A joyful and fruitful week

At the end of June 2023, Jason and Andrea Murfitt welcomed an Envision Team to Madeira to help Christ’s Church Funchal reach out to the lost with the gospel. As Jason reports, it was a blessed week for both the team and the church.

A week before the Envision Team arrived, we met on Zoom and were challenged by Jesus’ words: ‘apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). This must be well understood before we can ‘bear much fruit and so prove to be [his] disciples’ (v8). Later comes a surprising application: ‘These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full’ (v11).

Our week together taught us to appreciate our reliance upon Jesus more, as his work in us bore ‘much fruit’, and our ‘joy’ was made ‘full’.

The faithful sevens

Seven ‘faithfuls’, representing five GBM churches in England, sacrificially and bravely came together to form the Envision Team. Joining with seven faithfuls from CCF, we engaged in eight three-hour outreaches over four days.

First, we enjoyed Sunday together. Each Envision Team member was involved in some way—preaching, teaching the children, reading the Scriptures, praying or giving their testimony. Then from Monday to Friday, 200 Bibles, 250 gospels (of Luke and John), 500 church invitations, and over 4000 tracts—in Portuguese, English, German and Spanish—were distributed door to door, on the streets, in parks, hospitals, churches and hotels.

Wednesday was supposed to be a day off, but the team was keen to be armed with material ‘just in case’. Some of us went off to swim with the fishes in natural saltwater pools. On that day we had three separate gospel opportunities with people from the Czech Republic, explored a secret road that led to a hidden hamlet where each house also received tracts, and did a ‘sting operation’ in a Roman Catholic church, leaving gospel material and proclaimed the way of salvation in the visitors book! That week the equivalent of five months of our regular evangelistic work was joyfully undertaken.

Signs of fruitfulness

Some of the fruit included someone who, when presented with a Bible, said, ‘Just yesterday I prayed to God and asked him to give me a Bible!’ And a Venezuelan lady, who had lived in Madeira for two years but thought there was nowhere she could worship where the Bible was taught—she came to our church the following Sunday. Except when she is forced to work, has been coming ever since.

There were some challenges with language. But it is amazing how a smile, compelled by the love of Christ, combined with a little boldness, and with Google Translate on standby, can bridge the gap.

We had worked alongside a similar mission team four years earlier, one of whom joined us this time. A significant difference from that previous occasion was that more hotels were unwilling to receive free gospel material to display in their libraries and foyers. Even so, two of us were blessed to meet a lady at one of the most prestigious hotels who not only received our gospel material gladly, but also said: ‘I wish there were more people like you willing to sacrifice their time to reach others with the gospel.’ Then just last week a visitor came to our church clutching an invitation that he had picked up in his hotel foyer. Nothing was in vain! As nothing that week was done ‘apart from [Christ]’, but all in his name and for his glory, so his joy was made full in us. Pray that there be even more fruit from this labour of love.