I really enjoyed the opportunity to be in Motherwell near Glasgow in Scotland to speak a the “GLO Mini Bible School”. GLO – which originally stood for “Gospel Literature Outreach”, is an amazing place containing a Bible College, bookshop, and a mission agency which sends trains and send people on evangelism and church planting missions all over Europe. It’s been doing that for fifty years now and is quite well-known in Scotland. In fact their director, Stephen McQuoid was a guest on our PEPTalk podcast a while ago too.
Every year GLO hosts a “Mini Bible School” and I was invited to speak at two sessions there this time. Despite the fact that on one of nights I was speaking there, there was a terrible storm, with high winds and lashing rain – around 150 people came, which was hugely encouraging! Equally interesting was that the organisers noted that the audience who came were younger than they often get. It was good to see lots of younger people there including plenty of students.
I ‘tagged-teamed’ the teaching with Stephen McQuoid. He began on the first night in Deuteronomy, with a series of lessons from that book about how we can live for Christ in a confusing and hostile culture. The Israelites were called to distinctive faithfulness to YHWH in the midst of all kinds of competing cultures, religions and worldviews.
So then in my first session I looked at the question of ‘worldviews’, such as atheism or Islam and how to understand them. I looked at the kinds of questions we should ask of other worldviews in order to understand what they teach and our friends who subscribe to them. I made the point that the way to get to the heart of a person or a culture is to really seek to understand them and what they believe.
In my second session at GLO, I looked at Acts 17, where Paul addresses the people in Athens. I looked at Paul’s method for engaging people there – and drew some lessons on how we can represent Christ well in our own ‘culture of confusion’ today. The way that Paul engaged the Greco-Roman world is hugely insightful for us in our own ministry today.
We then opened the floor to Q&A which was lively and engaged and then at lunchtime I spoke to the students at the Bible College there. I did a talk based on my new book, “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot”. One of my passions is that students don’t come to Bible College and just think about highfaluting ideas but also think through how to take what they have learned of the wonderful truths of the gospel and engage the world around them with those. So, it was really good to be able to equip them with some really practical tools for conversation. Hopefully as they go and serve and lead in churches around the world they will be able to take these tools and work practically.
It was a real privilege to be able to partner with GLO again this year – last year my colleague Gavin Matthews spoke there. We hope to be able to work with them again soon.
