Sharing the gospel and curry! Hillbank Men’s Event

At Hillbank Church prior to COVID, we would have men’s outreach evenings around three times a year. Throughout COVID, our focus, like most churches, turned inward and the job of shepherding the flock took precedence over reaching the lost. Since then, things have very much taken off and our church has grown – meaning church maintenance has kept us all very busy. But truthfully, we have struggled to prioritise evangelistic outreach and have been eager to address this.

After Gavin preached at one of our Sunday services a few months back, we decided to press on with a men’s evening and invite him to speak. We have many in the church who are regularly engaging with non-Christian friends, family and workmates throughout the week and we wanted an occasion where they could invite these people to an informal event where they could enjoy food and hear something of the Christian message. We know events like these are central to the heart of Solas so we were really pleased Gavin could be part of the evening. Around 30 guys came along, maybe a dozen or so would have been non-Christian. Many more were invited but we’re aware that events like these won’t appeal to everyone. We enjoyed a curry together before Gavin spoke.

Gavin’s message was on point. He looked at the topic of Men of Integrity. He initially spoke about how integrity is in short supply in the public sphere, looking at examples in politics and pop culture before considering how, in reality, all of us fall short in this area. Suffice to say, everyone could in the room could relate to this. Gavin went on to share how only in the gospel of Jesus can we know true acceptance and forgiveness from God despite our failures. The message was simple, clear, relevant and very easy to listen to. No prior Bible knowledge was required which was a great help for the guys who came along.

Our hope going forward is that events like these help to serve as one step among many in our evangelistic engagement with our non-Christian friends.


Matthew Blakeman is Community Pastor at Hillbank

How Do We Know What’s True?

How do we know what’s really true? Especially when it comes to the big questions of life — like where everything came from, whether life has a meaning, and how we should live? Steve Osmond explores why when it comes to what’s true, what you believe really matters.

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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

PEP Talk with Sean McDowell

This week on PEP Talk, Andy chats with US author and speaker Sean McDowell about reaching students and young people with the gospel. What themes pervade the lives of young people on both sides of the Atlantic? From science to identity to the goodness of God, Sean provides insight into how we can equip our children and young people to respond well to these questions.

With Sean McDowell PEP Talk

Our Guests

Sean McDowell is an Associate Professor in the Christian Apologetics program at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University in California. He is a speaker and author, co-author, or editor of over twenty books including Rebel’s ManifestoChasing Love, The Fate of the ApostlesSo The Next Generation Will Know (with J. Warner Wallace) and Evidence that Demands a Verdict (with Josh McDowell). Find out more at seanmcdowell.org

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

Islam and Oslo

With family links in Scandanavia, Andy especially enjoys occasional ministry trips there. In this short video he gives an update on his recent trip to work with IFES and a Bible College in Norway. With IFES he was sharing the gospel and dialoging with Muslims, and then helping young Christians to grapple with the apologetic challenges they will face as they go to Higher Education.

Evidence for Belief – Andy on the ‘My Faith at Work’ podcast

Audio Player

Andy Bannister was Simon Ward’s guest on the My Faith at Work Podcast recently, for a wide ranging discussion about the Christian faith – and the evidence for it. You can play the episode with Andy on by pressing on the link above. Alternatively follow this link to the webpage for the programme and listen there, as well as see all the other interesting guests that SImon has interviewed.

Perfectionism, grace and drums – Undercurrents in Whiplash

Several years ago, I asked a Chinese friend why only one of her elite post-doctoral group of pure mathematicians were from the UK. The answer I got was shocking. “I have a daughter in primary school in Scotland, and you do not understand education here. Most of what my daughter does in school is play; her academic work is constantly interrupted by parties, games, outings, assemblies; and the school day is so short. In China at that age, I studied maths every day at school and for many hours before and after school too – here it is all play, play, play!”

I was confronted with the question: what price is worth paying for perfection?

Whiplash is a film about individuals being crushed by the relentless drive for greatness in a particular field. It could have been maths, or sport; but the film is set in the world of jazz – in which the key figure Andrew Neiman (played by Miles Teller) is a drummer. The pressure to become “one of the greats” is certainly an internal drive for Neiman; but is taken from obsession to destructive levels by his teacher Terence Fletcher (J. K Simmons), whose drive for perfection destroys students. Perhaps worse still, Fletcher seems convinced that his students must be broken repeatedly to push them beyond ordinary human limitations. “The two most dangerous words in the English language are, “good job”” he notes. As such, Fletcher’s teaching method not only demanded iron discipline and technical excellence, but also involved a form of psychological warfare against his students. Films have occasionally shown army recruits being broken in this way; but rarely with the ferocity which Simmons brings to the part of Terence Fletcher.

