Andy Bannister recently joined Helen Lea on UCB radio for a lively discussion about sharing the Christian faith. They started talking about Andy’s book, “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like Idiot“, and then the conversation went out from there! The whole of this hugely enjoyable programme is available online- click the UCB icon to get the programme.
Steve Osmond and Kristi Mair are delighted to chat with a living legend of the British church, Roger Carswell. Roger reflects on over 40 years of sharing the gospel in different ways, with his trademark warmth and wisdom. HIs insights on the changing world, the consistent gospel, Christian literature and the heart of gospel preaching are so encouraging.
Roger Carswell is a travelling evangelist and author. He leads evangelistic church and university missions as well as speaking at Christian conferences. He has written a number of books including ‘And some evangelists’ and ‘Where is God in a messed-up world?’ and publishes numerous gospel tracts and booklets. He is married to Dot, has four children and lives in North Yorkshire
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Hardly a day goes by without yet another product being updated, digitised, and relaunched with an “e” prefix. We’ve had e-mail, e-bikes, e-books, e-cigarettes and thousands more products. I even saw an advert for an “e-toaster” (which connected to your WiFi and would ping your phone when your bagel was done!) In our digital, highly-Internet-connected age, maybe we can do the same for “e-vangelism”!
Many of us have a complicated relationship with the Internet. Some of us spend way too much time on it! And others of us get sucked into the black hole of the culture wars waging online: I’m reminded of the cartoon of the man sitting at the kitchen table, staring bleary-eyed into his laptop and shouting over his shoulder, “Honey, I can’t come to bed yet—somebody is wrong on the Internet!”
But maybe there’s a better way of being a Christian online. If you’re on any kind of social media platform, what about trying some simple “e-vangelism” by getting into the habit of sharing good quality, thought-provoking content regularly online? Things that your non-Christian friends might be intrigued by, not wound up by? For example:
And don’t forget to pray as you do this. Here’s a prayer you might use: Lord, please help me be neither addicted to nor afraid of the digital world, but to use it as a space in which to be a faithful witness for you. Amen!
Previously: Launch Pad #15 The Opportunities in Daily Routines
Solas has had a long and warm relationship with Blairgowrie Evangelical Church, an independent fellowship which meets in the Perthshire town of Blairgowrie. Over the years we have spoken at various events and services for them, including some memorable outreach events in a hotel in the centre of the town.
I was delighted to be invited to go to up to Blairgowrie to give the church there an update on the ministry of Solas, and to preach for them as well. Our old friend Iain Craig (who works for Mission International in the adjacent office to us in Dundee!) led the worship, and I brought a message from the Bible to the church. Blairgowrie Evangelical are doing a series of consecutive sermons through the book of Acts. So I thought it would be a useful idea to bring a message which was complementary to that, without stepping on Derek (the pastor’s) toes in his consecutive studies. So we looked at the way the early church used their homes for ministry, both for outreach and fellowship. Drawing on various texts from the New Testament, and writers like Tim Chester – we thought about the way in which we are called to use our homes for God and his gospel (if we have one).
The audio (only) of the talk can be found here:
Solas places a huge weight on the importance of the local church, which is why we don’t run events in our own right – but only go and serve the church where we are invited. The local church is God’s biblically mandated instrument to take the gospel to the world – and so our job is to serve the church. That’s why going to towns like Blairgowrie is an absolute joy for us, to work with partners in the gospel, doing good, faithful gospel work in their communities. Please get in touch if it would be helpful for us to come to your church or community.
Turn on any news channel and you will find no shortage of depressing stories of what’s going on in the world. There’s so much that’s wrong, so much that’s broken, even within ourselves. When we pause to consider all of these things, we often wonder how we can get the world to change – to be a better place. Do these feelings and intuitions actually point us to something more? In this Short Answers video, Steve Osmond highlights the Christian hope for real change in the world and how it can start with us.
Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!
We’ve all seen those crime series in which a private investigator is hired to tail someone and figure out their daily routines. Which café they go to for their morning coffee, the route they take to work, the people they speak to and the school they fetch their kids from.
Now, ignoring the potentially sinister nature of that kind of profiling, it does raise a point – we all have a routine! We all have patterns and rhythms in our lives where we will use the same routes, and go to the same stores, car-parks etc. If we pay just a little attention, we will notice that we regularly cross paths with the same people as we go. This creates a great opportunity to slowly begin to build relationships, move from surface level conversations to deeper ones, offer friendship and ultimately share our faith.
Someone once spoke of the ‘ministry of dog walking’ – they recognised the great opportunity that dog walking presented as a way to meet new people, slowly build relationships, and get to a place where they could share their faith in conversation with people (see here and here for some tips on how to do that naturally).
