Street Ministry

One of our favorite memories of our time in Australia is of the various people we met and the things we witnessed God doing in their lives during street ministry in the city of Adelaide.  Our approach to street ministry was a little different from the stereotypical idea of people standing on street corners, handing out tracts and confronting random strangers, which often results in pushing people away from the kingdom.  Instead, we "adopted" a small area of the city called Rundle Mall and Hindley Street and visited there many different times each week, frequenting the shops, walking the streets, hanging out meeting people as God led.  Sometimes we just walked and prayed and other times we found ways to connect with people by giving out water, sodas, flowers. etc.  Our main focus was simply to be available to join in with whatever God was already doing.  Some nights it seemed very small and weak, but every time we found opportunities and through these simple acts, God moved in amazing ways!

Rundle street has a open mall with many different shops.  During the day the mall is full of shoppers, vendors and street performers ("buskers").  At night the streets are much quieter, but there is still quite a bit of foot traffic, made of a mix of business people, lingering shoppers, street performers, homeless and revelers.  There are many benches throughout the mall area and free wi-fi, so there were always opportunities to meet interesting people who were just hanging around.  We ran into Michael and Rod almost every night on the mall and were able to develop a connection, praying with them about their struggles and having some very deep discussions.

Hindley Street is known as the entertainment district of Adelaide.  This is also the area of Adelaide where many of the underground brothels operate out of the back of nightclubs, karaoke bars and massage parlors. Many nights we simply walked and prayed in this area, as many people were not really open to talking, but over time things really opened up.  This was the place where we met Richard, the man whose testimony we featured in a prior blog post.  God was really after Richard and he used our encounter with him to bring about a total transformation in a very short time.

No matter what we did or where we went, we found that if we would just be willing to look around and really see what was going on, it was actually very easy to find people that needed some help, a little bit of encouragement or just a kind word.  It was amazing to see the reactions when they asked why we would come from all over the world just to walk the streets and talk to people.  It gave us a great opening to talk about what God has done in our lives and in many cases led to opportunities to speak into their lives and prayer for issues or speak into opportunities that He was highlighting in their lives.


Our approach to street ministry was inspired by a movie we had watched as a team called "Father of Lights".  There was one story in particular that impressed us all, which followed a man named Todd White (who happens to be from PA!)  as he simply prayed for people he met on the streets.  I don't have a direct clip from the movie, but here is one of his videos on YouTube, which is a great example of the amazing things God does to demonstrate his love and interest in his children!