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But which are the best restaurants in Tunbridge Wells? We tried to narrow it down to five but that was too difficult, so here are our top ten.

The Best Tunbridge Wells Restaurants

In our opinion, these are the best ten restaurants in Tunbridge Wells…

1. Vittle and Swig
2. Thackeray’s
3. Kitsu/Kiko
4. The Beacon
5. Zorba Meze Grill
6. The Warren
7. Soprano/Coco Retro
8. The Ivy
9. The Small Holding (in Kilndown)
10. The Poet (in Matfield)

But we keep changing the order. We can’t decide!

1. Vittle and Swig

Vittle and Swig is our favourite restaurant in Tunbridge Wells. It replaced the previous ‘Camden Quarter’ in late 2016 – just after we moved here.

Whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, Vittle and Swig’s “contemporary British cuisine” never fails to impress. Their Summer 2019 Evening Menu includes mains such as; Spring Lamb Fillet (£22), Pork Collar & Shoulder Wonton (£22), and Half Lobster (£30).

Vittle and Swig (26-28 Camden Road) is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. On Sunday they have a brunch menu (which is amazing) from 11:30-15:30. They’re closed on Mondays.

• http://www.vittleandswig.co.uk

2. Thackeray’s

Thackeray’s offers a relaxed form of fine dining within a 300-year-old Georgian house in Tunbridge Wells. We believe they used to have a Michelin star!

The popular chef’s tasting menu is £78 per person and currently includes treats such as; Foie Gras Parfait, Roast Scallops, Aged Sirloin of Beef, and more. Mains from the a la carte menu range from £24-35.

Thackeray’s (85 London Road) also offer a great value set menu at lunch (£20 for two-courses, £24 for three). And their evening market menu is a new addition, we think (£25 for two-courses, £30 for three).

• http://www.thackerays-restaurant.co.uk

3. Kitsu or Kiko

Kitsu was one of the first restaurants we were told about when we moved to Tunbridge Wells. We have to admit, it doesn’t look much from the outside – but the sushi!

The quality of the sushi is enough to place Kitsu #3 on Foursquare for all places in Tunbridge Wells. If you haven’t been yet, you must! But before you go, it’s worth knowing the restaurant is cash only (old school) and BYO alcohol.

Kitsu (82A Victoria Road) opened a second location near the bottom of town (5 London Road) called Kiko in late 2018. The sushi is just as good and the general decor of the place is much nicer.

• http://www.kitsu.co.uk

4. The Beacon

The Beacon, located just a mile west of Tunbridge Wells, is beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that you can even get married there!

The restaurant is set in seventeen acres with three beautiful lakes and amazing views over the Kent countryside. The menu’s pretty great too. Mains are in the £20-25 ballpark and they look exceptional.

There’s a summer set menu too (£16 for two-courses, £20 for three) and they do a cracking Sunday roast. If you haven’t paid them a visit, we highly recommend a quick drive out of town to Tea Garden Lane!

• https://www.illbemother.co.uk/thebeacon

5. Zorba Meze Grill

Zorba is the place to go in Tunbridge Wells (actually, Kent) for Turkish. They recently expanded into the shop next door and the rebrand is looking superb.

We love eating loads of different bits and pieces when we go out – so Zorba is perfect. The meat dishes are always exceptional. The staff are friendly. And the place is packed most of the time.

Occasionally, they do special midweek deals. We got a 50% off voucher once in The Times of Tunbridge Wells. But it’s good value paying full price regardless. You’ll find them at 4 Upper Grosvenor Road.

• http://www.zorbamezegrill.com

6. The Warren

The Warren can be found on the High Street, opposite The Bedford pub and above the shops ‘Kitch’ and ‘Mind’. You may have walked past it during the day and not even noticed.

It’s in the evening that the place really lights up! Literally. The huge chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling windows light up the high street.

The cool thing about The Warren (5A High Street) is that the ingredients come direct from the Crowborough Warren Estate – 600 acres of wood and farmland bordering the Ashdown Forest. It’s home to all of their cattle, sheep, boar, deer, poultry and waterfowl!

• http://thewarren.restaurant

7. Soprano/Coco Retro

Soprano and Coco Retro are two very different Tunbridge Wells restaurants but they are both owned by brothers Maurizio and Ivan Di Santo, originally from Southern Italy.

Soprano opened first, in 2006, bringing tapas and cocktails to Tunbridge Wells High Street. Most small dishes are £6-8. Get a selection and share with friends. Cocktails are £9.

And don’t let the odd-looking plastic French man outside of Coco Retro (7 Vale Road) put you off going in. It’s honestly lovely inside! The gold bar at the front is stunning and the place is much bigger than it looks too, set over three floors.

• https://www.sopranowinebar.co.uk
• http://www.cocoretro.com

8. The Ivy

We weren’t planning on including any chain restaurants in this list. But how could we leave out The Ivy?

When Jamie’s Italian closed in 2017 we were concerned. Not because we loved Jamie’s Italian – we only went there once and it was average at best – but because we thought we might get stuck with another big empty retail unit on the high street. When we heard The Ivy was opening, we knew it would be a roaring success!

The Ivy (46-50 High Street) has a substantial a la carte menu available from 11:30am every day. The majority of main dishes are priced from £15-22. There’s also a set menu (£16.95 for two courses, £21 for three).

• https://theivytunbridgewells.com

9. The Small Holding (in Kilndown)

Our final two choices aren’t technically located in Tunbridge Wells, but they’re both amazing restaurants!

We love The Small Holding. We love the food. We love the owners. We love that they grow loads of the food on their own farm and come and tell you the story of your food before you eat it. We love the fact that their “full acre” tasting menu is just £60.

We’ll be honest, we don’t really like spending loads of money eating out. But we left The Small Holding after our first experience of their “full acre” tasting menu just saying over and over, “We can’t believe that was only £60!”

If you want to know more, I recommend reading this recent review by Grace Dent for The Guardian. SPOILER… She loved it too!

• https://thesmallholding.restaurant

10. The Poet (in Matfield)

Last but by no means least is The Poet, which is about 6 miles away in Matfield. We haven’t eaten here yet – it’s next on our list – but we have plenty of friends who love it!

The Poet call themselves a “classic pub with an affordable menu inspired by modern and traditional British cuisine”. But this pub is exceptional, in every department.

The head chef is Petrus Madutlela (who is also a co-owner) and with his team, he produces truly beautiful and delicious food. Mains are around £25 but there’s also an eight-course tasting menu available on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. And it’s only £79.95 for two!

• https://thepoetatmatfield.co.uk

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Yesterday, I stumbled across a very helpful online forum hosted by Affinity. I will post the full video below but the purpose of this article is to focus on one comment that was shared by the second speaker, Matthew Roberts, minister of Trinity Church York.

If you’d like to see it for yourself, please start at 50:00. Otherwise, I’ve typed out below what Matthew said in response to the first question…

Do you think that we sinned when we didn’t meet during those Spring months of lockdown?

“That’s a very good question.

So, I think we need to make a distinction and I will, I’m afraid, differ from John [Stevens] again here on the question of; is the only criterion of disobeying the government if it would be a sin [to obey].

Is it a sin for me to sleep in a separate bed from my wife? The answer to that is; no, it’s not. In fact, because I’ve had a cold I have done so for the last few nights – although thankfully I’m feeling a lot better this morning.

Would it be wrong for the government to tell me I could never do so [sleep in the same bed as my wife] again? Yes, it would. Or, indeed, to tell me I couldn’t do so for any period of time. Yes, it would [be wrong for the government to say/do that]. The government has no right to tell me that. It’s outside of its jurisdiction to say that.”

When I heard Matthew share that thought, I realised that this is a key issue that has gone largely unaddressed in discussions of the correct Christian response to various government mandates.

I believe it requires a number of clarification questions…

To John Stevens:

1. Am I correct to assume that if the government created a law that from Monday 24th May 2021, for seven days, no two people in England could share a bed, you would obey their order and sleep on the sofa for a week because you believe that Christians must obey the government at all times unless such obedience would be sinful?

To Matthew Roberts:

1. Am I correct to assume that if the government created a law that from Monday 24th May 2021, for seven days, no two people in England could share a bed, you would disobey their order and continue to share a bed with your wife?
2. If so, where do you draw the line?
3. Would you disobey the government if they created a law stating that all of your children must share a bedroom with you?
4. What if the law stated that only children under 18 months old must share a bedroom with you?
5. How about if they created a law making it illegal to have your dad round for lunch or to go on a walk with a couple of friends?

I should point out that prior to this week, I completely 100% agreed with Matthew Roberts. I believed that the government has a God-given authority but that that authority has limits. And telling me that I can’t share a bed with my wife for the next week is totally outside of their authority. Therefore, as I disobeyed that hypothetical government law, I didn’t believe I was sinning against God. I didn’t believe that God was displeased with my actions. I had a clear conscience. I had done nothing wrong. It was the government who were wrong.

