Cirencester Baptist Church is large church in Gloucestershire, where I have spoken a few times over the last couple of years. I’ve got to know Matt Frost, their pastor quite well too – which has been great. Matt was a guest on the Solas PEPTalk podcast last year, which is well worth a listen! He has a really good podcast of his own which is called “Two pastors in a pub” which you can find here. In their podcast they take on a different topic and try a different drink every episode – it’s a great little programme!
So, it was great to drive back over to Cirencester and catch up with Matt and speak at Cirencester Baptist Church again. This time we did a Confident Christianity event – but on a Sunday morning, which was a new innovation for us. Usually we have done these types of training events on a Saturday and then contributed to the normal worship service on the Sunday. Matt is conscious that most of his people lead very busy lives and wouldn’t be able to come to a Saturday event and to church on Sunday, so integrated the Confident Christianity into the Sunday programme. We designed a one-hour session which began with some sung worship, Matt then did a five-minute devotional talk which set the whole thing up so well, then I did a series of fifteen-minute talks, broken up with five-minute discussion slots followed by Q&A. We ran that twice, at both morning services, and then used the same structure but with different topics at the evening service. That way, by coming to morning and evening people had access to a lot of the Confident Christianity experience and material we cover. It was great to see around 90 people back in the evening too, which was encouraging as evening services are not always that well supported these days. It was a new format for us, with shorter, tighter talks and really focussed discussion times. Of course, not everyone likes discussion times, it can be an introvert’s nightmare! So I named the elephant in the room and said that I realised that some people would dread the thought -so that seemed to help them to relax, acknowledging that it’s not easy for everyone. But looking round the room, the groups were all very animatedly chatting away!
It’s been really encouraging to hear from people who came to this event and said how helpful they had found it. One chap tracked me down on line and emailed to say that it had been ‘life-changing’ , so that was exciting and encouraging to hear. During the day we looked at things such as conversational evangelism, engaging the apathetic, and connecting people to the gospel through ‘wondering questions’.
We’re always keen to be as flexible as possible in our approach so that we can meet the needs of different churches, of different types and sizes all over the country; and this new format seemed to go well – so we’d be very willing to do this again for other churches, if they felt that the normal Saturday conference format wasn’t suitable for their context. Please do get in touch with us, if that would be something that you’d be interested in Solas bringing to your church fellowship.
One of the sessions from Cirencester was filmed and is available below.