So, thinking like a private investigator for just a moment, do a little assessment of the regular patterns of your life. What trends do you see? What places are you regularly visiting? Can you see the faces of some of the people you regularly pass along the way? Is it the guy in the yellow reflector vest walking his Alsatian along the same path, or perhaps the lady with the long pink hair walking her little ones to the same school that you walk your children to?
What might start with a courteous nod, can progress to a ‘hiya’, to ‘hey, how’s your week been?’. The great thing about this approach is that there is time to build a relationship slowly and meaningfully. We don’t know the stories of all the people we pass – but we know their need for a Saviour, the need we all have.
Pray: ‘Lord, please help me to see the patterns and rhythms in my life where there is opportunity build relationships and share your love and grace. Make me bold as I look to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with those people you bring into my life’
Previously: Launch Pad #14 Create a Welcoming Impression of Church
Next: Launch Pad #16 Put the “E” into Evangelism
Beauty. Justice. Identity. Love. Stories. Nature. Hope. These things intrigue us, move us and prompt us to ask big questions. Could there be clues in our deepest desires that point to life’s meaning?
Have You Ever Wondered? is for anyone who has looked at a landscape and contemplated why we are drawn to beauty; or wondered why we are so insatiably curious about our universe, or even for those who have simply looked up at a million stars in the vast night’s sky and just wondered.
Featuring 30 chapters exploring everything from why we’re drawn to beauty, to why justice matters, to why we love stories and music, to why we yearn for love, meaning, and purpose, Have You Ever Wondered? is a book with something for everybody.
Whether you’re a seeker wondering about spirituality and faith for the first time; or if you’re a Christian looking for a gentle book to give to a friend to help them think about Jesus in an engaging way, Have You Ever Wondered? is the ideal book for you.
UK readers
USA readers
Canadian readers
Have You Ever Wondered? invites you on an immersive tour through the issues that matter. This book is for anyone who has looked at a landscape and contemplated why we are drawn to beauty, or wondered why we are so insatiably curious about our universe, or even for those who have simply looked up at a million stars in the vast night’s sky and just wondered.
Contributors with backgrounds in science, law, linguistics, theology, bioethics, history, and more, reflect on how their questions have, in some cases unexpectedly, led them to a compelling Christian spirituality and a profound sense of meaning and purpose in life.
Featuring chapters by Andy Bannister, Gavin Matthews, Gareth Black, Andy Moore, Mary Jo Sharp, Andy Steiger, Michael Ots, Clare Williams, Anne Witton, and David Nixon, Have You Ever Wondered? is the perfect gift for friends, family, colleagues, or as a giveaway at events for churches. It’s designed to be a highly accessible, fun, and easy to read book that will help begin conversations about Jesus.
It was a delight for three of us from Solas, and Liam our intrepid cameraman to head up to Hillview Community Church in Aberdeen for a morning of Confident Christianity.
Scott, Grant and Jonathan from the church were in front of the camera at the end of the event and recorded their reactions to the morning we spent with them. Scott is one of the pastors at Hillview, and he explains in the video why they invited us to Hillview, why they asked for some particular topics to be addressed, and how they are planning to respond to what we considered together.
We appreciated the warm welcome from the folks at Hillview, their slick organisation, engaged audience and really insightful questions that they raised in the Q&A time. We made new friends on our visit and met up some old ones too.
If you’d be interested in bringing something like this to your church, do get in touch – we’d love to speak to you.
If you know the life-changing experience of tasting traditional Japanese ramen, you know it is something you want everyone to experience. Is it the same with our Christian experience? Today on PEP Talk, Andy and Kristi speak with our ramen-loving guest about the roles of enthusiasm and duty in our evangelistic life.
Matthew Mittelberg is an experienced Christian teacher and apologist, serving as Director of Content at Apologetics Inc. He has spoken to thousands at universities, churches, conferences and youth events in both the US and the UK and his talks have been seen online hundreds of thousands of times. Matthew completed his MA in Philosophy of Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic University, received his BA from Grand Canyon University, and a certificate in theology from Wycliffe Hall at Oxford University. Find Matthew on YouTube here.
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Do your friends, family, colleagues and neighbours know that they would be welcome to come to church with you? Our instinct may be to just assume that everyone knows that people would be delighted to see them if they pitched up one Sunday, to the Alpha course, or a carol service.
But we might want to check that our assumptions are realistic or if they are detached from the actual experience of our friends.
Many of our colleagues and acquaintances might be aware that we go to something called ‘church’ on a Sunday, but because they’ve had no significant contact in their lives with the church, have no inkling that it has anything to do with them. What goes on at church might be completely unknown or mysterious to them in reality.