But is that an acceptable/correct Christian response? After all, I imagine John Stevens would say that it isn’t and that we should submit to the government even when we think that their laws are silly. And I’m guessing he knows his bible a lot better than I do and has given this a lot more thought than I have.

And if it is an acceptable/correct Christian response (to disobey the government and continue sharing a bed with your wife), again, where do we draw the line? What principle are we using to enable us to determine when we can and when we can’t disobey the government.

The comments are open. Please help!

The post Can we only disobey the government if it would be a sin to obey? appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

Instead of every single church having to create their own evangelism strategy, I think it would be much better if there was a big Christian organisation that specialised in faithful evangelism and provided free high-quality content, resources, and ideas for churches to use.

Personally, I like Christianity Explored for this – but I think “Christianity Explored” sounds like some sort of school RE course. Like it’s aimed at people who want to learn more about one of the many religions this world has to offer. Maybe they’ll try Buddism Explored next!

I would rename Christianity Explored, Jesus Explored, and go for something like…

• Jesus Explored: Discover the real Jesus

Most non-Christians think they already know what Christianity is all about. After all, they did RE for an hour a week in school, didn’t they? Therefore, they have little desire to spend their evenings “exploring” Christianity. Rico even alludes to this in the video on the Christianity Explored homepage…

You might counter that they probably think they know what Jesus is all about too. But I think it’s easier (and more helpful) to take the angle of “Discover the truth about Jesus” rather than “Discover the truth about the Christian faith”.

And where do we discover the real Jesus? In the bible. So, the aim of Jesus Explored would be to get non-Christians reading (or listening to, or even watching) one of the gospel accounts.

And ‘Jesus Explored’ could be so much more than just a seven-week course. It could also include one-off talks, weekly bible study groups, and plenty of online content. Basically, everything a church might need to introduce non-Christians to Jesus throughout the year.

1. JE Course

The Jesus Explored course would basically just be an updated and rebranded version of the Christianity Explored course. Except it wouldn’t be sold as the final destination down a large evangelistic funnel (BBQ > Jazz Night > Course). Instead, it would be calling out to anybody and everybody…

“Want to discover the truth about the most famous man who ever lived? Then come along to Jesus Explored and meet the real Jesus!”

But do evangelistic courses even still work? Will 21st-century non-believers commit to a seven-week course? Wouldn’t they rather have an evening in?

I think we can all sympathise with the lure of the sofa after a long day at work. But I don’t think the evening course is dead just yet. Back in January, my wife and I did a five-week “Bump & Baby” class. There were 10 couples. Nobody dropped out. Virtually everyone was there every week.

The lesson here? If people think it’s important enough, they’ll come!

But what if you’ve tried putting on evangelistic courses and for the last few years they’ve been empty? Surely that proves they don’t work in your church context?

I think this could be more down to our shoddy advertising and general lack of publicity, rather than a problem with the course itself. Most churches seem to invite people to do a Christianity Explored course via passive friendship evangelism (“think about who you’d like to ask”). My assumption is that, after 20 years of Christianity Explored, most church members have simply run out of friends to invite!

2. JE Talks

We obviously want to do some one-off evangelistic events too. Instead of wine-tasting evenings and sports quizes, Jesus Explored could offer a selection of evangelistic talks that answer the questions non-Christians actually care about, like…

• What did Jesus really say about sex?
• What did Jesus really say about money?
• What did Jesus really say about work?
• What did Jesus really say about love?
• What did Jesus really say about success?
• What did Jesus really say about happiness?
• What did Jesus really say about heaven?

Maybe those aren’t the things non-Christians are concerned with. I just made them up. And I’m not a non-Christian. Instead of assuming we know the questions non-Christians are asking we should probably do some proper research to find out! And whatever we discover, we want to make the talk titles more relevant and engaging than wine-tasting or a sports quiz.

And instead of each church individually trying to figure out what non-Christians are thinking and how to engage them with the good news of Jesus, it makes sense for a big organisation like Jesus Explored (Christianity Explored) to do that for them. They can afford to pay someone who actually knows what they’re doing to come up with the best titles, taglines, graphics etc.

There are loads of ways to run these one-off talks…

1. Churches could have the option of showing the official Jesus Explored video for the topic, which could have a Q&A (chat around your tables) sort of bit in the middle or at the end.
2. Churches could book one of the official Jesus Explored “Success” or “Happiness” speakers to come and speak at their event. So you have people who can preach but who also have personal testimonies that work for that specific topic.
3. Churches could access the official Jesus Explored resources/cheatsheet for that topic. It contains a selection of appropriate places to go in the bible and other tips for hosting a successful Jesus Explored “Love” talk, or whatever the chosen topic is.

You could even use these to create a sort of Jesus Explored mission week. You pick five of these talks and do one every evening at a university. Or maybe use them as a series of five guest services at your church’s evening meetings.

3. JE Groups

Something I’m interested to try out are gospel bible studies for mixed groups of Christians and non-Christians. These Jesus Explored groups could meet weekly (either in church buildings or local coffee shops/pubs).

The format is very simple. You read one chapter of a gospel each week (perhaps using some sort of a JE cross between the fancy ESV notebooks my wife likes and Uncover or The Word One To One) and then you meet up as a group to chat it through. If the group gets too big you can still meet all together but then split into two or three groups, or start a new group somewhere else in town.

I like the idea of non-Christians regularly digging into the gospel and having the opportunity to ask questions. And this more relaxed format means people can miss a week and it isn’t the end of the world.

I also like the fact that it feels less like your typical course or talk where the distinction between believers and non-believers is very obvious. Everyone in these groups, believers and non-believers are learning more about Jesus and the response he wants from them as they read and meditate on each chapter.

The Christians aren’t just there to make the numbers up or keep the conversation going if it’s a quiet group. And the non-Christians should feel less like outsiders who we’re trying to convince to join our “club”.

You can advertise these JE groups on sites such as Meetup and Nextdoor (more on online opportunities next). It’s probably a good idea to put something in the local newspapers and magazines too. The same goes for the JE course and your one-off JE talks. If we’re putting these things on, we want to make sure everyone in our area knows about them!

4. JE Online

This is where we need to get creative. It is the 21st century, after all. I’ve had enough of naff-looking booklets!

I’m yet to be convinced that your average local church needs a really impressive website and social media presence. It can be really expensive to do that stuff well and doing it on the cheap can end up being worse than not doing it at all.

But a worldwide organisation such as Jesus Explored needs to be crushing it online! Especially producing attention-grabbing video content that churches can then re-share.

What can we do with video that delivers the gospel to 21st-century non-believers in an engaging and entertaining way? There are so many possibilities!

99% of churches can’t afford to produce high-quality video content. But that’s ok. We only need one big evangelical Christian organisation to be regularly creating this kind of stuff and then all the churches can use it. Nobody in Tunbridge Wells is going to be saying, “I’ve seen that video already on Christ Church, Nottingham’s Instagram!”

And we can combine the worldwide online element with local door-to-door stuff. Here’s an idea I had…

Jesus Explored makes a really great evangelistic video about Jesus. They also create a template for flyers that look professional, match the branding/theme of the video, and can be tweaked by each church. Churches then make a page on their website with the video and a sign-up form where people can enter their name and email or phone number if they want to find out more.

I like this because;

1. It’s all about Jesus.
2. It is a bit of a funnel – but it’s a funnel that starts with Jesus.
3. It’s door-to-door – so you’re reaching everyone.

And it’s opt-in instead of opt-out. So, instead of saying, “We’re coming to your door unless you tell us not to.” It’s saying, “We think Jesus is great and we want to tell you about him. If you want to discover what all the fuss is about, go to this link and watch our video.”

The post Jesus Explored appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

These are some of the questions I’ve been pondering over the past few months and I think I’m just about ready to articulate my thoughts.

You’re reading the first of three articles on counter-cultural Christianity…

• Dare To Be Different (Part 1)
• Countering Your Local Culture (Part 2)
• Countering Your Church Culture (Part 3)

This short introduction will set the scene. We’ll get into the specifics in parts two and three.

Christianity is (usually) counter-cultural

But what does that even mean?

A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behaviour differ substantially from those of mainstream society.

Of course, it’s possible to be counter-cultural purely for the sake of it. You could walk around in shorts and flip flops when everyone else is wrapping themselves up in coats and scarves. You could insist on being contacted via pager instead of by mobile phone or email.

The church isn’t meant to be counter-cultural like that. We don’t start by looking at whatever everyone else is doing and then simply do the opposite.

No, we start with Jesus.

The church belongs to Jesus, which means that He gets to determine its “values and norms of behaviour”. And as followers of Jesus, we want to obey Him. We want to live His way.

And (usually) Jesus’ way will be pretty different from the way of the culture at large. Not in all things and at all times. But in most things and at most times.

If we’re following Jesus, our “values and norms of behaviour” are going to be pretty counter-cultural.

Dare To Be Different

I’m assuming this isn’t a new idea to you. You’ve probably got a copy of Vaughan Roberts’ book ‘Distinctives’ on your bookshelf somewhere. I’ve got two!

