Alltnacriche is a wonderful Scripture Union Centre near Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park. I have many happy memories of camps and work-parties there, and of exhausting cycles up and over the famed ‘Burma Road’ – a dramatic track which climbs high over the mountains behind the centre.
This time however, my trip to Alltnacriche was a little different. Shula, the chief instructor at Alltnacriche, had come across Andy Bannister’s “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking LIke An Idiot” training session online. He’d done a longer more comprensive version of that talk for the CS Lewis Institute recently, which they had posted onto YouTube. You can watch that by clicking here.
With two days of staff training to arrange for folks from Alltnacriche and Lendrick Muir, Shula thought that it would be great to equip and encourage the instructors with the tools for gospel conversation that Andy outlined in that session. The problem was that Andy was arriving back in England in the early hours of that morning after speaking in Norway, and was due in St Neot’s for a Solas conference the next day! So there’s no way he could come.
So Shula and I devised a plan; we’d use a virtual Bannister! Not quite an AI version of Andy – but the video from YouTube. So after I had introduced the topic, we watched Andy’s introduction about the ‘Power of Questions’ and the way that Jesus used them in the gospels. Then we broke for discussion in small groups and they all thought abuot questions they had been asked, as well as examples of Jesus and questions in the gospels. Then we used sections of the video followed by discussion to work our way through Andy’s talk.
The SU instructors seemed to respond well to the format – and we had a good time of Q&A at the end when many different issues were raised from specific questions they get asked to the relationship between Jesus’s many questions and his memorable parables.
This was the first time we have done a hybrid in-person/video event; but I was pleased with how it went and delighted to be back in Alltnacriche again too.
