CBMC – Belfast is a network of Christians who work in the business sector, and in the marketplace in and around Belfast. The event was organised by Andrew Wallace who is one of the leaders of CBMC-Belfast.
The invitation was for Solas to come and present some advice and ideas for doing helpful evangelism while lockdown restrictions prevent us from doing our normal work. Around 25 members of CBMC Belfast joined Andy Bannister and Gareth Black on the webinar. Between them they broke the night into three parts.
Gareth Black kicked proceeding off with a session looking at some of the obstacles we face in evangelism. He talked about some of the unhelpful ways Christians can view people who do not share our faith; as well as the fear some Christians have that they might lose or weaken their faith if they engage too much with the world. There is a lurking fear that the world has more power to contaminate Christians, than the Christian-gospel does to win people in the world. So Gareth addressed some of those fears. Then he looked at some of the practical difficulties some Christians face such as, not knowing what to say, or how to conduct a meaningful gospel conversation.
Andy Bannister took the next two sessions. He looked at how to ask good questions to further gospel-conversations which are helpful. Questions such as “why do you think that?” and “have you ever wondered…?” can be incredibly useful in opening up and developing positive conversations with friends who not yet believe in Jesus and his gospel.
Andy then looked at eight ways people are doing evangelism over the Christmas period, when this webinar took place. He talked about everything from ‘carols-by-carlight’ to evangelistic Christmas-cards, to examples of people running Christianity Explored or Alpha in their workplaces.
Then there was a good Q&A sessions with some insightful and probing questions – and it made a good start to a series of evangelism and evangelism-training events Solas has planned with CBMC Belfast.
Andrew Wallis said,
“CBMC Belfast is so thankful for Andy and Gareth delivering an online event for us on ‘Sharing Your Faith During Lockdown’. We are an organisation that is passionate about equipping marketplace leaders in sharing their faith in their business or workplace context and the guys from Solas were great in making the session relevant to our group. The mixture of practical examples from Gareth and the theological grounding from Andy was perfect for our group and we pray that the group can take the lessons and put them into practice in the coming days and weeks.”
For more about CBMC-Belfast, click here.