“The Lord Jesus expects his forgiven people to be different from others. The demands of God’s kingdom are radically different from the norms of our culture. Too often we let ourselves be moulded by others, but Christ longs to use us to change them. Paul urged the Christians at Rome: ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ Will we take up the challenge? Will we dare to be different?”

Vaughan Roberts (Distinctives)

In my experience, evangelical Christians (and evangelical churches) are fully on board with the call to be different from the world around us. We know that Jesus expects us to be different. We want to be different.

But different from what, exactly? Different from whom?

This is where it gets a bit more tricky.

Which Culture?

We live in a multicultural world. And by that, I don’t just mean that we live in towns made up of people from different ethnic groups and nationalities. Let me explain…

The “culture” of Tunbridge Wells will be quite different from the “culture” of Brighton. The same is true even of local areas within Tunbridge Wells. Less than a mile apart!

The demographics will be different. The clothes will be different. The language will be different. The aspirations will be different. The struggles will be different. The politics will be different. The beliefs and worldviews will be different.

My point is this… There is more than one “culture”.

The “culture” is not this one thing, out there, that we need to try and stop ourselves from assimilating into.

Our local area has its own culture that we are fully immersed in – whether we realise it or not. Even our individual churches have their own cultures!

Low Hanging Fruit

• It’s easy to be distinctive from a culture we don’t belong to.

If I was to travel to a village in the middle of mainland China, I would be extremely distinctive. The same is true if I was to move into an inner-city housing estate/scheme in Scotland.

• It’s easy to spot the spiritual errors and moral failings of a culture we don’t belong to.

When you look at something from the outside, you’re a fresh pair of eyes, so to speak. Mistakes and misunderstandings appear glaringly obvious.

But as Christians, it’s not good enough for us to only be distinctive from cultures we don’t belong to. Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

And it’s not good enough for us to only push back against the spiritual errors and moral failings of cultures we don’t belong to. Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

That’s not to say we shouldn’t counter cultures we don’t belong to, but merely to point out that that’s very much the “low hanging fruit” – and the Lord Jesus expects so much more from us than that!

Countering Our Culture

As Christians, we should be distinctive from the cultures we belong to. Even from people who, on the surface, appear virtually identical to us. That’s the difference that following Jesus should make.

Even if I was to bump into a 31-year-old, table tennis playing, gym-loving, online businessman, who lives in Tunbridge Wells, and follows exactly the same accounts on Twitter as I do, but who doesn’t follow Jesus…

…the things I think, and say, and do, should still be radically different from him!

If not, if our lives are fairly indistinguishable, then I’m clearly not living Jesus’ way. I’m living Joe Rogan’s way. Or Gary Vaynerchuk’s way. Or Jordan Peterson’s way. Or some combination of whoever it is that people like us, within our culture, look up to.

The temptation for me (and every Christian) is to live whichever way we choose, imitating the influencers and gurus we in our particular culture follow, but tricking ourselves into thinking we’re actually living Jesus’ way.

It’s easy, we just point out all of the coincidentally godly attributes within our particular culture and ignore all of their ungodly counterparts.

And if we want to feel particularly self-righteous, we can even pick a different culture (one we don’t belong to) and point out all of the ungodly attributes of that culture. We can think to ourselves, “Thank goodness I haven’t sold out and gone along with the world, like the Christians in that culture!”

The only problem is that the Christians in that culture are looking at us and thinking exactly the same thing.

That’s why some Christians view thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray as counter-cultural role models, “fighting the good fight”, “swimming against the tide”, and standing up for truth. Whilst other Christians consider them to be extremely dangerous and representative of everything that’s wrong with our current culture.

But that’s all for part one

I hope it’s whet your appetite.

In parts two and three, I’ll introduce to you two imaginary churches (St Stephen’s Tunbridge Wells and St Stephen’s Brighton) and we’ll look in much more detail at how they can actively counter the cultures they belong to.

First, we’ll discuss their local cultures and then, in part three, we’ll focus even closer to home as we think about countering their church cultures.

The post Dare To Be Different: Counter-Cultural Christianity (Part 1) appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

Over the past 6,790 words (but who’s counting), we’ve looked at free lunch evangelism, funnel evangelism, and friendship evangelism. Today, we’re thinking about what faithful evangelism looks like in the 21st century. And it’s gonna be a long one!

But before we start, a question…

What is the key to evangelism in the 21st Century?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for the past few years. Here are ten potential answers…

1. Hospitality – Steve Childers
2. Engaging the next generation – Nicky Gumbel
3. Word and deed ministry together (not one without the other) – Tim Keller
4. Network evangelism (it’s a lifestyle) – Tony Merida
5. Intellectual evangelism (sending every Christian to seminary) – Arthur Jones
6. Belong, believe, become – Eddie Cole
7. Getting out of the church and onto the streets – Bob Stamps
8. Personal, small groups, and events – Rebecca Pippert and Bishop Kwashi
9. Stories (instead of preaching) – Eric Hatfield
10. Adopting a posture of embrace before others – Kimberly Reisman

That’s a lot of keys! And I’m sure they are all useful for opening different doors. But which one is the master key? The key that opens all the doors.

That is the question we want answered.

There are loads of different Christian leaders, promoting loads of different evangelistic strategies and approaches. But who’s right? Who should we listen to?

Eddie Cole says people need to belong to our church community first, then they’ll start believing somewhere down the line. Bob Stamps says, “We’re living in post-Christendom, they’re not gonna come to church anymore!”

Do we need to grab the attention of the next generation with some sort of spectacular one-off live experience? Or is the answer to create a giant funnel of regular events and courses for people to travel through? Perhaps, we should focus primarily on developing lifestyles of hospitality and befriending people?

Or maybe it’s all about social media. This is the 21st century after all! Does anybody on the staff team know how to use TikTok? Maybe we should hire a social media pastor. What is the key to evangelism in the 21st century? Can somebody please tell me, because I’m getting a headache.

Take a deep breath.

Close all of those tabs you just opened.

Count to ten.

Ok.

I think we’re asking the wrong question

This series is entitled “21st Century Evangelism Strategies” but, personally, I’ve had enough of ‘strategies’. I’m only too aware that my thinking over the past few years has been way too focused on ‘strategies’.

And I have a feeling I’m not the only one. Our churches are busy, busy, busy trying to put into place all of these different strategies for evangelism.

So, if “what is the key to evangelism in the 21st century?” is the wrong question, what’s the right question? Well, I think it’s something like this…

What does faithful evangelism look like in the 21st century?

That’s the question we’ll be trying to answer throughout the rest of this article. First, let’s figure out what is (and isn’t) faithful/biblical evangelism. Second, we can mull over how best to apply that to the 21st century.

What is (and isn’t) faithful evangelism

We read in Luke 1:19…

“I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.”

God sent Gabriel to Zechariah to tell him good news. Literally, to evangelise him. Evangelism is “the announcement of good news”, specifically, the good news of Jesus Christ. That is faithful Christian evangelism.

With that simple definition under our belt, it should be fairly straightforward to work out what is and isn’t faithful evangelism. If the gospel is being announced, it’s evangelism. If something else is happening, it’s not.

A free weekly table tennis club, held in a church, where Christians build genuine friendships with non-Christians… isn’t evangelism. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to do. I’m simply saying it isn’t evangelism.

The same is true of English language classes, toddler groups, and international cafés. Again, I’m not saying the church should stop doing these things. I’m just saying we shouldn’t think of them as evangelism.

A free church BBQ for the local community isn’t really an “evangelistic” event – not if there’s “zero ‘Christian’ content”. It’s a lovely thing to do. But it isn’t evangelism. Maybe it’s “outreach”. What actually is “outreach”?

Evangelism vs outreach

The terms evangelism and outreach are often used interchangeably, but Christian blogger Tim Challies defines them differently…

“Evangelism is primarily a message, while outreach is primarily an action.”

Challies goes on to say…

“We often feel that we have fulfilled the Lord’s command to preach the gospel through evangelism when, in reality, we have been involved in outreach.”

You may disagree but, personally, I find Tim’s distinction helpful. It stops us from thinking we’re doing evangelism when we’re actually doing something else. Our free church BBQ is outreach, not evangelism. The same goes for the weekly toddler group. You get the idea.

“Plus a short gospel talk”

But what about our church’s imaginary upcoming wine tasting event? Does that count as biblical or faithful evangelism? After all, it says on the flyer…

“You are invited to an evening of wine tasting, live music, plus a short gospel talk.”

• Does the 10-minute gospel talk make the whole evening “evangelism”?
• What if it was only a 5-minute talk? Or a 1-minute talk?
• What percentage of an event needs to be spent announcing the gospel in order to make it an “evangelistic” event?
• Does the “evangelism” begin when the speaker stands up and then stop when he sits down?

These are genuine questions. I’m not sure what the answers are.

I’ve discussed evangelism and these sorts of evangelistic events with quite a few people over the past month. Despite their varying ages and church backgrounds, the general tone of the conversations have been the same…

What we’re currently doing doesn’t seem to be working.

