When preparation is preaching to yourself

Today I was privileged to be able to go back to my old university CU, University of Manchester Christian Union, to do a seminar looking at God's role and our role in evangelism. I'm going to post my notes in three parts over the coming week, looking first at Our role, then at God's Role and finally at some great truths we can hold onto as Mission Weeks approach.

But before I start posting, I thought I'd say that preparing for it was wonderful.

It was great to have an excuse to spend time re-reading JI Packer's brilliant Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, which I think might be one of the most influential books I've read so far as a Christian. It's one of those books that are available via Amazon's market place at a few quid, so buy it if you haven't read it and are involved in evangelism in some way!

And it was also a timely kick up the butt to remember that evangelism is not about me. It's God who gives belief (Ephesians 2:8), who gives repentance (Acts 11:18) and who rescues us (Colossians 1:13). We don't do any of that, all we do is tell people the gospel (Matthew 28:18ff). God saves. We do not.

It was a timely reminder because for the next three weeks I will be in some way or another involved with a CU mission week in Greater Manchester.

Next week is the Distribution week at Salford Uni CU, where they are aiming to hand out a couple of thousand FREE gospels (Mark's Gospel in trendy covers!) to students in Salford. During the day we'll be spending three hours chatting to students around campus, whilst in the evenings we will be knocking on doors in halls of residence.

The following week is Salford CU's Events week, where they will be holding three evening events during which Tim Hanson will explain the gospel to students. The events are a JazzCake (jazz and cheese cake, a bizarre combination which Salford students seem to love!) evening with a talk, a Grub Crawl with a talk, and a talk over tea and coffee. You might notice that CUs love providing food! I've yet to find an atheist society that is as keen to feed their fellow students!

The following week is Week 1 of the Manchester Mega Mission (University of Manchester CU, Man Met Uni CU, Royal Northern College of Music CU) during which I will be a CU guest, supporting the work of University of Manchester CU as they try and reach students with the gospel. I will be seconded to a few hall groups to support them in their evangelism in their halls of residence, as well as doing first contact evangelism on streets around the unis and talking to people at events.

So, it's good to remember that in these weeks that when I become progressively more exhausted (which I will!), God still remains strong and, as it's him that saves, I can remain confident that he will be at work convincing students of the truth of the gospel as I tell it the them.

There were some other amazing things that God really taught me as I worked through the prep, but you're going to have to wait for me to upload the talk for them...

A reasonably exciting day

Today at Bolton CU we had a bit of a discussion about God's word and evangelism.

We read 1 Peter 1:23-25 and saw that it is the living and abiding word of God that causes us to be born again. We found out that this word of God is living and imperishable, and that it was the good news that was preached to us!

We also looked at Romans 10:11-17 and saw that for people to be saved from God's judgement they need to call on the name of the Lord - to trust and believe and seek mercy from him - and to do that we saw that people need to hear the good news being preached to them: faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes through the word of Christ!

There are around 11,000 non believers at the University of Bolton and these guys need to hear the good news and they need to receive God's word. Imagine my excitement as this tiny CU (7 students meeting in a small room) began to think for themselves about how they can go about getting God's word into students' hands!

They're now in the process of discussing how they can put on their first evangelistic event in years and how they can practically go about distributing as many FREE gospels as possible to their fellow students.



They've also decided to get a weekly prayer meeting going - as one student pointed out, without God involved, it's all pretty pointless! There are some really exciting ideas in the pipeline for how we can get these FREE gospels into peoples hands (watch this space!) and most CU members are thinking of personally handing out FREE gospels to their friends.

And, as if all that wasn't exciting enough, on her way out of the room where we meet one of the CU members got chatting to a random student and handed out our first FREE gospel: God's living and abiding word that brings rebirth is now in the hands of one more student in Bolton University.

So, if you're in the mood for praying, we'd appreciate prayers for...

1. the student who recieved a FREE gospel earlier today.
2. Bolton CU as they begin to think about ideas for how to distribute these FREE gospels.
3. God to work through this CU and to encourage them as they begin to do evangelism.
   

Some Interesting Discussions on Evangelism

There's some interesting blog posts on evangelism out there at the moment. They're all well worth a look...

Dave Bish explains how DISCO is the reason he doesn't do evangelism...

Hugh Bourne is thinking about how we need to engage with different student mindsets in our evangelism on campus... He's started by thinking about how we engage with students who are really success driven.

Mark Driscoll talks with Philip Jensen about Sydney and, amongst other things, how we're going to get young men into the church. He's talking specifically about Sydney, but I think some of it still applies to us here in the UK... (be warned this is a 25 min video!)

