It was great to be invited back to Norway for Bergen Sceptics Week. Several campus Christian ministries, such as Navigators and IFES, came together for a week of events at Bergen University. I’d been to Norway before and worked with the Veritas group there, but this time it was for a campus mission. Around 50 or 60 Christian students at Bergen were involved in organising these events. They spent their days on campus, inviting people to come to the events and handing out leaflets. They did huge amounts of groundwork—inviting people to the meetings which took place every evening.
I spoke at some of these events, which took place in a lecture theatre on campus. The theatre was pretty-full most nights, with a good mix of Christians and non-Christians in the audience. Happily, the students there all speak English, because I don’t speak Norwegian!
The first topic I did was ‘Why I Am Not an Atheist’, and then I addressed the subject, ‘Why I Am Not a Muslim’. They like to do these presentations interview-style rather than as a traditional monologue, which was nice because it’s such a friendly and engaging way to explore a serious topic. After these conversations, we did Q&A, and if the breadth of questions represented the breadth of people present, it was an extremely wide-ranging and diverse group!
The follow-up plans after Sceptics Week were really exciting too. They were challenging people who were interested in finding out more about the Christian faith to join the Alpha Course, which was starting the following week. Every morning, we started the day with a prayer and worship time, and shared prayer points and news. I vividly remember that on the Wednesday morning, the prayer request was that they urgently needed a new room for Alpha because the room they had booked for fifty people was full—Alpha was oversubscribed for the venue. So, we prayed for a new room, and a bigger venue was found. I believe in the end almost a hundred people signed up.
It was exciting to see the spiritual hunger there in Norway, as we are seeing in the UK—students are much more open than they once were to spiritual questions. The passion of the Christian students was also something I will remember for a long time. It was fantastic to observe the time and effort they put in, starting with their commitment to prayer. Then they were volunteering, giving leaflets out to their friends—which really shows what you can do with a relatively small number, just fifty or sixty people, if you are really intentional about mission.