Non-Christians are still coming along to some of our events, but we’re seeing hardly any of them putting their faith in Jesus.

We all seem to agree that holding up a sign that says “Repent or Perish”, whilst completely biblical (Luke 13:1-5), probably isn’t the most effective way to announce the gospel.

But perhaps we’re starting to realise that free lunch evangelism, funnel evangelism and friendship evangelism aren’t proving much more effective.

And that leads us on (finally) to the bit we’ve all been waiting for. So…

What are the most effective ways to announce the good news of Jesus Christ in 2020?

Before we get into it, I want to point out again that I’m trying to promote principles over strategies – or at least principles before strategies. If we’re all super clear on the principles of faithful evangelism, we’ll find it much easier to make decisions about which specific strategies to use.

And the principles really haven’t changed over the last 2,000 years. Here they are…

1. Focus on Jesus
2. Start with Jesus
3. Tell everyone about Jesus

1. Focus on Jesus

The free-lunch evangelism fallacy is that non-Christians aren’t interested in Jesus and therefore we need to use something else as evangelistic bait.

We end up with “evangelistic” events where the focus is very much on the sports quiz, or the wine-tasting, or whatever other activity we’ve chosen. The “short gospel talk” certainly isn’t the focus of the evening.

But does that matter? I think it does!

For starters, these events actually put off the majority of people simply because their hobbies and interests don’t align with whatever activity is on offer. But aside from that, ask yourself, what kind of unspoken message are we conveying by treating the gospel in this way?

It reminds me of a J.John quote my dad told me…

“If you want to share the gospel with confidence, you have to have confidence in the gospel.”

Jesus is not a timeshare…

Do we have confidence in the gospel? Whenever I’m at a “free lunch” evangelistic event, I don’t feel like we do. I feel more like we’re trying to sell a timeshare.

Nobody wants to buy a timeshare. If buying a timeshare was such a great idea, the salespeople wouldn’t have to lure unsuspecting holidaymakers into their pitch with the promise of freebies! Surely the same goes for telling people about Jesus.

By focusing on something else, it’s as if we’re admitting that “Jesus really isn’t that great, but if we can hook you in with something else then perhaps we’ll find a way to talk you into becoming a Christian.”

…Jesus is good news!

This is what we believe, right? But is this how we act? Does our evangelistic event give off this message?

If Jesus really is “the very best news you could ever hear” then why do we need something else to act as the “selling point”? Shouldn’t Jesus be the focus of our evangelistic event? You’d assume so, wouldn’t you?

We need to have confidence in the gospel of Jesus. Personally, I think we need to go “full-on” Jesus. Put Jesus on absolutely everything. We want people in our area to know that…

1. Our church is all about Jesus
2. We think Jesus is the best

So, when we put on evangelistic events they need to be about Jesus. The general gist of the invitation must be, “Come and hear about Jesus“. We can’t expect non-Christians to be interested in Jesus if it doesn’t even appear to them that we’re interested in Jesus!

Jesus is not irrelevant…

I’ve heard it said that non-Christians think Jesus is irrelevant to 21st-century life. The typical next question is… if that’s true, how do we make Jesus relevant?

Let’s start with what we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t just stick a gospel talk in the middle of an unrelated activity we think people might enjoy.

If we host a two-hour truffle-making workshop with a short 10-minute gospel talk in the middle, then the focus of the evening is clearly the truffle-making. By design, we’ve turned the Jesus bit into an irrelevant distraction!

The whole structure of our evangelistic event needs to announce the relevance and importance of Jesus. And there are loads of ways to do that, provided we put the focus squarely on Jesus.

…Jesus is King!

In fact, he’s the King of kings and Lord of lords.

To say Jesus is irrelevant would be like saying Donald Trump is irrelevant. It’s ridiculous. You might not like Trump, but you can’t claim he’s irrelevant. And he’s just the president of a country. Jesus is the President of presidents!

I think too often we put ourselves on the backfoot unnecessarily.

“Oh no! People think Jesus is irrelevant in 2020. How can we change their minds? What can we possibly do to make Jesus appear relevant in the 21st century?”

Kanye West simply says, Jesus is King.

Jesus is relevant, and always will be relevant, because he is the forever King of everything and everyone. And to those who disagree, to those who don’t believe that Jesus is King, Kanye has this to say…

“People who don’t believe are walking dead. They are asleep. And this is the awakening.”

I don’t think we necessarily need to be quite that blunt. But that is what we need to believe. We have the truth. We have the good news. And it’s all about Jesus. We need to have confidence in the gospel.

So that’s principle #1; focus on Jesus. It sounds obvious and yet a lot of the time we seem to focus our evangelistic efforts on all sorts of other stuff, with Jesus as a 10-minute add-on. When we focus on these other things, we’re only reinforcing assumptions that Jesus can’t be that good or that relevant today. Because if he was, surely he’d be the focus!

2. Start with Jesus

The funnel evangelism fallacy is that non-Christians need to be warmed up to Jesus slowly and therefore we need to start with “zero ‘Christian’ content”.

In threshold one of InterVarsity’s Five Thresholds they say…

“People today often start in a place of skepticism or distrust towards Christians.“

Now that could well be true. But the assumption here is that in the past people didn’t start in a place of scepticism or distrust towards Christians. That things are different in the 21st century and therefore we need a different approach. A softer approach. We need “pre-evangelism“. We can’t just start with Jesus.

I disagree.

Where to start?

I’m not saying Jesus needs to be the very first word out of our mouths. I’m just saying we should want him there in our first evangelistic conversation or church event. We don’t need to create a funnel. We don’t need to save him for Level 4. We can start with Jesus.

Just look at the example of Paul in Acts 17…

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

He starts with them, the people he’s speaking to, and what they already know. He then goes on to talk of God the creator and how he is totally different to their idols of gold or silver or stone. But he ends with this…

The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

He certainly doesn’t waste much time before getting to Jesus!

And we’re told there was a mixture of responses. Some mocked. Others said, “We’ll hear you again about this.” But some joined him and believed! They heard him announce the gospel once and that was enough. They didn’t need to be warmed up by a free BBQ or a weekly football social.

This is actually a great relief. Faithful evangelism is actually much simpler than we’ve made it out to be. We don’t need to be strategic about when to introduce Jesus into the equation. We don’t need flow charts or funnels. We just need to tell people about Jesus.

Evangelism before apologetics

BBQs and 5-a-side football aren’t the only ways we try to warm non-Christians up before we get to Jesus. I’ve noticed that a lot of church guest events tend to skew more towards apologetics than evangelism.

But aren’t evangelism and apologetics basically the same thing? I found the following quote from Mack Stiles helpful…

“A housewife meeting with a friend over coffee may be evangelizing, while a brilliant Christian apologist speaking to thousands in a church sanctuary may not be. Few see it this way, but that’s because we have false understandings of what evangelism is. Defending the faith is a fine thing to do, but it is easy to give apologetics for Christianity without explaining the gospel—and we cannot evangelize without the gospel.”

If evangelism is “the announcement of the gospel”, we can define apologetics as “the defense against objections to the gospel”.

Again, I’m not saying we should stop doing apologetics. But it often feels like we’ve got the order the wrong way round. As if first, we need to answer every possible objection a non-Christian may have with the gospel. And then, once we’ve done that (and convinced them we’re sensible/rational people), then we can actually tell them the gospel.

So, you book a high-flying Christian speaker for a men’s guest event, but he ends up spending more time defending why he’s a Christian than actually sharing the good news of Jesus.

I remember asking the guy sitting next to me at church if he was planning on bringing anyone along to the upcoming men’s event. He replied he’d been hoping to get his non-believing dad along, but his dad had never even mentioned evolution before and the last thing he wanted to do was give him another objection to Christianity!

So that’s principle #2; start with Jesus. We don’t need to try and be clever by saving Jesus for a later “phase” of the process or drip-feeding him in slowly. And if we do start by announcing the gospel to someone and they come back with an objection, well that’s ok. That seems like a great time to tackle whatever specific objection they may have.

3. Tell everyone about Jesus

The friendship evangelism fallacy is that non-Christians need to hear the gospel from a friend they trust. So, either focus primarily on telling your friends about Jesus, or perhaps actively go and make some new friends so that in the future you can tell them about Jesus.

Personally, I think this is the most prevalent evangelism fallacy in 21st-century Christianity.

The blurb to Sam Chan’s book ‘Evangelism in a Skeptical World’ starts like this…

“Most Christians already know that they should be telling their friends about Jesus.”

Now, I’m not trying to have a go at Sam Chan’s book. I haven’t read it, but it’s probably very helpful. Rather, my point is this…

It’s become so normal to talk about evangelism as “telling your friends about Jesus” that I doubt many people even gave a second thought to the blurb starting in that way.

It’s as if we all have some sort of ‘Great Commission’ filter or converter installed in our brains. So when we read Matthew 28v19…

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”

What we actually hear Jesus saying to us is…

“Go therefore and make disciples of all your friends”

But that isn’t what he said!