The two central performances in Whiplash, are superb. Teller is excellent as the driven, intense, gifted, yet vulnerable young drummer; who learns to confront his demons both inner and external. Simmons is truly horrific as the dangerously out-of-control Fletcher, who values winning and perfection above people. Simmons’ viciously foul-mouthed and blisteringly intense denunciations of errant students is like something from the Maoist cultural revolution; it is gruelling watching – but impossible to turn away from. In Fletcher’s world, if he destroys fifty people, but makes one genius, he’s a happy man. Like all the best movie villains, Terence Fletcher makes compelling viewing. In one scene (spoiler alert!), Fletcher weeps over the death of a student – a great player who he had ‘broken’ and made legendary. “He was a beautiful player”, laments the teacher. We later discover that the young man had killed himself – the parents blaming Fletcher for the psychological torment he endured at his hands. Yet still, even as Fletcher appears to show some normal human warmth, or even vulnerability his words are chilling. “He was a beautiful player”, seems to suggest that Fletcher wept not for the loss of a person, but for the loss of his talent.

The film leaves us with an ambiguous conclusion; on one hand Nieman finally emerges as a great drummer; and gains the respect of his fellow musicians and his sinister teacher. However, we are left with a question mark. Would he have achieved such greatness without Fletcher’s psychological battering, or would he have consigned himself to a more contented mediocrity? Leaving aside the much-debated issue of whether practice-makes-genius or not; the issue here is – what price is it worth paying in pursuit of a goal?

Neiman is shown giving up on most aspects of what it means to have a normal balanced life; he has no friends, has given up on sport, and loses his girl in his thirst for perfection. He ends up as a specialist, but with a malformed life. These questions are pertinent in parenting and education. We may not be as extreme as Fletcher; but when is it right to push our kids; and when is it right to let them just meander along contentedly? Are our schools so fearful of the kind of Fletcher-dynamic depicted in Whiplash that they fail to inculcate any kind of love of excellence in our children at all? “Gold-stars all round – and who cares what mark you actually scored?!”

Central to the almost unbearable dynamic of this film is the way that the master propels the apprentice towards perfection under the constant threat of rejection. Being the ‘core player’ in the music school’s prestige band was an honour entirely at the disposal of Fletcher and expulsion from the band something he could execute on a whim. The film depicts the pursuit of perfection as the ideal of greatness and significance; but it also portrays a self-destructive fear of rejection as the necessary stimulus for its achievement. This seems to leave us in an impossible dilemma in that either greatness doesn’t matter on one hand, or that people don’t on the other.

This is a remarkable example of what we might term “un-grace”.

In contrast, relationships which are founded on the concept of grace, (rather than accomplishments) work in exactly the opposite way to the dynamic between Fletcher and Nieman. In grace-founded relationships, (be they human-human, or Divine-human), the pursuit of greatness, is predicated upon the foundation of compete acceptance of the person; which in turn produces a mutual striving towards what is good. The force that propels the student (or disciple) forward, is not the fear of rejection and humiliation from behind (as with Fletcher); but the embrace of the other willing them forward towards a beautiful conclusion. That could be a parent leading a child towards career goals, but we also see it in the Christian story of God embracing us ;ole a Father- and leading us towards holiness, purity, and Christlikeness.

Grace is the very idea that meticulously high standards and goals are not to be lowered, but that people are to be loved and valued even while those high standards are being worked towards. The fear of rejection is not the great stimulus to progress; but the grasping of a magnificent vision is.

Whiplash is a great film which unsurprisingly won prizes at The Sundance Film Festival upon its release in 2014, followed by five academy award nominations. The plot is intriguing, the dialogue alarming, and the acting intense and frightening. Allegedly based on the author’s real experiences at a leading American musical college; it demonstrates the nature of abusive power-relationships, where the people are forgotten in the pursuit of some goal or accomplishment. Simmons’ searing portrayal of Fletcher will remain the most poignant memory of Whiplash, and a sombre reminder of how ugly humanity looks when we use people to serve things, rather than things to serve people.

I am intrigued when I speak to people who imagine that God looks something like Terence Fletcher. After all, God is perfect and demands perfection – and is a judge who offers both rewards and punishments. Mercifully though that is where the comparison ends. The Christian faith says that God will embrace and accept us as we are, to then lead us towards perfection. He doesn’t lower His standards but lifts us towards them. Most remarkably of all, at the cross of Christ we see that the person who gets broken to achieve that is Him and not us. There is a price worth paying for perfection, and the message of grace is that that Christ has paid it for us. The genius of Whiplash is that it shows us what perfection without grace would look like, how destructive that would be and how much we need it in human relationships but ultimately from God.

