The black and white of the St. Piran county flag was the colour of the month through September.
Walk Cornwall 2 did three weeks of evangelistic mission in the far west county, all under the auspices of Through Faith Missions, utilising local leadership.
20 years ago the Walk of a Thousand Men in Cornwall found the walkers called the yellow bananas on account of the colour of their sweat shirts. Statistics can’t tell the full story, but in numbers the walk had: 250 churches involved in 47 centres with 339 volunteers from all over the UK, including one very committed man, who took three days to arrive from the Shetlands. Around 20,000 homes were visited with 9,000 completing the religious belief survey resulting in 950 contacts to follow up in courses like Christianity Explored.
Redruth leads
In Redruth, the Baptist church took the lead and enjoyed working with a happy and genuine six-person team with 23 extra helpers from YWAM and 90% of the local congregation being involved in some way. An empty town centre shop was taken over with various creative activities taking place there: film shows and testimonies, a secondhand goods sale, raising over £600 for Barnabas Fund, all done to attract people into conversation about Jesus and to give away 100s of tracts and DVDs. Families particularly liked the professional face-painter.
The team, with local Christians helping, visited all 500 homes on the North Redruth housing estate. Three people made serious commitments to Christ and 128 spoke to the visitors and completed the survey. Results show that people are now more commonly saying Jesus is a prophet, and still want the key question in apologetics to be answered: ‘Why does God allow suffering?’ In seven out of ten cases they want to know a personal God, if such a being exists. Few were abusive and door-to-door was seen to be effective, as it was done sensitively and boldly.
Many were approached through offering to pray with people on the street and this work continued after the mission month with a small but determined team.
Christ crucified
Daniel Cozens spoke movingly at the open-air launch in Camborne: ‘The priority remains preaching Jesus and him crucified’. With a clear gospel, work with others was clear too. Deep bonds were forged by being on the front line together with other churches. Christ was offered to the people just as John Wesley had offered Jesus in the same town almost 300 years before.