Why the focus on our “friends”?

We all grew up being told not to talk to strangers – and rightly so. But as Margeret Manning writes perhaps it’s “a rule we learned too well”.

In the 21st century, at least in the West, starting a conversation with a stranger is practically viewed as anti-social behaviour. It’s normal for 50 people to sit in a tube carriage for 20 minutes and nobody to even make eye contact!

In general, we do only talk to people we know. So it makes sense that our evangelistic efforts have naturally become focused on our friends. But again, that isn’t what Jesus commanded us to do.

Here are four statements I’ve heard from people consciously (or unconsciously) promoting friendship evangelism…

1. “You might be the only Christian they know”

I’ve heard this said a lot to try and encourage believers to tell their friends about Jesus. And, of course, we should be praying for and looking for opportunities to tell our friends about Jesus, but again this type of thinking assumes that people need to hear about Jesus from someone they know.

2. “Jesus befriended unbelievers”

Unsurprisingly, Jesus is often used as an example for our evangelism. And it’s true that Jesus spent plenty of time with unbelievers, engaged in friendly conversations with them, and even ate plenty of meals with them. But I don’t remember Jesus joining a 1st-century running club and spending months trying to develop genuine friendships with the other members so that he could tell them the good news a bit later on.

3. “It’s difficult to witness to complete strangers”

According to Tony Miano, one of the great misnomers of friendship evangelism is the idea that it’s easier to witness to someone you know. In reality, we often find it most difficult to talk about Jesus with our non-believing family and closest friends. Especially if they’ve already told us, very politely, that they’re not interested in Christianity. The truth is, it can be pretty difficult witnessing to anyone.

4. “Pick three non-Christian friends to pray for”

I’ve encouraged people in my bible study group to do this. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. But God hasn’t promised to save Dave, Sally and Michelle. We pray that he will. But we don’t want to turn them into our own personal evangelism project. To have them “in the incubator” – as it’s been said. And we especially don’t want to do that to the exclusion of everyone else in the world!

Tell everyone!

We need to give everyone the opportunity to hear the good news about Jesus. It’s a universal message. Everyone needs to hear it.

And Jesus seems to say to his disciples, “Go and tell some people about me. If they won’t listen, go and find some other people to tell.”

Rather than, “Find a group of people. Spend some time befriending them. And then keep trying to tell them the gospel until they believe.”

The gospel is not just for our friends, the gospel is for everyone. Therefore, tell everyone…

Or at least invite everyone!

Jonathan Parnell says, “Not everyone will believe the gospel, but everyone should be invited”.

I think we should definitely apply that to our church’s evangelistic events and courses. We need to make sure we’re trying to invite everyone (in our local area) and not just friends of current church members.

This is one of the reasons I’ve warmed to the idea of door-to-door. You can’t deny that going door-to-door in your local area or parish is a great way to reach everyone. I think we should flyer more often. And there are definitely many more creative things we can do with that.

When it comes to actual door knocking, I think I prefer an opt-in rather than an opt-out approach – but I’ll save that for another post.

And we should advertise our evangelistic events widely, making use of community sites such as Meetup and Nextdoor. It’s probably a good idea to put something in the local newspapers and magazines too. And there’s no harm in making a giant banner or sign to hang outside your church building either.

Homogenous churches

As another side point, network evangelism leads us to tell the gospel to people just like us. So, over time our churches naturally become more and more homogeneous. Everyone starts to look the same, talk the same, think the same.

This doesn’t strike me as a good thing. Apparently, some people actually think it is – I just started reading about the “homogenous unit principle“. But there’s no time for that now.

So that’s principle #3; tell everyone about Jesus (or at least invite everyone). It sounds so obvious, and yet we don’t seem to be doing it! A focus on passive friendship evangelism excludes so many people from hearing the good news. And on a practical level, it makes it much more likely that our next Christianity Explored course will be close to empty.

Questions to ask before announcing your next evangelistic event

Well done for making it this far and reading over 10,000 words of my ramblings about evangelism. I hope you found them helpful. My prayer is that God would reveal to you how best to approach faithful evangelism in your specific situation and context.

To finish, here are four questions you might like to ask yourself before you announce your next evangelistic event or strategy…

1. Does this evangelistic event announce the good news of Jesus?
2. Is Jesus the focus, the centre, the main “selling point” of this evangelistic event?
3. What percentage of our time/money/energy will be spent not announcing the good news of Jesus?
4. How will we advertise this evangelistic event so that as many people as possible will have the opportunity to hear the good news of Jesus?

The post Faithful Evangelism: 21st Century Evangelism Strategies (Part 4) appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

In this article, I’ll be writing about; what friendship evangelism actually is, my failed attempts at it, and why it might be time for a rethink.

This is part three of a four-part series looking at evangelism in the 21st century. I’m covering…

1. Free lunch evangelism
2. Funnel evangelism
3. Friendship evangelism
4. Faithful evangelism

What is friendship evangelism?

Friendship evangelism can mean one of two things. For the purpose of this blog post, I’m going to label it as either active or passive.

1. Active friendship evangelism

I’ve called this first strategy “active” because it encourages you to actively seek out new friendships with non-believers. It’s deliberate, purposeful and simple.

• Step 1 = Befriend some non-Christians
• Step 2 = Share the gospel with them

How you do that specifically is up to you, but there are two general ways of doing active friendship evangelism; start a church-led community group or join an existing community group.

Start a church-led community group

These are, usually, free to attend weekly groups that are organised by churches. The primary aim behind them is to build friendships with non-believers (with the hope that opportunities to share the gospel will follow).

There are so many examples…

• Arts and crafts groups
• Baby and toddler groups
• English language classes
• Gents drinks (at the pub)
• International cafés
• Seniors lunches
• Sports groups
• Youth football

Groups like these give church members an opportunity to serve the church and get to know non-believers who share the same interests, or are at the same life stage, as them.

Join an existing community group

But you don’t always have to start an official church group.

Chances are, there’s already a tennis club, or group, in your area. So, instead of starting a church tennis outreach group, you could just join the local tennis club. Perhaps you could even get a few tennis-loving church members to join with you?

You’ll have just as many opportunities to develop friendships with non-believers and way less admin!

So that’s active friendship evangelism. But what’s passive friendship evangelism?

2. Passive friendship evangelism

I’ve heard this called “network evangelism” before. The basic idea is that every Christian already has a network of non-believers (friends, family members, colleagues, neighbours, etc.) and they should seek out opportunities to share Jesus with their network.

The seeking out of opportunities can still be quite deliberate and intentional but I call this “passive” friendship evangelism because it doesn’t involve actively going out and looking for non-Christians to befriend.

If you’ve read my previous two articles on free lunch evangelism and funnel evangelism you’ll recognise passive friendship evangelism. It’s largely responsible for getting people along to our “free lunch” church events or top-of-the-funnel initiatives.

I’ve often heard it said…

“Start thinking about who you might like to invite.”

This is passive friendship evangelism. A church wine tasting evening is coming up in three weeks time. Our job is to think of all the non-Christian friends we already have and then decide which of them might enjoy coming along.

“Not Dave because he’s more of a beer man. Not Sally because she’s on holiday. Maybe Michelle. Yes, I’ll send her a text!”

My failed attempts at active friendship evangelism

When I moved to Tunbridge Wells in 2016 I was 100% on board with active friendship evangelism. I even remember chatting to the vicar and explaining that “if we want people to actually listen to our gospel, then first we need to earn their trust because nobody listens to strangers”.

So, I did two things;

1. I started a weekly church table tennis club
2. I joined the local squash club

What can I say? I love sport. And that’s both forms of active friendship evangelism covered!

Squash club evangelism

I was a member of the local squash club for two years and in that time I got to know roughly 30 other members. I was there, on average, about three times a week. I had a great time and my squash got a lot better!

But opportunities to talk about Jesus were few and far between. I did manage one or two conversations, but overall it proved extremely difficult to get beyond chit-chat and squash-chat. People aren’t generally discussing life and death and faith and God before or after a squash match!

If I’m honest, it would probably also be a bit of a stretch to call any of the guys I played squash with “friends”. “Acquantainces” would be more accurate.

Table tennis evangelism

Unfortunately, I wasn’t having much luck at my church table tennis club either. If anything, it was even harder to have proper conversations with people when you’re the one running the whole thing!

Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun and we had plenty of non-Christians coming along. It looked like a great success. There were probably 20 people there each week who ordinarily would never step foot inside a church. A few even mentioned that our table tenis club was friendlier and had a nicer, more inclusive vibe than any other club they’d been to.

But there wasn’t really any “evangelism” going on.

I suddenly realised that active friendship evangelism was a much bigger task than I’d anticipated. In order to actually become friends with someone, and reach the place beyond chit-chat, we’d need to spend a lot of time together! And that’s not easy to do when you have a wife, and multiple businesses, and lots of church commitments, and family members you haven’t seen in ages, and three or four existing networks of friends.

