Solas recently partnered with Lennox Evangelical Church in Dumbarton on Scotland’s west coast – where one of our board members, Prof David Galloway is a leader.
For several years we have run day-long “Confident Christianity conferences” with churches around the UK. These are designed to encourage and equip Christians to share their faith with others, engage in natural gospel conversations and answer their friends’ questions or objections. For these major day-conferences, churches have typically worked together to bring in a large crowd – and Solas has provided a varied speaking team with a range of expertise. Like so much else, Covid has changed much of this and many people don’t want to spend long periods of time in large crowds in busy buildings. Neither do they want to spend a whole day wearing a face mask!
Instead, we have begun to do “Confident Christianity: Lite” events. In these we don’t bring in a speaking team from all over the country, but I bring a very small team with me from Solas. We also don’t do a whole day – but usually a half day. After speaking to pastors and other local-church leaders, it became clear that many of them would welcome this smaller option in the current circumstances and we’re happy to help!
At Lennox, we did four sessions. I did an introductory session on conversational evangelism, slanted towards our witness in the workplace. Then we looked at the whole question of suffering and how to respond to the challenge that is to faith. David Galloway then explored the question of science and Christian faith and I ended with a look at evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Q&A is a really important part of virtually all Solas events, and we had a really good session of that in Dumbarton, with thoughtful questions from an engaged audience.
Churches seem to respond really well to these events, and we have a number planned for the rest of the year in various places. These half-day ‘lite’ events make some of what we do more accessible to churches who don’t – for a variety of reasons – want to mount a large conference. So we’re delighted to change our format to meet their needs. If an evangelism-training event like this could be useful in your church, we’d love to speak to you. Please do hit the “connect” button above to get in touch.
