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Faith Shared

Session 5 - How Does Your Church Invite People to be Part of its Story?

Session Activities

At the end of last week, you asked the group to reflect on:

  1. Where do they connect with people outside the church?
  2. How do the wider community connect with the church?
  3. What is the nature of the interactions?

Introducing

After giving people some time to refresh their minds about these questions, ask people to share their thoughts. It would be good to think creatively about how you could use the space. Maybe have a board at each end of the space you are meeting in with question 1 at one end and question 2 at the other. Give people a number of post-it notes each and ask them to put their ideas on the boards.

It doesn’t matter if people replicate answers, the point is to get a variety of opinions rather than looking for correct answers.

Once people have done this, ask them to spend some time looking at what everyone else has put up, and ask them to sum up their interactions with the wider community.

Expanding

Exploring

The aim is, using the table below as an example, reflect on what your church is already doing, the Mark of Mission it engages with, and the impact. You will likely need more rows, so this is just here as an example.

Once you have filled out the table with as many things from your church life as you can think of, look back over them and pick out any that don’t engage with a mark of mission. Spend some time thinking about how it could be adapted to, or if it can be.

Alternatively, or as well, you could spend some time looking over other activities/events and thinking about how you could deepen their impact.

  • Specifically think about how evangelism is part of these activities, and how it could be made more prominent.

Making it stick

  • Sometimes when we think about the things that we could do as a church, we stop there and don’t take the actions needed to follow through on our plans. If you feel you have spotted an area in which your church could do some good within your wider community set up further planning times to make it a reality.

Praying

Using the audio prayer, give the group some time and space to reflect on the ideas that you have been exploring through this session.

Session 5 Materials

Session Sheet

Video

Audio

Session 1
What is Evangelism?
Session 2
What is Your Story?
It is important that before we start trying to explain our faith to others, first we reflect on our own journey.
Session 3
Where and How Can You Share Your Story?
Session 4
Jesus’s Story
Why does Jesus matter? Why is He important? Why do we think He is worth following?
Session 6
Ideas for Outreach
God is standing with us, looking at the world, and saying to us, ‘Let’s do something about that.’

More Resources

Faith Pictures

Helping Christians of all traditions talk about their own story of faith with confidence.
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Faith Questions

Faith Questions is a free resource from Church Army helping Christians of all traditions think about the difficult-to-answer questions of our faith.
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Faith Empowered

Enabling those who feel called to evangelism in the local church to explore their calling.
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