Realistically, you can only really do that with a handful of people. This has unintentionally turned into some sort of friendship evangelism funnel!

Is it time for a rethink?

While researching this blog post, I stumbled across an article with an absolutely cracking title… Friendship Evangelism Is Neither Friendship Nor Evangelism.

I highly recommend reading that. But here are some thoughts I’d like to share.

Survivorship bias

Just like funnel evangelism, friendship evangelism is based on the assumption that non-believers are more likely to accept the gospel as wise, true and powerful (1 Corinthians 1) if they hear it from a friend. And there are plenty of stats to back that claim up.

“According to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 80% of adults coming to faith in Jesus Christ do so as a result of the influence of a friend.”

It seems like friendship evangelism is one of the only things that’s working these days. Ignore it at your peril. But stop and think for a minute and you’ll realise that that isn’t necessarily true. Survivorship bias is an important consideration.

“What on earth is survivorship bias?”

Put simply, survivorship bias describes our tendency to focus on the people or things that have passed some kind of selection process.

For example, for the past 18 months every single person who’s turned up at my Tuesday-night church table tennis club has been brought along by a friend. 100% of members!

We could conclude from that that people will only turn up to a table tennis club if they know a friend who already attends the club. But I know that to be false because three years ago, when I first started the club, everyone who attended the club came along on their own after finding out about it online.

The truth is that 18 months ago I removed all mention of the club online because we were getting far too busy. So, for the past 18 months, friends of current members are the only people in Tunbridge Wells who have even heard about the club.

I was very excited yesterday to find someone else saying the same thing…

“There is an important fallacy underlying the concept of friendship evangelism. The reason friendship evangelism is statistically dominant is simply because we, as Christians, are so uncomfortable sharing our faith with strangers. We have created this statistical reality. We typically only share our faith with people we know, so it’s shouldn’t surprise us that these are the people who come to know something about our faith!”

So, on the surface it may appear that non-Christians will only attend Christianity Explored if they are invited by a Christian friend. But once we dig a little more, we realise that nobody else in our parish even realised a Christianity Explored course was happening!

The truth is, our friends are no more likely to accept and believe the gospel than total strangers. Therefore, it makes no sense for us to focus our evangelistic efforts on a handful of our friends.

Fake friendship

We had a guy come to our church last year to talk about door-to-door evangelism (a method I’ll be talking about more tomorrow). He gave a decent presentation, highlighting many reasons why door-to-door still works well today. But there was one thing he said that really made me question his approach.

He said, “We’re not trying to convert people on the doorstep or get them to come to church. All we want to do is start a friendship.”

I was aware that a few other people around the room also picked up on that. And we were all thinking the same thing – is that true?

You see, the church in question had a strategy in place to make sure they got to every house in their area. That’s a lot of people! Did they really want to start a friendship with all of them? Is that even possible? What would that look like?

I pictured myself knocking on a random stranger’s door in our parish. Can I honestly say that “all I want is to become friends with whoever opens the door”. I’m not sure I can. I’ve got plenty of friends already.

I want to tell them about Jesus. Yes, that’s the reason I’m knocking on their door. And if they’d like to know more, then I’d love to invite them to church. If I was simply after a new friend I don’t think my first thought would be to pick a random road in our parish and start knocking on doors!

Is friendship evangelism even friendship? I guess it could be. But surely a lot of the time it ends up being a fake friendship. Or a friendship with a very clear agenda. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m not sure how our new “friends” would feel about that either.

Passive friendship evangelism ignores the marginalised

What about the lonely, the isolated, the outcasts, the forgotten, the vulnerable, the homeless? Passive friendship evangelism doesn’t do a very good job of reaching them with the good news of Jesus!

And you could argue that these are the people who might be most responsive to the gospel.

Currently, we’re putting on evangelistic events and then primarily using passive friendship evangelism to invite people along. The most common result? Our friends come up with an excuse for why they’re not able to come along this time.

It reminds me of the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14…

“A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please excuse me.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to examine them. Please excuse me.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” – Luke 14:16-24

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with inviting people from our current “network” to our church’s evangelistic events. We should be looking for opportunities to talk to them about Jesus and praying that God would do a powerful transformation in them.

But we mustn’t focus on our friends exclusively. And we mustn’t ignore the marginalised.

What’s the alternative?

Ok, so maybe friendship evangelism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But what’s the alternative? We’ve already crossed off “free lunch” evangelistic events and evangelism funnels.

Well, here’s an idea…

If you want to tell people about Jesus, don’t start a table tennis club or a knitting club, start a Jesus club!

Not that there’s anything wrong with starting a free community table tennis club or knitting club, by all means go ahead and serve your local community self-sacrificially if you want to. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that’s evangelism.

I’ll be releasing the final part of this four part series very soon. It’s pretty easy picking holes in the stuff we do currently. It’s quite a bit harder coming up with fresh ideas and alternatives. But that’s the plan, anyway.

And even if all I’ve done is start a conversation about how we can do better at “evangelism” in the 21st century, well, I think that’s time well spent!

If you’d like to be the first to know when part four is released, please follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

The post Friendship Evangelism: 21st Century Evangelism Strategies (Part 3) appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

This is part two of a four-part series looking at evangelism in the 21st century. I’ll be covering…

1. Free lunch evangelism
2. Funnel evangelism
3. Friendship evangelism
4. Faithful evangelism

What is funnel evangelism?

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that the church has started adopting a lot of business/corporate strategies. This is just one of them!

Funnel marketing

“Funnel evangelism” comes from funnel marketing, a strategy that is especially popular with 21st century online businesses.

As an online business owner myself, this is something I’m very well versed in. I’ve even received emails from other businesspeople applauding me for the funnels I’ve created! Here’s an example…

• Viral Video: I have a viral video on YouTube of me teaching my friend Sam how to play table tennis in a year. It’s been viewed over 13 million times by people all over the world.
• Free Content: A certain percentage of those viewers are going to watch some of my other table tennis videos, or check out my table tennis blog, or listen to my table tennis podcast.
• Mailing List: Once they’re consuming my free content the next step is to direct them towards my mailing list. By this point I know they must be interested in table tennis and I can now contact them directly.
• Sale #1: Everyone that wants to get better at table tennis needs a “proper” table tennis bat. That’s the very first purchase. And I sell a number of different table tennis bats.
• Sale #2: But the funnel doesn’t stop there! Once they’ve bought a bat I have an online table tennis training course I can recommend. And I have more advanced bats for them to buy later on.
• Sale #3: Finally, for the most committed individuals, I sell a range of very high-end table tennis robots (the machines that fire balls at you).

Hardly anyone who watches my viral YouTube video is going to be talked into buying a £1,700 table tennis robot! But we’re still at the very top of the funnel. You don’t go straight from awareness to sale. Instead, you simply move them along to the next step – which, in this example, is more free table tennis content.

Funnel evangelism

Hopefully, you now have some understanding of funnel marketing. But what’s funnel evangelism?

Well, to put it simply, it’s applying those same business principles to the church – except the end goal changes from trying to make a sale to trying to save a soul.

Here are three examples I found online of funnel evangelism in action. Each one has a slightly different formula. I’ll start with InterVarsity, as they have a trendy video.

1. The Five Thresholds (Intervarsity)

The InterVarsity “Journey to Faith” is made up of the following five thresholds; trust, curiosity, openness, seeking, and following.

Here the focus is primarily on the various perceptions and attitudes someone may have towards the Christian faith, and the journey that ultimately leads to them becoming a follower of Jesus.

The Five Thresholds were created after “listening to the stories of thousands of people who once were indifferent to faith but then decided to follow Jesus in their adult lives”.

2. Four Level Evangelism (Christian Vision for Men)

This is without a doubt one of the most clear and open presentations of funnel evangelism I’ve found – even if they don’t use the word “funnel”.

CVM‘s “4 Level Evangelism” strategy looks like this…

• Level 1: Events or activities with zero ‘Christian’ content (for example; 5-a-side football or a pub quiz)
• Level 2: Events with a good Christian speaker (for example; a men’s breakfast or a fish ‘n’ chip supper)
• Level 3: A course for men to debate the gospel (for example; Alpha or Christianity Explored)
• Level 4: A church that can support, challenge and encourage men in their faith.

I find the explicit mention of having “zero ‘Christian’ content” at Level 1 events interesting as that’s where we got to by the end of yesterday’s blog post. You could do a pub quiz with a “short gospel talk” in the middle of it, but I think CVM have figured out that this usually feels a bit odd and awkward. Their solution? Save the ‘Christian’ stuff for Level 2!

And it’s worth pointing out that the whole idea here is for men to “progress” from one level to the next. It’s very much a pathway. A funnel.

3. The Start-Up Funnel (Send Institute)

Send Institute is a “think tank for North American church planting” and they explicitly use the word “funnel” (and start-up) in their evangelism strategy. Generally, I’ve found chuch planters to be the most overtly “businessy” and entrepreneurial, so that isn’t surprising.