Whiplash is available on DVD, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Good News in South Glasgow

At Solas we love working with local churches to put on low-key outreach events in their communities, to share the gospel with people who don’t come to church, essentially. We often use neutral venues to do this, sometimes they take place inside church premises too.

Our friends at South Glasgow Church opened their doors, and offered food, a friendly welcome and good hospitality to their neighbours and invited them in. They asked me to speak on a topic they thought would interest people in their community and chose “the pursuit of happiness” for the evening. It’s based on the idea that we look for happiness in all the wrong places.

It’s actually one of my favourite evangelistic topics to speak on because it is so accessible and understandable to people with no background in church, working knowledge of the Bible, or a Christian worldview.

I got the basic framework for this talk from a friend in Canada, and it really is very helpful for people. It’s based on the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who suggested that there are four levels of happiness and that true satisfaction in life only comes when all four levels are addressed.

The first level of happiness is ‘animal happiness’. That’s the happiness that comes when our basic needs for things like food and sex are met. However, only pursuing these things leads people into dissatisfaction and unhappiness because of diminishing returns. If you eat a doughnut, it’s great, but if you eat another and then another eventually you feel ill. And of course, our culture encourages us to treat sex the way we treat food and that has just caused chaos. There’s nothing inherently wrong with food and sex either – just that we are clearly designed for more than just those things so if you try and live at that level you end up simply unhappy.

If level one doesn’t satisfy you have to move up to level two. Level two , is the comparison game in which you gain a degree of satisfaction by doing better than somebody else at something -perhaps by winning in a sport, coming top of your university class, or climbing the career ladder. Again, there is nothing wrong with competition per se, in fact healthy competition can be a fun part of life. If it is the only thing you are living for though, you will have a problem because you won’t be at the top for ever. Eventually someone will join the sports team who is faster than you, or someone else will be promoted over you, or be the boss’s favourite and one day you will flunk an exam. It is also exhausting, if you have to justify your miserable existence by constant performing. If you try and gain happiness through the pursuit of level two happiness, you’ll just end up unhappy.

So, if you are unhappy at level two, what do you do? You have to go up to level three happiness! Level three happiness comes from living for others, pouring your life into somebody else. Parenting and charity work are two great examples of very rewarding things that we do, which can produce this kind of happiness. The problem here is that you can’t totally live for others, not least because if you do your job really well, they will no longer need you. ”The Empty Nest Syndrome” is what we call the sadness some parents feel when their job is done and the kids no longer need them. Worse than that, the great atheist philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche pointed out that if you are serving others in order to pursue happiness – you’re not actually doing it for others but in fact being selfish! It’s a very pointed critique, and all means that if you try this you will ultimately end up being unhappy.

The only answer is to find level four happiness. That means finding something truly bigger than you to stake your identity, meaning and happiness on. For Christians that is all about realising that life should ultimately be about worship. That is discovering happiness in loving, knowing, worshipping and being known by the God of the whole universe who created us and designed us for relationship with Him. The great thing about that is that it is not competitive in that you don’t have to earn it God’s love. Also, you can’t outgrow it, and when you have learnt to locate your satisfaction there it liberates you to enjoy other things. Parenthood, charitable work, competition, food and sex – become things that we do desperately trying to justify ourselves – but become good gifts that we can give thanks to God for because they are in their proper place. In contrast I knew a guy who told me that prior to becoming a Christian he had lived at level three. He had placed his family on such a pedestal and idolised them in ways they could never live up to. He said that he almost destroyed his marriage, and drove his kids away before he became a Christian and started to put things the right way round.

It was good to see that there were some non-Christian people who were there for event in South Glasgow. And I have found that with that talk I very rarely get any push-back. It always seems to open up really thoughtful, positive conversations.

If you would be interested in running an evangelistic event for your community along these lines, them have a look at this article entitled, “Taking the Gospel Outside the Four Walls of the Church” : Café Style Evangelism in Six Easy Steps. If you’d like to invite a Solas speaker to help you on the night, please do get in touch. We work all over the country, with churches large and small. We’d love to hear from you.

Jenny Hamill from the church wrote, ” It was great to welcome friends from the local community to our evening with Andy. As we considered ‘the pursuit of happiness’ there was opportunity to listen, question and even debate a little!  The message of hope in Jesus was clear – that we experience true joy, whatever our circumstances, when we know Him as our Saviour and friend.”

