Cornerstone Church in St Albans invited me to speak at their outreach event, which they held in their local golf club, an excellent neutral venue which was attractive to a much broader audience than just the usual church crowd. Cornerstone have booked the golf club before, it’s a popular venue with good food, in a handy location.
After a lovely dinner for all the guests, I stood up and spoke on “Finding hope in a world of chaos”. I always love doing that talk at these kind of dinners; everyone is very happy, the food has filled them up, the wine has flowed, they are all having a good time – and then I start to talk about chaos!
The church did an amazing job at inviting people too, all 60 seats were taken – with loads of folk from outside the church present. Mike, the organiser from the church had brought a whole load of work colleagues and pointed out round the room that several other folk from the church had done the same.
The “Finding hope in a world of chaos” topic always seems to gain a lot traction with people too – they really get it. Ukraine, The Middle East, political chaos both sides of the Atlantic – where does it stop? One of the most Googled questions in recent times has been ”Will everything work out OK?” The bottom line is that in this kind of world if there is no God, then there really is no basis for hope and chaos wins. The sun will expand, destroy the earth and then become extinct, the universe will end! However, if the Christian story is true, then there is something on which to build hope. Now that does not prove that Christianity is true, but it does surely give you the impetus to look hard and see. In the same way, if you were lost in the Sahara desert and dying of thirst, not every mirage is water – but where there is a chance of survival it must be investigated. So that talk shakes people a little, shows them that it really matters if Christianity is true or not, and invites them to look into it for themselves.
We did a Q&A session at the end as usual. People often see that they need ‘something’ and then start asking ‘so why Christianity?’ To which I would want to say that the claims of Christ stand head and shoulders above all the competing claims. Islam, for example has a great lack of historical evidence for any of its claims. I’d used 1 Peter as my biblical basis for this talk, which talks about us having a true and living hope. That makes it quite easy to investigate, you can for example read a historical account of the resurrection of Jesus and see the remarkable array of evidence for that. And if that’s true everything else follows.
