📣 Luton: 87 Souls in Two and a Half Hours
The police arrived in Luton town centre at five past eleven on Tuesday morning. They were still there at half past one, when we packed up and went home for lunch. In between, in the middle of a shopping square, 87 people prayed to receive Jesus Christ.
That number is not a rounding-up. It came out of a tally Rev. Paul Ki-Ho Song took at the end, walking round the team one by one: how many did you pray with? One said thirteen. Another said seventeen. I watched him work the square all afternoon, so I believe the total.
Luton is not a soft target. By some counts the town is now 40% Muslim. Nothing about Tuesday looked like a safe bet.
A Tuesday nobody planned
My parents have gone out into Luton three times a week for the last two or three years. The town is not new to our family—I was interpreting at the 2017 prayer mission in Luton—but what they do there is not a campaign; it is a habit. A cross, some tracts, a few hours of standing in the cold, week after week, whether or not anything appears to happen.
Then my father invited the street evangelism team from London Shepherd Church to come and join him.
Rev. Paul Ki-Ho Song has preached on British streets for over thirty years, and in many other countries besides. His team is, without exaggeration, all-star: twenty-plus members, all of them at this for years, trained in the only way this work trains anyone—by doing it in the rain, in front of people who would rather they stopped. Battle-hardened is the right word.
Twenty-one of them came. On a Tuesday. In November.
I took annual leave to be there. I had heard about Rev. Song and I wanted to learn from him, and I did. Moheb, a friend from church and a genuine prayer warrior, came too.
The first thing they did was not set up
Before a single stand was unfolded, the team gathered and prayed together—which goes without saying, except that it was not a formality. It was the engine.
Then every man and woman turned outward, arms held out towards the streets, and proclaimed the name of Jesus over Luton.
Twenty-one people in a ring, hands stretched over a shopping square, naming the King.
It was not a warm-up or a mood-setter. It was a declaration of jurisdiction. We were not asking the town’s permission to be there; we were announcing whose town it is. Over the council and the police and the environment officers, over the shops and the mosque and the pubs, over every ruler, every authority, every power of this dark world and every spiritual force of evil in the heavenly realms—the name that is above every name.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV)
And then we asked for the thing that mattered more than equipment, technique, or courage: the Presence of God. Not a good atmosphere, not a buzz. Him. Powerful and tangible, in the middle of a Bedfordshire shopping precinct, to bless Luton and every soul who walked across that square.
That prayer was answered before we had finished making it. Which is the only explanation for what happened next.
The rig did half the preaching
They wasted no time. Within minutes a Bose L1 Pro8 column array and a Jackery Explorer battery were standing in the middle of the precinct, cables taped down, and the gospel was going out over a public square from a system that fits in a car boot. Not a generator, so no drone under the preaching and no fumes—just a battery, and enough of it to last the whole outreach.
I had not appreciated how much difference good equipment makes to this work. The L1 Pro8 throws sound evenly: a man can preach at conversational volume and be heard at the far end of the square, without shouting himself hoarse, and without monitors, feedback, or the tinny distortion that makes street preaching sound like a nuisance. Then, in the last ten minutes, you can turn it to eleven and the whole square knows something is happening.
Here is a clip of me on the mic that afternoon, so you can hear the difference it makes.
How a team works a square
This was not twenty-one men standing in a huddle singing. Each member took an area of the square and worked it. There was always one man at the mic, preaching the good news without a gap.
And Rev. Song never stopped scanning. He stood back and read the square the way a shepherd reads a field, then called a name: go and pray for the woman in the orange top. Every few minutes another member peeled off to a specific person, at a specific spot, because someone had seen them.
That is the difference between enthusiasm and strategy. One is noise. The other is fishing.
The man who came to interrupt
At one point a street vagabond came weaving across the square towards us—drunk, ragged, talking to himself.
