I had the privilege of joining the student Christian Union (CU) group from York St John University for their weekend away. They had hired an Anglican Christian retreat centre in beautiful countryside about ten miles from Scarborough – and invited me to join them for the weekend as the speaker. It’s one of the smaller CU’s that we work with, and they managed to get twenty of their students along for the houseparty.
Over the course of the weekend, I led four sessions. We began with my introduction to conversational evangelism, (which I also wrote up as a book) called “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot”, then we did a session entitled “How to start spiritual conversations with your friends” which was a reworked version of the “engaging the apathetic” session we do at Solas. It draws deeply on the things we cover in the “Have You Ever Wondered?” book. The “Crunchy Christians” talk was next! In that session we focussed not so much on the words that we use in evangelism and the questions we use as tools; but about the character we need to display to make the gospel attractive. We are called to live in such a way that people are struck by the quality of our lives. ‘ Crunchy Christians’ are those who aren’t able to talk about their faith naturally, but make it awkward or weird! Praying, loving people well, saying sorry and serving are ways to de-crunchify ourselves! Of course, when the church is ‘crunchy’ we have a bigger issue – and so we had a look at John Dickson’s book “Bullies and Saints” in which he uses the illustration of the ‘music of Jesus’. If you want to know what a piece of classical music is like, you can listen to it played well or badly; but really to really assess it, you need to hear it as the composer intended. The music of Jesus has often been played badly, but people need to see Christianity as he intended it to be. Then of course when the church has got it wrong, we shouldn’t get defensive – but apologise. Then our final session was entitled, “The uniqueness of Jesus in a world of other faiths” – which ended the weekend thinking deeply together about Christ himself.
The retreat centre is a great location for a student weekend, the meeting room had big sofas set out which made it less formal and great for discussion times too. So we didn’t do long teaching sessions, but a bit of teaching them discussion, them discussion and Q&A – and then loads of great informal conversations with the students over meals, and coffee. There are advantages to smaller groups actually you can do a lot more interactively and get to know people much better.
York St John University CU are a great bunch of students, who are really friendly, very missional and keen to engage in the topics and then go and do outreach. I’d crossed paths with three of these students before, two at Word Alive in Wales, and one at CreationFest in Cornwall – which is how this invitation to speak had come about.