Gaz Leaney wonders how to teach the Bible effectively to people that struggle with reading...

Some thoughts on University #2 - Witnessing

I finished university a couple of weeks back so I thought I would share some thoughts on university and how it has affected me. If you're at uni or starting uni in the Autumn, please listen to my advice!

I'm working in a school at the moment. It's great fun and a real eye opener. One of the things that has been really hard is sharing the gospel in a different work context. I've had a few opportunities to talk about what I believe with some of the other students that are doing the same placement as me, but I've not had any with the proper teachers, and this is a little bit annoying. One of the things that I've noticed that has harmed my witness to the teachers is when I see pupils who are Christians acting no differently to the other pupils by misbehaving in class and being rude to the teachers.

I remember one of my friends at church, a retired lecturer at the university, telling me of how frustrating it was for him to try and share the gospel with his colleagues and then for them not to take the gospel seriously because they'd come into contact with Christian students who had been a bad witness.

One of the reasons I'm not going to focus in too much on what the Christian boy at my school did is because I realise I've been absolutely no different.

At university, I wasn't a great witness to my teachers. I know of other Christian lecturers in the department wanting to share the gospel with their colleagues and how frustrated they must be when they saw me not handing in work, not trying hard in class, not treating my studies properly. I wasn't a terrible student, and I didn't do these things all the time, but I didn't study properly for the whole three years.

I think we as students can become so obsessed with being good witnesses to our fellow students that we can forget that the teaching staff need the gospel too. It might not be us that actually gets to share the gospel with them, but the way we act and treat our studies can have a bearing on whether those lecturers take the gospel seriously or not when they hear it.

Titus 2 talks of how good behaviour can "adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour" (2:10). It's not a replacement for sharing the gospel, but the way we act can underline the gospel. Conversely, the way we act can cause the word of God to be reviled (2:5) which is quite worrying really.

It's so important to remember, so I will say it again, whilst acting properly is not a replacement for the gospel, it can underline the gospel and if we're not acting properly, we can even cross it out.

So, what do I want you to remember? If you're a student, I'd really urge you to learn from my mistakes and take my advice: you can be a great witness to your teachers through the way you treat your work and your studies, so study hard, hand things in on time, don't lie and treat lecturers with respect!

God's Part and Our Part in Evangelism

Have you...
...ever wondered about giving up sharing the gospel because no one seems to respond?
...ever thought about stopping trying to evangelise because as God is in control there's no point in us doing anything?

We have to remember that all the time, God is completely sovereign in evangelism:

• He gave us the Gospel, the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16)
• He convicts the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement (John 16:8)
• He gives repentance to people which leads to life - (Acts 5:31, 11:18, Ephesians 2:8)

This takes a huge weight off our shoulders: God, the sovereign God who created, sustains and directs the universe, has the responsibility of doing the hardest parts in evangelism. He convinces sinful humans - free willed creatures that are predisposed to be against God and against doing his will - to believe and trust in the Gospel, a series of events that happened two thousand years ago in a distant part of the world.

But although God is sovereign in evangelism, he has chosen to use Christians as his tools:

• We are to share the gospel - after all how can people believe in him they haven't heard? (Romans 10:13-17)

What are the implications for us of all of this?

We should persevere! We are told to just share the gospel. God does the hard work in the people we share it with. God is infinitely powerful and is sovereign. If he wants to save someone, he will do. Paul says in (2 Tim 2:8-10) that he endures everything (he was in jail for doing evangelism) for the sake of the elect (the people that God has decided to save) that they may obtain salvation. We should persevere in our evangelism because our evangelism won't fail - God will save those that he has decided to save.

We should pray! We are told to share the gospel. God does the hard work. But our part can be hard and we should pray about it and for it. In Acts 4:29-31, the church in Jerusalem prayed for boldness to continue to speak whilst they were facing opposition in evangelism. God granted them boldness and they continued evangelising! In Ephesians 6:18-20, Paul asks for prayer for him to have words to share the gospel boldly. I think it's a real encouragement that even Paul asked God for help in evangelism - none of us should be doing this in our own strength, but rather we should ask God to equip us!

We should do it! We are told to share the gospel. God does the hard work. Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 28:18-20 to go out and share the gospel. We must obey Jesus in this. We need to always be looking for opportunities to share the gospel.

How to spice up your testimony

One of the things that has really struck me today is just how frequently I think my testimony is dull. I wonder how many people have a similar testimony to mine:

I was brought up in a Christian family, attended a good church from my birth and was a really well behaved kid. Having said all that, I was never particularly interested in Christianity as a kid and treated church as one of the many chores I had to do along with brushing my teeth and having a bath.

