Teesside outreach sees 1,400 respond

Festival Teesside, featuring evangelist Andrew Palau, was ‘a massive success’ and the ‘fruition of 15 years of hard work,’ says mission organiser Stephen Sutton.

Sutton, who is pastor of Beacon Baptist Church, Middlesborough, also said that the gospel seed had been sown and that local churches were now deploying ‘the skills of the harvest field’ which the Palau team provided.

Seventy Teesside churches (more than half calling themselves evangelical) united behind the week-long event, which culminated in the free Festival, with music, at Stewart Park in the city from 8-9 June. The total of 18 Festival events included men’s and women’s events, action sports - such as the stunt biker pictured below, family fun activities and food trucks. More than 600 local churchgoers were trained in evangelism beforehand and 900 volunteers were signed up to take part – all representing a large percentage of the 6–7,000 or so people in the area who normally attend church on a Sunday.

That commitment paid off in terms of the impact the Festival had. Over 27,000 people came to the main weekend event with 1,400 responding to the gospel, many being young people. The next stages are pizza party follow-ups across the region’s churches, before invitations are sent out to join the 50-plus Alpha courses taking place in September.

Sutton revealed that local churches are coping with a cost of living crisis that has affected many of their members and they have responded by operating a food bank. But the most significant change affecting Teesside over the past ten years has been the huge influx of asylum seekers and refugees. These have included many Nigerian adult student migrants, many of which are Christians. And, since the pandemic, he has noticed what he calls the ‘total shift in the mission environment’, such that people are now far more receptive to the gospel and churches are regularly reporting conversions.

Asked what he thought were the key current trends in world mission, Andrew Palau revealed that the Palau team’s new ‘Hope with God’ initiative on Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram is generating no less than 40–70,000 responses a week, coming from every nation on earth except North Korea. But the challenge they now faced was getting all these enquirers into a local church and properly discipled.