Imagine my wife and I go to Sherward forest for a day’s picnic. At the end of the day, we are packing up and realise we only have one of our sons with us. We’ve lost the other two. “Oh no! What shall we do? Let’s go and look for them.”

We go back into the forest and hunt all over the forest. We find one of them and say, “Oh well, at least we have found one. Let’s go! We lost two, we got one back. You lose 100%, you get 50% back – that’s the way life is. Win some lose some.”

NO! What would we do? We would go back into the forest and we’d search for our lost son until we found our son, alive or dead. We wouldn’t stop.
That’s the heart that the church needs to have as part of this whole thing of being outward looking, to have a heart for the lost. I am not saying that every minute of every hour of every day, we are out seeking the lost, but if that’s the heart of the church, then its troops are going to be active at different times and different places doing this.

UK Focus – Holy Trinity Brompton Mag, Aug 97, J. John