Believable, Biblical Evangelism

Owen Brown | 07:43, 25th March 2013

It's something that's been on my mind for a while: how can I help Christian students in their evangelism to be both biblical and tuned in to the concerns and questions of their friends?

It was an issue that was also keeping fellow UCCF worker Dave Bish awake at night. So we put our heads together and came up with a weekend event called "Believable Biblical Evangelism Training."

We especially wanted to help potential student preachers and evangelists, to equip them better to proclaim Christ at university.

It's the sort of work that's going on right across Europe thanks to the new movement led by Lindsay Brown called FEUER (Fellowship of Evangelists in the Universities of Europe).

So on a Friday night in January, 22 of us gathered in Newport to kick the weekend off by getting to know each other over a curry. 

On the Saturday, we had seminars on how to use the Bible in evangelism: “The Bible and the Evangelist” (Lindsay Brown) and “The Bible in Evangelism” (Jonathan Thomas, Senior Pastor, Ammanford Evangelical). We also took time in workshops to get delegates to deliver 10 minute talks on a passage from Luke's gospel, before receiving constructive feedback from the group. We weren't expecting slick talks, and most of the students had had less than a week to prepare. But it was a really useful exercise as we asked each student to hone in on the main point of each passage and explain it coherently. We encouraged them to think about the following approaches:

1. Identification – putting ourselves in the shoes of a non-Christian in light of the main point of the text.
2. Persuasion – what objections do we need to overcome to ‘persuade’ an unbelieving audience of the main point of the text?
3. Invitation – what response do we want someone to make? (so that could be "become a Christian" or it could be "read a gospel". What exactly is the next step we're aiming for?)

On the whole, the feedback was generous but to the point. Iron sharpening iron! We hoped some of the students would feel able to attempt a talk at a meal-with-a-message event or something similar, and we have since been really encouraged to hear that some of them have done so.

It was a real treat to put this weekend together and we hope it won't be the last. Please pray that we would have real wisdom to make future events more effective, strategic and beautifully believably biblical!