I have been preaching since I was 13. - By the time I was 17, I was so impatient to evangelise that I didn't want to 'waste' time in Bible College. I knew that time was short, Jesus was coming and I wanted to win the lost and dying for Christ! I wanted to get on with the job! All the time I prayed: "God, I don't have time for Bible School, I want to be an evangelist!" But I was told I had to go. Still I was so worried, I used to spend so much time in prayer: "Lord I know what You want me to do, but instead of evangelising, I am here, working in a bank, to raise the money for Bible College!" I was so anxious to find this powerful God, I thought that in the time it took me to earn the money to go to Bible School, God might have found somebody better than me! I used to pray desperately: "Please Lord, don't give my job to someone else!" Sixty years later I still pray that same prayer!

After I had been in the College only three months, a pastor of a church some distance away in Dorking, Surrey, had to leave his church to assist in a crusade. I was asked if I would be willing to take over until he returned, which should have been after three weeks. I was more than willing. But the pastor didn't return - so now I was the only student in the College with a church to pastor! This meant that I was studying full-time and pastoring the church on my own - all the time I was at College - going several times a week to the church which was 30 miles away! This was 60 years ago, I was just 18, and so on Fire with the Holy Spirit, that people were getting saved and filled with the Power of the Holy Spirit until late every night!

Soon the College summer vacation began. Only pastoring the church was not enough, I wanted to do more! So in July 1950, within one month of becoming a pastor, I hired a tent and began to evangelise! The only people who would help me were a Russian ballerina and a Polish ex-SS Officer who had been converted after escaping from behind the Iron Curtain! Soon, we had another Russian girl who came to Christ - and she became my interpreter in those early years after the War. I was evangelising Russian speaking people in England. So my connection with East Europe had already begun! - And that is how I began evangelising.

1 Peter 1:4 says that our inheritance in Christ can't fade away! It is so easy for me to talk about the Power of God. To me, right from my earliest days, my whole desire, my whole passion, my whole purpose in living, was to experience the Power of God in my life. When you have the Fire and the Power of God in your life, you can't lose it - it doesn't fade, but only gets stronger! I'm not celebrating the end of my ministry, but the first year of the next 60 years!

'What matters most to me is to finish what God has started' (Acts 20:24, Msg).