Rev. Song did not move him along. He summoned the whole team, formed a circle round the man, and did deliverance ministry right there, in the open, in front of the shoppers: intense prayer, hands laid on him, the demon of alcohol called out and commanded to leave in the name of Jesus.
I will be honest: I have read about this all my Christian life and never seen it at close range in a town centre. Twenty minutes later the same man—calm, clear-eyed, entirely sane—was standing with the team handing out gospel tracts until we packed up.
“And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons.”
Mark 16:17 (NKJV)
The Muslims took the tracts
Here is what I did not expect. Luton is now, by some counts, 40% Muslim. I offered gospel leaflets to men in kurtas and women in hijab, expecting the door to be slammed in my face, and they took them. Openly. Some read them on the spot. A few asked questions.
Not hostility. Thirst.
We have been told for twenty years that these conversations are impossible, that the Muslim next door is a wall. He is not a wall. He is a man whose soul is a harvest field, and the field is white already.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.”
Romans 1:16 (NKJV)
The opposition, and the last ten minutes
The environment officers and the police were there from the beginning. Luton has seen street preachers before.
Rev. Song is an ex-policeman, and it showed. He was courteous to every officer who came at him, knew exactly what we were and were not permitted to do, and did not give up a single inch of ground. Boldness and good manners are not opposites; the combination is unanswerable.
Then, with ten minutes to go, he cranked the speaker to eleven, put on a loud praise song, and called the whole team to gather in the middle of the square and dance as David danced before the ark.
Which, of course, brought the police back. That was the design. By the time they reached us we were packing the stands away, and there was nothing left to object to.
Ten minutes I did not ask for
Mid-afternoon, the environment officers pulled Rev. Song aside for a chat. An offended Muslim had reported us, apparently.
He walked past me, handed me the mic, and went to talk to them.
So I held that microphone for ten minutes in the middle of Luton and told the square what God had done for me, and then I preached the good news to them. I had not prepared it. I did not need to. When you are handed a mic in a public square, the Holy Spirit does not require a manuscript.
Moheb got the mic after me, and he was on fire—the kind of preaching that makes people stop walking.
Then my mother fed twenty evangelists
We finished at half past one and went back to my house. My mother had been cooking all morning: steak, and plenty of it, for twenty-plus battle-hardened street evangelists.
What happened round that table was the best part of the day. Many of those men and women are ex-homeless and ex-drug addicts who met Jesus on a street corner exactly like the one we had just left, and now they stand on the mic themselves and testify to God’s faithfulness. One after another they told us what they had been and what Christ made of them.
That is what evangelism produces when it is done for years instead of afternoons: not decisions, but disciples; not a crowd, but a family. A taste of heaven, on a Tuesday, over lunch.
The tally
Eighty-seven people prayed the salvation prayer in two and a half hours, in a town that is 40% Muslim, in front of the police, on a Tuesday in November, with a portable PA and a battery.
But I will not hand that number to a PA system and twenty-one disciplined evangelists. The equipment carried the sound; it did not open a single heart. The team found the people; they could not unstop a single ear. If you had put the same men, the same crosses, and the same Bose in that square on a Tuesday when the Spirit of God had not gone ahead of them, you would have got a lot of leaflets handed out and nothing else.
What opened the doors that day was the hovering of the Holy Spirit over the minds and hearts of everyone who crossed that square. The same Spirit who hovered over the face of the waters at the beginning, brooding over a formless void, was brooding over Luton on Tuesday. Where He hovers, light comes.
“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
Genesis 1:2 (NKJV)
Eighty-seven souls is what happens when the Spirit of God hovers over a square and somebody is standing in it with a microphone.
“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”
Matthew 9:37–38 (NKJV)
That is my prayer out of Tuesday. Not for better equipment, though I am now a convert to the Bose L1 Pro8. Not for more permission, since we had none and did not need it. For labourers—and for the Presence that makes sending them worth it. Lord of the harvest, raise up more harvest workers: in Luton, in London, in every town where the field is white and nobody is standing in it.
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.