“The goal of the start-up funnel is to cultivate a network of relationships that lead to evangelism and assimilation into the church family.”

And the funnel is split into four categories; awareness, networking, relationships, and evangelism.

They mention that each category describes a circle of people that are getting progressively smaller. Evangelism is the final category.

“Finally, your evangelism circle will be the smallest since most of those whom you evangelize will come out of the relationship circle.”

They even throw out some numbers!

You should plan an activity that will make 3,000 people aware of your church in a positive way. Then try and gather the names of 300 of them. Put on relational activities to form relationships with 100 of them. And then an evangelistic event for 50 of them.

Why did we start thinking in terms of funnels?

Whether they are aware of it or not, most of the churches I know are engaging in some form of funnel evangelism. Perhaps they plan to put on a free church BBQ in September, followed by a wine tasting event (with a short gospel talk) in October, which leads straight into a 6-week Christianity Explored course.

But why did we start thinking of evangelism in terms of funnels?

The professionalisation of the church

As I mentioned earlier, it feels like churches are starting to be run more like companies. This shift obviously has both pros and cons – but that’s a discussion for a different article altogether.

All I want to say here is that the more we start to think of our local church as a business, the more we’ll begin bringing business strategies to our church planning meetings.

Perhaps church leaders start reading business books to see if they can glean any insights from the world’s top entrepreneurs. Or businesspeople on the church PCC subconsciously switch on their workplace results-oriented mindset.

I’m sure it’s all very well intentioned. “We use these strategies and techniques to get results at work, so it makes sense to use them to get results at church, doesn’t it?”

We end up with; vision statements, 10-year plans, market research, policies and procedures, AGMs, logos and branding, professional websites with corporate headshots of the team, operations managers, line managers, finance departments, HR, PR, professional cleaners, and the list goes on.

I’m not saying all of those things are bad. But if we’re doing all of that, why not create an evangelism funnel for good measure?

Rick Warren

Personally, I think Rick Warren’s 1995 book ‘The Purpose Driven Church‘ is at least partly responsible for today’s abundance of funnel evangelism.

Pastor Rick Warren says…

“One of the core ideas I wrote about in The Purpose Driven Church, and which we teach in our Purpose Driven events, is that every church needs a process for making disciples.

“At Saddleback, we’ve always thought of our target audience through the concentric circles. When you’re planning sermon series, outreach, and ministry, you must think of the various levels of spiritual maturity. We’ve identified at least six.

“These circles of commitment affect everything your church plans. From your preaching calendar to the structure of your small groups, you must be intentional about creating pathways for people to grow from one level of commitment to the next.”

Now, personally, I’m not a big fan of dividing your church up into ‘the congregation’, ‘the committed’, ‘the core’, etc. (you can read more about Rick’s six categories here). But, again, that would be a discussion for another blog post.

The point I want to make is this, once you start viewing the local church in this way, it’s not much of a leap to add levels of non-believers to the outer layers of the diagram. You can sub-divide ‘community’ into the first four thresholds of InterVarsity’s Journey to Faith, or the first three levels of CVM’s model.

Is it time for a rethink?

I think it is. Here are some reasons why.

We lose the majority of people before it’s time to tell them about Jesus!

This was particularly clear in the Send Institute’s Start-Up Funnel. It was only the people who made it all the way to the fourth ‘evangelism’ category (roughly 50 out of 3,000) who got to hear about Jesus. The other 2,950 didn’t make it to that point!

Instead of spending our time, money and resources coming up with a way to tell as many people as possible the good news of Jesus, we’ve spent most of our effort narrowing in on a select group of people.

But I actually think CVM’s 4-level model is the most common strategy used by churches – with only one level of zero ‘Christian’ content. But the result is basically the same.

A typical church’s evangelism programme

• Level 0: There are 5,000 people in our church parish (the very top of the funnel) and we invited all of them to a free church BBQ.
• Level 1: At the BBQ (which was a roaring success with over 200 guests) we invite everyone to our church wine tasting event that’s happening in a few weeks time.
• Level 2: The wine tasting didn’t attract as many guests as we’d hoped (there were about 30 in total) but the speaker was great and it still felt busy as all the church regulars turned out. Flyers were handed out for a Christian Explored course that’s starting the week after.
• Level 3: There were only two guests at week one of Christianity Explored. By week two this had dropped to just one guest, so it was decided to stop the course and do a one-to-one with that individual instead.

The BBQ and wine tasting event were largely created to funnel people from our parish into Christianity Explored. But that doesn’t seem to have worked. Why? What went wrong? It was looking so promising at the BBQ!

Well it turns out that we didn’t actually put on a Christianity Explored course for people in our parish. Instead, we put on a Christianity Explored course for people in our parish who…

1. Read flyers that come through their letterbox
2. Enjoy going along to random community BBQs
3. Were free on the actual day of the BBQ
4. Enjoy going along to, let’s be honest, mediocre wine tasting events held in churches
5. Were free on the actual evening of the wine tasting
6. Are interested in Christianity enough to sign up to a six-week course
7. Were free whatever night of the week the course was held on

Understandably, that leaves you with just two people out of a possible 5,000!

It’s not our job to “warm up” cold contacts

This is another business idea. Imagine you have a list of cold contacts that you want to sell something to. Nobody is going to buy from you right off the bat. First, you need to warm them up a bit. Give them something for free. Show them you’re a nice guy. Then you can try and sell to them.

Funnel evangelism adopts a similar approach. There are 5,000 people in our parish, but we assume that none of them will listen if we go straight to telling them the gospel. First, we need to warm them up a bit. Invite them to a free BBQ. Show them we’re normal people. Then we can tell them the gospel.

But I don’t think we have any reason to think that way. It’s not our job to “warm up” people in our parish to church, Christianity, or Jesus. It’s our job to tell them the gospel.

1 Corinthians 1 tells us that there will be two responses to the gospel…

“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” – 1 Corinthians 1:18

“But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” – 1 Corinthians 1:23-24

You see, it really doesn’t matter how many free church BBQs someone’s attended or how many of our evangelistic “levels” they’ve progressed through. They will either see the gospel as foolish or wise. False or true. Weak or powerful.

An unbeliever is no more likely to see the gospel as wise, true and powerful just because they’ve spent six months working their way down our evangelistic funnel.

Alpha at Hackney Church

I remember listening to a baptism service at Hackney Church. Before getting dunked, each baptisee (is that the correct term?) would share a few words explaining why they were getting baptised and how they’d got to this point.

What shocked me was how many of them had signed up to Alpha purely based on seeing the banner outside church. That shouldn’t work! Who signs up to a 10-week course, in a church, where they don’t know anyone? That’s going from zero to a hundred, real quick!

But we forget that, whether they were aware of it or not, God was drawing them to himself. God was the one doing the initiating.

That means we don’t need to go hunting around for the right people to tell the gospel to. And we don’t need to warm them up first with fun times and free stuff. God is the one doing the warming. God is the one awakening the hearts of those he has called to himself.

What’s the alternative?

Ok, so we’ve decided it might be a good idea to stop installing 50ft helter skelters and crazy golf courses inside our cathedrals. This kind of top-of-the-funnel evangelism is expensive, takes up a lot of our time and effort, and distracts from actually telling people the gospel.

“But what’s the alternative?”, I hear you crying out! If we’re not going to be putting on church BBQs, and jazz nights, and truffle making workshops, and pub quizs, where should we direct our efforts instead?

Well, in tomorrow’s article we’ll be looking at “friendship evangelism“, which is surely one of the most popular trends in 21st century evangelism. Maybe that’s the answer? Or maybe not.

To be notified when part three goes live, please follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

The post Funnel Evangelism: 21st Century Evangelism Strategies (Part 2) appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

In this article, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on “free lunch evangelism”; what it is, why we naturally want to do it, and why it might be time for a rethink.

This is part one of a four-part series looking at evangelism in the 21st century. I’ll be covering…

1. Free lunch evangelism
2. Funnel evangelism
3. Friendship evangelism
4. Faithful evangelism

What is free lunch evangelism?

“Free lunch evangelism” is a term that I’ve literally just coined. But it certainly isn’t a new idea.

Apparently, back in the late 19th century, saloons in America would lure customers in with the offer of a “free lunch”. This lunch would naturally be nice and salty, to encourage plenty of drinking.

And it led to the aforementioned expression, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. After all, the saloons wouldn’t have been offering the free lunch if they didn’t expect to at least cover the cost through additional drinks sales.

In reality, it was all about the drinks!

Lunchbar (noun)

If you’re into your Christian jargon you’ll know that a lunchbar is an evangelist event put on by university Christian Unions in the UK.

Lunchbars take place on campus at, you guessed it, lunchtime. And they usually comprise a short gospel talk and a free lunch.

Back in 2010, I took over the role of Evangelism Secretary at Nottingham Trent Christian Union and that meant I inherited the job of running the lunchbars. I would book the venue, find a speaker, get the flyers printed, and make sure we had plenty of food for our “free lunch”.