While we think it totally obvious that the doors of the church are flung wide open to welcome outsiders and that what goes on inside those doors is reassuring and familiar, our non-Christian friends or family may have very different perceptions. If they are two or three generations removed from any meaningful contact with the church it will seem as remote, and perhaps as daunting to them as visiting a mosque, betting shop or masonic temple might to most of us!
Just think about that for a moment.
We need to begin to create what one writer called a ‘culture of invitation’ in which we constantly send out the message to everyone that the church is not just open to Christians, but open to anyone who will come. We need to be crystal clear in all that we say and do that the church is welcoming to people with questions and messed-up lives, not least because we too have questions and messed-up lives! We cannot assume that everyone knows this – so we need to tell them.
“You know you’d be welcome to come with us to church any Sunday” is a simple sentence which could produce surprising results. More often than not when I have heard this said, the reply has been, “Not at the moment, but thanks for asking.” Sometimes though, it has been the gateway to a life-changing encounter with Christ and his people.
Pray: Lord, please help remind me to tell everyone I know that they’d be welcome at church. Amen!
Previously: Launch Pad #13 The Ministry of Chocolate
A Solas team, consisting of myself and Steve Osmond went to Seaton Community Church in Aberdeen for a weekend of ministry.
The highlight for me was the outreach meeting on the Saturday night. It’s talking about Jesus with people outside the church that really gets me fired up and buzzing about the potential the gospel has to change people’s lives forever! Often when we are invited to do some training with a church, such as Confident Christianity evangelism conference, we encourage churches to consider putting on an evangelism event while we are in their town too. Typically these take place in café’s, pubs, restaurants and other neutral spaces, but Barry the pastor at Seaton indicated that their church premises is at the heart of the community in Seaton and would make a great venue for an event. He pointed out that many, many non-Christian people come through the doors of Seaton Community Church each week, and are comfortable doing so, and that working in the church premises would be a good option for them.
The invitations went out, and a lovely couple in the church cooked a great Indian meal for everyone, and the church hoped and prayed for 60 people to come. On the night over 80 people showed up, which was really encouraging for us all. Extra chairs were brought out to accommodate the people, and thankfully there was plenty of curry for all comers! After dinner I spoke on the subject “Christianity: Out of date, irrelevant and intolerant?” So I took each of those accusations head on, and pointed out that far from being out of date, Christianity is growing. In London, for example there are 10% more people going to church than there were forty years ago, because immigration has really fuelled church growth giving the churches there a vibrant international flavour. But it’s not just in the West where such things are occurring, in Africa there we used to count the number of Christians in single-figure millions; but now they are measured in the hundreds of millions. China too is a story of extraordinary church growth, and I showed some data on the decline of atheism today as well.
When it came to the relevance of Christianity, I looked at some of the big questions of our age such as justice and meaning. There seems to have been a change in the intellectual climate over the last few years, which our friend Justin Brierley has charted in his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, with more and more people saying that Christianity is in fact incredibly relevant. Now I know that there is a difference between people thinking it is relevant and believing that it is true. But we can certainly observe the decline of the objection that it is irrelevant, and therefore not worth anyone’s time investigating.
Intolerance is an accusation that is usually levelled at Christianity around issues of sexuality. I explored that in the light of ‘freedom’. Because if you think the purpose of life is to be able to do whatever you want and to be entirely free from constraint, then of course you will have a problem with Christianity. But the idea of an entirely unconstrained life is a myth – there are all kinds of limits on what we can do physically, socially and so on. The real question is ‘what were we designed for?’ and therefore what are the limits which will cause us to thrive and not to wither? I gently suggested that God’s design for our lives is designed to be life-giving, and will cause us to flourish. Indeed Jesus famously promised to give us ‘life to the full’ in John 10-:10.
The question in the Q&A that stood out in my mind came from a man who only came along because someone from the church put a flyer through his door. He said, ‘I think there is something after death, I reckon there is probably some kind of God, but how can we be sure we’d ever get into the afterlife, what if God didn’t want us?’ So it was such a joy and privilege to address that question by saying that I believe that we can know God’s salvation in this life, and be confident of being accepted by Him for eternity. However, we can be confident of that not because of our performance, but because of what Jesus has done for us. Barry, the pastor had a good chat with this man at then end. So, it was a really encouraging night in Seaton!
