By Charles Gardner —
Yorkshire missionary Andy Newlove saw enough miracles in his early Christian life to be able to trust God for all his needs in the faraway Philippines.
And when he got there, his first port of call was a place called Miracle Missions, which just about summed up his 15-year-long adventures on the Southeast Asian islands where he and his family helped to spread the gospel and train local people to do likewise.
In fact, Andy’s birth was a miracle as his mother suffered a miscarriage and doctors doubted if she would ever carry a child to full term. But like Hannah in the Bible, she prayed: “Lord, give me a child and I will dedicate him to serve you like Samuel, the prophet.”
Andy duly arrived but, tragically, was only six months old when his dad suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. Yet Andy grew up witnessing amazing answers to prayer and learning that the gifts of the Holy Spirit including faith, healing and miracles were as available to believers today as they were in the early church.
He invited Jesus into his life as a child and first experienced divine healing, aged nine, after badly scalding his hand and arm with boiling water. In excruciating pain, and with infection setting in, a Pentecostal preacher came to pray a “thunderous” prayer over him, as he recalls in his book Angels Push! published by Ambassador International in 2025. His temperature soon dropped and his wounds began to heal.
Years later, his godly parents (his mum remarried) received a phone request for prayer from a lady in Hull, whose daughter was in hospital dying of meningitis. So after finishing the milking round on his dad’s farm where he grew up in Howden, East Yorkshire, he went to pray for the sick girl. Tracey recovered and became his wife!
And while she was 33 weeks pregnant with their first child, the couple flew off to commence their missionary work 7,000 miles away. It was a nation of over 7,000 islands plagued by regular typhoons and floods, yet they survived earthquakes and treacherous roads. And God met every need as they shared the good news of Jesus, built up thriving churches and trained the indigenous folk to imitate their faith.
A huge ’quake struck while Andy’s toddler son was in hospital with a high fever, but he managed to prevent a full-size oxygen tank from landing on the boy’s head. Among their congregation, meanwhile, a young lady diagnosed with breast cancer was completely healed.
Unity among pastors praying together no doubt helped spark revival, backed up in the 1990s by a new President, Fidel Ramos, who introduced a Moral Recovery Program in which weekly Bible studies became compulsory in government institutions including the police and armed forces.
On one journey, when mudslides made the road virtually impassable, the family resorted to earnest prayer to overcome the obstacle, with their three-year-old daughter Lydia shouting, “Push, angels, push!”
They got through! And this kind of deliverance through miraculous intervention was the ongoing story of their mission to Filipinos, some of whom are now serving in other parts of the world.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without their supporters back home at the Hollybush Christian Fellowship in Northallerton and elsewhere.
After handing over the work abroad to local Christians around the millennium, Andy established the Family Life Church in Thirsk, with their daughters Naomi, Lydia and Julia all involved in the work of Christian outreach while son Andrew has returned to the Philippines with his wife Ruth to continue reaching out for Jesus there.
Copies of Angels Push! Can be obtained from the author at [email protected]