I also inherited a couple of wearable sandwich boards that had “FREE LUNCH” plastered on the front and back in all caps. CU members would walk up and down campus wearing these and handing out the flyers.

As you might expect, plenty of students were interested in getting a free lunch. They were less interested in sticking around for the Jesus talk. And most were able to come up with a half-decent excuse for why they needed to dash off just before the speaker got going.

That is free lunch evangelism at its most primitive!

Beyond lunch

But it doesn’t have to literally be a free lunch that you’re using to lure people in to your evangelistic talk. The “free lunch” can be all sorts of different things.

• A live band/jazz night
• A quiz
• A sports tournament
• A party/fun-day
• A standup comedian or magician
• A breakfast/curry/BBQ etc.

Absolutely anything that you’re using to get people through the doors and bums on seats. It really doesn’t matter what it is.

I’ve been involved with every single one of the alternative free lunches listed above. A sports quiz, with a 10-minute gospel talk in between rounds. A table tennis tournament, with a testimony before the knockout stage. A comedy night, where the comedian switches gears at the end and starts talking about Jesus.

That’s free lunch evangelism. You came for the free jazz, drinks and nibbles. But, in the end, you realise you paid for it by listening to the talk.

A free lunch (with a talk) vs a talk (with a free lunch)

Before we move on to looking at why we love putting on free lunch evangelistic events, I want to briefly highlight a good reason for offering a free lunch at your evangelistic event.

St Nick’s Talks meets every Thursday at St Nicholas Cole Abbey in London. They meet at lunchtime, are openly evangelistic, and give everyone a free lunch.

But St Nick’s Talks is not free lunch evangelism!

Here’s the key question you need to ask…

Are you offering a free lunch to make it easier for people to come to the talk or is the “free lunch” the main thing being advertised to get people to the talk?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not against providing people who are attending your lunchtime talk with a free lunch. That sounds like a great idea!

City workers probably don’t have time to attend your talk and go and grab food in their lunch break. So, instead of making them choose, why not sort out lunch for them?

The issue is when the free lunch becomes the main draw. The bait you’re using to lure people in.

When we were putting on our lunchbars at Nottingham Trent, we could have put the title of the talk on the sandwich boards and then told people that lunch is also provided. Instead, we went for… FREE LUNCH!

Why we love free lunch evangelism!

Most churches I’ve come across engage in some form of free lunch evangelism. Why is it so popular? I think there are a few reasons.

1. The numbers

When we put on an evangelist event, we generally consider it a success if lots of people come and the room feels full. And we assume we’ll get a lot more people through the doors for a “truffle making and chocolate tasting” event than an evangelistic sermon.

So, when planning an event, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out which type of “free lunch” our demographic will find most attractive.

We end up with lots of dodgeball tournaments and open mic nights at universities and plenty of arts and crafts mornings and jazz evenings everywhere else.

Most of the time, lots of people do come to these. Because plenty of students are up for a dodgeball tournament. And seemingly, baby boomers can’t get enough of jazz music!

2. The easy invite

The general impression is that Christians find it difficult or uncomfortable inviting their non-Christian friends to a gospel talk, and that it’s much easier to invite them to a church BBQ or a sports quiz.

So, we put on a “free lunch” evangelistic event hoping that the congregation will be a bit more enthusiastic about inviting people from their “network” (family, friends, colleagues).

And, in general, we probably are more likely to invite our friend from work to “a film night happening at our church next Saturday” than to a talk from Luke’s gospel.

3. The brand perception opportunity

We have a sneaking suspicion that the world around us thinks Christians are boring, stuffy, old, stupid, uncool, or whatever. Perhaps an exciting “free lunch” evangelistic event could be just the thing to change their minds?

We’re normal. We’re cool. We’re intelligent. We’re sophisticated. We’re fun.

Something like a wine tasting event ticks all of those boxes. It’s fun. It’s cool. It’s alcohol – surprise! It’s high-end.

Is it time for a rethink?

I think it is. And here’s why.

Firstly…

I think it’s strange that we’re putting on evangelistic events that are, at most, only 10% gospel – if not 5%, or even 0%! If the power is in the Word then shouldn’t it be given the majority of the time?

I’ll admit that I don’t know a great deal about historical revivals. But, as far as I’m aware, they were built out of Christian meetings and preaching – rather than local churches trying to cobble together, for example, a circus and then sticking a 10-minute “God slot” in the middle of it.

And, from what I’ve read in the New Testament, I don’t think Paul chose to implement any evangelistic tent-making workshops as a part of his missionary journeys either.

Secondly…

I don’t know about you, but free lunch evangelism has always made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Like we’re not being 100% honest with people. Like we’ve got a hidden agenda.

We’re putting on a creative writing workshop, for example, but we don’t really care about helping you to improve your creative writing. The only reason we’re doing this is to get you through the doors so that we can tell you about Jesus. And we figured you wouldn’t come if we were more open about it!

And the more I think about it, the more it all just starts to feel a bit desperate. As if we’ve decided what we’re offering isn’t very good so we’re trying to get people in with something else instead.

It reminds me of something my wife told me after visiting Tom Kerridge’s Pub in the Park. Naturally, she and her friend were drawn towards the tent giving out free brownies. But once she got inside, a lady started talking to her about Trinity Theatre.

Trinity Theatre don’t really care about brownies. It’s certainly not what they’re passionate about. Surely it would have been better if they’d used the art of drama to engage with people, rather than confusing them with brownies!

Thirdly…

Free lunch evangelistic events are meant to be easier to invite people to. But I’m not convinced they are.

For starters, most of my non-Christian friends don’t really want to come to a jazz evening. They’ll often decline the invitation before I’ve even mentioned there’s going to be a “short gospel talk” at the halfway point. It’s the “free lunch”, the random extra bit, that’s putting them off!

Let’s say I do find a friend who likes jazz and enjoys going along to jazz nights. Well, now I’m a bit embarrassed to ask him. I’m assuming he probably isn’t going to be that impressed with the church band’s attempt at a jazz night. It’s certainly not going to live up to what he’s used to.

And am I inviting him to a jazz night or to an evangelistic talk? Kind of both, right? But it’s actually pretty hard to invite someone to two things.

So I start by asking him if he fancies coming along to a jazz night at church. But then often there just isn’t a natural opportunity to mention that “there’s also going to be a short gospel talk at some point during the evening”. And if there is an opportunity, what am I meant to say anyway? I can’t remember the vague provisional talk title – if there even is one.

I reckon that the majority of guests at free lunch evangelistic events are at least slightly surprised when the vicar gets up and starts speaking from the bible. And with that in mind…

Fourthly…

We need to remember that we’ve probably been to so many of these free lunch evangelistic events that we start to forget how weird it is.

Imagine a friend invited you to come bowling with him and some of his mates from the local Green Party. And you thought, “Why not? I like bowling.”

And then, in between the first and second game, some random man stands up and spends 10 minutes telling you why everyone should join the Green Party. You look around and most people there already are part of the Green Party. They all know each other. They’ve got their Green Party badges on. So he’s basically just saying you should join.

And then after the talk, your friend turns to you and says, “So, what did you think of the talk?”

“Ummmmmm…”

What’s the alternative?

I think a lot of churches have started to realise that free lunch evangelism is a pretty awkward, clunky, and altogether odd way to tell people about Jesus.

It makes people uncomfortable. It feels a bit deceptive. It rings of what happens when you’re on holiday and they try and sell you a timeshare.

Because of that realisation, I’m seeing more church “evangelist” events where the free lunch isn’t only taking priority over the message, but there simply is no message. The whole event is just a free lunch.

These events become an opportunity to serve the community. Or to get to know the community. Or to show Jesus’ love to the community. Which is fine. But it’s not really evangelism any more, is it?

I’ve heard this sort of event being called “pre-evangelism”. The “first step” of developing a relationship with those outside of the church.

But I won’t say any more about that today, otherwise I’ll spoil tomorrow’s article (part two) on what I’m calling “funnel evangelism“.

If you’d like to be notified when that one goes live, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

The post Free Lunch Evangelism: 21st Century Evangelism Strategies (Part 1) appeared first on Ben Larcombe.

But who is Fixupboy? We decided it was time to find out by asking him ten quick-fire questions…

How old are you?

• 18.

Where are you from?

• North London.

What are three things you love?

• Shoes. Cars. Girls.

What are three things you hate?

• Liars. YouTube Beats. Drum & Bass.

If you weren’t doing music, what would you be doing instead?

• Selling drugs.

How would you describe your music in one word?

• Sad.

Who makes up your team?

• Midnight1200 and CasperMasi.

Which other UK artists (from outside your team) do you rate?

• Digga D.

Who is your favourite artist of all time?

• Vybz Kartel.

What’s been the highlight of your music career so far?

• Getting half a million plays on a song.

You can find Fixupboy on Spotify, Soundcloud, Instagram and Twitter.

And you can also find his music on his YouTube channel.

The post Who is Fixupboy? appeared first on Ben Larcombe.