Andy Bannister reports from Washington DC
At The CS Lewis Institute in the USA I did two things.
The first is that I recorded a podcast with my friend, Randy Newman, he’s coming up soon on our Solas PEP Talk podcast (The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast), when he was in Scotland. So when I was in the USA he returned the favour and I was guest on his podcast. Randy is the author of a really helpful book called “Questioning Evangelism” that we recommend a lot at Solas, which is all about how you can use good questions in evangelism.
That was also the subject of an event I spoke at for the C.S. Lewis Institute, in Washington DC. The title of the talk was “How to talk about Jesus without ruining the holiday meal”. The talk was presented in the run-up to Thanksgiving in the USA and then Christmas in the UK. The issue is that a lot of Christians get quite encouraged at these times, because non-Christian friends and family members might actually come to church; and if not they might come to dinner! The pressure on Christians is that on one hand they want to talk about their faith during what is, after all, ‘religious occasion’, but on the other hand they are afraid of being the person who wrecked Christmas dinner because they started an argument about religion – and what if they never speak to you again!
So I shared some of the stuff we regularly do at Solas, about how to have good conversations about Jesus in a natural way, and angling that into the Christmas season. You can hear the whole talk here.
A chapter of Randy Newman’s other book, Unlikely Converts is available here on the Solas website.