I definitely didn't have a dramatic conversion by any stretch of the imagination. To be perfectly honest, I can't even remember when I became serious about Christianity, but it was probably somewhere between 11 and 18. During that time, God gradually revealed so much about him to me through hearing good talks at church, through looking at the Bible in various Christian youth groups and through the witness of Christians at church and my Christian parents at home.

As I said, it wasn't dramatic, I just gradually became more and more aware of how I had removed God from his correct position in my life - being God. In my life, I was living as if I was the most important thing, I did things my way and definitely not God's. This definitely didn't lead to crime or anything really bad, but I just treated myself as being the most important person in my life.

I begun to realise that this really wasn't good and that as the Bible says, displacing God from his positon in this way is rebellion against God and it was going to end up like rebellion against a king - with punishment being dished out on the rebels for their rebellion.

At some stage I decided to place my trust in Jesus to save me from the punishment I deserved for my rebellion. I realised that I couldn't just stop rebelling - I was physically incapable of not living with myself at the centre of my life. I understood that Jesus had died on the cross and that when he did, he had taken the punishment for my rebellion, and that if I trusted in him, my punishment would be dealt with and I would be made alright with God.

I also understood that when you put this type of trust in Jesus, God does something strange - he makes you more and more able to live with him at the centre of your life. It has finally become possible to stop rebelling against God. Having said that, even ten (or so!) years on I still slip up and go back into living with myself as the most important person in the whole world. The good thing is that Jesus took the punishment for this once and for all.

Nowadays I still trust Jesus to save me from my rebellion. I'm getting better at living with God as the most important person in my life, which in practise takes the form of acting as he says in the Bible and not doing things my way. I still struggle though and it's really hard to not slip up and resort to living the way I used to.

To be fair, it's no Paul conversion is it?! Sometimes I've been a little bit ashamed of my testimony and tried to spice it up by making myself seem a little bit worse before I became a Christian. So are you wondering like me about how you can spice up your testimony?

How to spice up your testimony

Sorry for the anti-climax. Actually, I'm not at all! I can't tell you how to spice up your testimony and make it more exciting because my testimony is already incredible and so is yours (if you're a Christian!) There's need (or way) to make it any more exciting or impressive - it is already as impressive as it can possibly be.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:1-10

Get this: God loves you so much that he chose you before time to save you when you were dead in your sins and trespasses (your rebellion) and on top of this, he has raised you up to the same level of Jesus Christ - God's own Son. If that's not exciting enough, you don't have to do anything except believe it - you are saved by God's amazing unconditional love and it was by his initiative, you haven't done anything to deserve it.

One word: wow.

Can Media Coverage Usher in Revival?

Josh Harris on the media spotlight falling on Christianity after American Idol contestants sung "My Jesus, My Saviour":

"But I think that it's too easy for Christians to think that any moment in the media spotlight on TV or in film is a bigger deal than it really is. We should welcome any opportunity for media to help spread the good news about Jesus, but I don't think we should put too much stock in that vehicle. The gospel is going to advance as it always has—steadily as it is clearly proclaimed by believers in their words and modeled by their lives and actions. The gospel advances as local congregations receive and live God's word for their neighbors to see."

So much more than just a meeting...

Earlier today my staff worker and I met up with a couple of guys from Bolton University Christian Union (where I will be doing Relay next year!) to discuss and plan for Freshers Week in September. It was a really exciting time of thinking about what we could do, but it was particularly exciting seeing them realise the vision of what Christian Unions are all about - students reaching students with the gospel.

Out of this understanding, it becomes obvious that being in a CU is so much more than just meeting up with other Christian students once a week to pray, sing songs and hear a talk... it's about praying for each other, supporting each other, training each other and encouraging each other to share the gospel with our fellow students in the universities, halls and departments has put us in!

Roll on September!

Being a part of someone elses evangelistic efforts

Two amazing things have happened this past week. You may remember that I posted a while back about a conversation I had with some Muslims about the gospel. It turns out that one of the girls I spoke to is a friend of Fay, one of the girls in CU. Later that week, they ended up having a really indepth conversation about the gospel in which Fay was able to explain to this girl how it all works! How amazing is that? There I was thinking I was talking to some random students, but God was working behind the scenes so that the conversation we had was the catalyst for the opportunity that Fay needed to be able explain the gospel to her friend!

