A small team from Solas went up to Kiltarlity, which is just over ten miles west of Inverness. We have good connections with Kiltarlity as two of our Solas board members live there, and attend the village church. In fact, one of them is the pastor of that church. It’s a small village of just a few hundred people, and we were originally going up there for a day of Solas administration with the board members. However Stephen, the pastor there asked if while we were up if we could do an evening meeting, which we thought was great idea. So we did the “How to talk about Jesus without looking like an idiot” session, which is our standard introduction to conversational evangelism, which we do in many places.
Stephen thought that it might be a useful evening for the 15-20 people he thought might be interested in a midweek session on evangelism training; hoping to pitch it primarily at the church’s young adults group. Stephen made 120 tickets available – and sold them all about a week before the event, and then sold more! On the night, the building was packed to bursting. The audience were incredibly warm, and asked really great, very perceptive questions during the Q&A; they were really engaged and enthusiastic. We were then really encouraged to learn that in the weeks after the event, the group that had travelled up to Kitarlity from Glen Urquhart, took the material back to their church and shared it with everyone there.
At Solas we are deliberately trying to make space to go to places like Kiltarlity, which are somewhat off the beaten track. Some large Christian ministries will only go to the big cities, and do a tour around London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow – but we’re also trying to get out to the towns and villages to serve the local church. The result is that you can have a massive impact in that community, and try and reach some of the places that other ministries don’t.
