Pt 3. Precedents

So what decent precedents have I got? I guess you’ve got to look at other people who’ve wrestled with this question, worked with similar people and been led by Jesus into enabling real transformation.

In 1995, my Dad and a couple of friends from church ran a course with unemployed people in Southampton. It was helpful for people, and so they ran another one. And another. He left his job and started his own business to help enable the friends to do more courses. The more they worked with people, the more they discovered about the many things that were stopping people getting jobs – apparently it wasn’t just people being lazy. And so the Get That Job course developed from some interview practice, encouragement, and careers advice to include CBT, fun games, group support, life coaching and wisdom from the Bible to set the people free.

15 years on, Southampton university department of psychology concluded a 3-year quantitative study with the finding that SAFE and the Choices course produce ‘a statistically significant result’ in improving mental health. That’s no joke. Pretty much every single course participant saw the symptoms of medically diagnosed depression and anxiety disappear. People who’ve been labelled by doctors as ‘disabled’ – “you’ve got a chemical unbalance in your brain and you’ll always need to take these pills” – are simply not depressed anymore. They’re remaking their life how they once dreamed it might be.

Another one: I’ve nearly finished reading about Jackie Pullinger, who ended up working with Triad heroin addicts in Hong Kong in the 70s. She had a vision not just to help one or two, but clear up a whole area that was outside government control and therefore completely dominated by drugs, prostitution, poverty, and gang violence – the Walled City. Possibly an unrealistic ambition for a naive white girl from Surrey.

But the young gangster addicts she befriended began becoming Christians, getting filled with the Spirit, and experiencing no withdrawal pains when they prayed in tongues. And as they were helped to follow Jesus, living in community away from their old environment, they began to do crazy things like hand themselves in to the police for crimes they’d got away with, do housework, and help set others free like they had been. Gang bosses got set free, and the walled city began to change.

Today, after 30 years of setbacks, heartache, danger, blood sweat and tears, the Walled city is a beautiful garden.