves it,” bubbles Jake, adding
“The first time I ever prayed for someone
was when I prayed for Perry. It was really
weird for me. I was laughing as I was
praying; I kept my hand on his head and
someone was with me saying ‘Yeah, that’s
alright’”. Jake was learning how to be a
Christian, an evangelist and a leader – all at
once.
Then at another large Jesus event, Jake,
Perry and some other friends had a powerful
experience of God when they were
prayed for:
“We went down like a ton of bricks. It was
really powerful; there were about four of us
there and we were shaking and there were
Jesus Life One/2008 Page 28
www.jesus.org.uk