The second amazing thing that happened this week was that I got to explain the gospel to my Personal Tutor at university! Wow! He told me that his sister recently became a Christian and although he read the Bible a bit over Christmas he couldn't understand how to reconcile it with his scientific understanding of the world. He had loads of questions which I was able to help with. I went in expecting to get my exam results (I did!) but I left having also told him the gospel and how I could believe in it as a scientist. I suspect that this conversation wasn't a flash in the pan conversation but part of a much bigger evangelism chain that his sister had already started - I'd be very surprised if it wasn't his sister who'd encouraged him to read the Bible over Christmas.

These two things made me think. Jesus talks in John 4 about how one person sows and another reaps. Chains of evangelistic opportunities will happen in peoples lives - I've been part of two this past week! This has really encouraged me. We're not working individually in sharing the gospel with people - in the same way that I was able to explain the gospel to someone's friend or relative, there are people out there who might be right this instant explaining the gospel to my friends!

After very few proper opportunities to explain the gospel to friends back home before I left for university I'm tempted to feel like giving up on any hope of seeing them come to faith in Jesus. But how wrong is it of me to think like that?

If you've had a similar experience to me, pray for your friends! I'm praying for my mates. We should obviously seek opportunities to continue explaining the gospel to them, but we should also be praying for them and expecting someone to come into their lives to explain the gospel to them! God is more than capable of bringing people into their lives who can continue explaining the gospel to them!

But before we start to think that we can forget about doing evangelism ourselves, flip this idea around. Do you ever have random opportunities to share the gospel with people you come into contact with? Do you ever pass up on these opportunities, thinking it's not really your place to tell them the gospel or that it's not a good time? I know I am definitely guilty of this. But just think, this person I have come across might be just one conversation away from putting their faith in Christ - how do I know? Telling the gospel to this person might be an answer to someone else's prayers or it might be a catalyst for someone else closer to them to be able to explain the gospel!

So next time you have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone, do it! And if you lose contact with friends, don't lose hope of them coming across Christians and hearing the gospel again - pray for God to bring people into their lives who will share the good news with them!

First Contact Evangelism

Just finished Action Group with University of Manchester CU. Before heading out we looked at God's part and our part in evangelism. We learnt that our part is essentially just to get out there and tell people the gospel (Matthew 28:16-20 and Romans 10:11-17) and that it's God's job to save people (Acts 4:10-12 and Revelation 7:9-10) - what a well timed reminder for us just before we head out to the daunting task of telling complete strangers the gospel!

Seven of us headed out in pairs and a single. We had some pretty cool conversations with many different types of people. I spoke to Muslims for a half hour showing them how that as God is both a perfect judge and loves us perfectly, the only way he can reconcile these two characteristics and forgive people of their sins is through Jesus taking the punishment for our sins on the cross. How exciting to be able to tell this to Muslims on campus!

Several other great conversations were had and we all became more confident in sharing the gospel with students.

The Truth?

"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873.

"What's true for you is not true for me." Student, 2007.

"I am... the truth." Jesus, c. 30 AD

Is there such a thing as objective truth? If you asked the average student here in Manchester they would probably say not. Pluralism and postmodernism pervades the modern day students worldview - it is claimed that it is wrong to say someone is wrong and its considered arrogant and even rude to claim that what you believe is the truth.

Jesus claims to be the truth. This claim flies in the face of everything that society says, but in a world where despite the many loud voices shouting that there is no truth, people are increasingly searching for a deeper meaning and purpose to life. Surely he is one person worth listening to.

On another occasion Jesus stated that he came into the world to testify to the truth and that everyone on the side of truth listens to him. Surely he's a person worth listening to.

What is truth? The University of Manchester Christian Union is hosting a week of events from Monday 11th - Saturday 16th February 2008 and invite you to come along, find out what Jesus had to say and decide for yourself whether his claim to be the truth is truthful. Everyone is welcome, whether Christian, or of other beliefs or none at all. All events are free.

Events are happening on the following days:

• Monday 11th 1-1.45pm @ Jabez Clegg (Dover Street) - short talk on "Where is God in a messed up world?" with free lunch.
• Monday 11th 7-9pm @ Queen of Hearts (Wilmslow Road) - pub quiz with talk on "The truth about God" (TBC)
• Wednesday 13th 7-9pm @ Queen of Hearts (Wilmslow Road)- talk on "The truth about Life" preceded by a quick account by an ex IRA terrorist who became a Christian whilst in prison.
• Thursday 14th 1-1.45pm @ Jabez Clegg (Dover Street)- short talk on "What is True Love?" with free lunch.
• Friday 15th 7-9pm @ Glass (Wilmslow Road) - talk on "The truth about Jesus"

Check out The Truth? Facebook Group

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