If you’ve caught yourself “doomscrolling” through the latest depressing news from Ukraine, Gaza or somewhere closer to home, you might wonder where God could possibly fit in such a world of chaos. In this Short Answers episode, Andy Bannister asks what sort of god might offer hope and order into this story. Amazingly, the story of Jesus fits the God of the universe into the chaos of an uncertain parentage, Roman occupation and the brutality of the cross. And the great news of Easter is that God is eager for you to invite Him into the chaos of your own life.
Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!
Thanks for coming to the Confident Christianity Conference at Plymstock United Church. As promised, you can find our slides from the morning — as well as recommended resources related to the talks.
Andy’s First Talk:
https://www.solas-cpc.org/launch-pad-52-ways-to-share-your-faith/
https://www.solas-cpc.org/mind-the-gap-the-full-series/
Tom’s First Talk:
https://www.solas-cpc.org/pep-talk-with-andrew-bunt/
https://www.solas-cpc.org/inclusive-exclusive/
Andy’s Second Talk:
https://www.solas-cpc.org/why-do-suffering-and-evil-seem-so-wrong/
https://www.solas-cpc.org/broken-planet-with-sharon-dirckx-video-interview/
Tom’s Second Talk:
Why not use a ministry of chocolate to connect with the people in their community. We heard of one church that did this to great success! Stephen, the organiser, said: “The original idea was just to do something that would bless the people in our town.”
They began by using community social media groups to ask anyone who would like a free Easter egg to sign up. On Easter Sunday morning, a team of fun-filled church members (some dressed as Easter bunnies!) dropped off hundreds of Easter eggs around the town, along with information about the church.
The idea then took off and grew!
In the first year they used supermarket Easter eggs, which led to them being able to share something of the Christian message with the manager of the shop who asked them why they were buying all the eggs and who they were for. In subsequent years they have used the Real Easter Egg Company, which includes the Easter story in the box. It cost the church about £400 for all the eggs and the leaflets each time they did it. It took Stephen several evenings of planning and organising too, but the delivery was all done in one morning.
The response of people all over their town was so positive that the church pushed on in later years, finding some brilliant Easter leaflets from 10ofThose to add to the little package being delivered by their Easter-bunny costumed volunteers. These volunteers were each provided with a bag of Easter eggs, the Easter leaflets and Google Map directions for all the people who had signed up to receive them. The rest was simple and lots of fun.
Later in the year, the church realised that their ministry of chocolate would be a brilliant way of inviting people to their Christmas services and events. This time though, the Advent Calendars they gave out contained the Christmas story along with some very yummy Fairtrade chocolate. (Also, their Easter Bunny costumes were shelved in favour of Elves and Santa Suits!) By taking Jesus seriously but not taking themselves too seriously, they created a stir, drew people to their Christmas events and gently shared the story of Jesus with their community.
Pray: Dear Jesus, please help us to find imaginative, generous and welcoming ways to share your love and your gospel with those around us.
Previously: Launch Pad #12 Join a Club or Group Outside the Church
Next: Launch Pad #14 Create a Welcoming Impression of Church
This was my very first visit to The Isle of Lewis for Solas. Although we have criss-crossed Scotland speaking in big cities like Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Dundee, as well smaller towns like Galashiels, Blairgowrie and Maddiston, we hadn’t ever been to the Western Isles! So it was lovely to receive an invitation from Back Free Church on the Isle of Lewis. Colin McLeod, the pastor there is an amazing chap, who worked for many years as a military chaplain before taking on the pastorate of a congregation, first in Edinburgh and then in Lewis.
I did a flying visit, and they packed a lot into the short time I was on the island. The first thing was a media interview. The community radio station there interviewed me about faith and contemporary life for two hours! They asked about why we had come to island as well as my story and Christian testimony – all kinds of things. One of the great things about that was that the community radio station has a surprisingly large listenership across the community there, so it was a wonderful opportunity.
Then I led a Confident Christianity evening at Back Free Church and probably almost a hundred people came along. It was an interesting audience too, because there was a cohort of older Christians there who had always lived in a very, very Christian subculture on the island. Some of them told me they are struggling with the way in which culture is changing and trying to understand it. But there were also lots of younger people there, in their twenties and thirties who have understood that the world is changing fast and many of their questions were very perspective. Several NHS staff asked questions about their witness for Christ in the workplace.
Happily we have been invited back to build on the work that was begun that day! Steve Osmond and I will be going there again to lead a Confident Christianity in another church in Stornoway, as well as some evangelism with that church. So it was a great opportunity for me to meet the churches on Lewis, equip some believers and encourage them in sharing their faith, and make some new connections for Solas as well.
I think the key message I had for them was not to be afraid of the changing world around us, but to look for ways I which the gospel engages the evolving nature of the questions that people are asking, We are not called shake our heads in despair at the world, but to positively look for ways to share the gospel with people in it!