PEP Talk with Jon & Penny Thorp

Sometimes you just need a bit of enthusiasm to get out there and do it! Today on PEP Talk, Andy chats with a couple engaged in old-fashioned street evangelism and tract distribution.  Having seen God work through these in their own lives, Jon and Penny encourage their church family to be actively speaking to others at work, in the community and on the High Street.

With Jon and Penny Thorp PEP Talk

Our Guests

Jon & Penny Thorp met through their work driving buses in West London. Penny was saved through an addiction recovery program and Jon came to the Lord in 2019 after knowing Penny for six years. They are now married and active at Feltham Evangelical Church.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

From Athens to Swindon – Andy at Pattern Church

Pattern Church in Swindon is the church that my family and I have been attending since we moved to the area last year. It’s a fairly new church plant in the Church of England, which was supported by Holy Trinity Brompton. It meets in an old factory dating back to the days when Swindon was a massive railway town built around the headquarters of the Great Western Railway (GWR). Half the town was these enormous engineering facilities, for the railway. That has nearly all gone now, but those enormous buildings remain and Pattern Church have got one of them and built their worship centre in. The name “Pattern Church” comes from the history of their building as the Pattern Factory which held all the engineering templates for the GWR.

It’s a lively church with lots of young families. It’s also got lots of new Christians in it too – people who are very new to faith. Being planted by HTB they have loads of ALPHA related mission going on, something really central to their ethos.

They asked me to preach at Pattern Church with a mandate to really help and encourage Christians to share their faith with their friends and work, home and school. One of the things about ALPHA is that it depends on people in the church bringing their friends along, which in turns depends on them having helpful conversations outside the church!

So I drew some lessons from a favourite passage of scripture to do this, Paul’s visit to Athens as recorded in Acts 17. In Athens Paul first of all toured the town and learned about the culture by careful observation. He looked at the sorts of things that dominated Athenian life, which were idols and temples and the busy religious life of the city. He then looks for a connecting point with culture and finds it in the ‘idol to an unknown god’ and doesn’t begin by criticising or denouncing it; but he builds off it. He commends them for their religiosity and proceeds to tell them about the unknown God. So I showed how that is a model for today, finding the things that our friends are into (not unknown gods in the literal sense) but things like justice, identity, the environment, or meaning. The task then is to show people the way in which that thing is great – but that these things makes little sense on their own. In fact – they only really make sense when embedded in a Christian worldview. Many people are looking for good things, but looking in all the wrong places.

It’s the approach we have taken here on the Solas website with the Have You Ever Wondered? series, starting with people’s everyday concerns and showing how they work in a biblical framework.

If you are a Fecbook user, you can watch the talk on this link, starting at 44 minutes.

The Road to Emmaus – and Maddiston!

It was good for Solas to renew our friendship with Maddiston Community Church. Maddiston is a village in the Falkirk area of Scotland’s centrla belt – and we’ve known the folks down there for many years.  I went down to Maddiston to speak about the appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples on the road to Emmaus for Solas – and to conclude the church’s series on the book of Luke. You can watch the whole message here.

Maddiston Community Church is the same fellowship that used to be known as Maddiston Evangelical Church. I asked them why they changed their name and they explained that while the term ‘evangelical’ accurately describes their theology, the term is widely misunderstood by folks in the community around them. An extreme example is a man who thought that it meant it was some kind of right-wing American import, with some connection to Donald Trump!

Thanksfully I wasn’t invited to Maddiston to talk about politics, but to talk about the transforming message of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what happened to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road as they trudged wearily home from Jerusalem after the crucifixion. Their hopes were dashed, and their understanding of how the Kingdom of God would arrive, lay in pieces. The very last thing they were expecting was to meet with Jesus – in fact they were going the wrong way completely. In addiiton to that they couldn’t see Jesus, they were dissiluioned with religion, confused about God and their efforts to figure it out themselves had failed. At Maddiston, we looked at the way in which the risen Christ overcame all these problems for the disiples – and how he can do the same for us today.

You can watch the talk in the link above, and read the original story in Luke’s gospel here:

How Could a Virgin Give Birth?

How could a virgin give birth to a child? This was asked at a live Q&A at Glasgow University and Andy Bannister shows how we’re faced with a choice of miracle: the birth of a baby without a man involved (but with a God behind the universe); or the miraculous birth of the universe from nothing, caused by nothing. Which is the harder to believe?

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Support

Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

“The Jesus God Shows Up” – Andy with Glen Scrivener

Andy Bannister was Glen Scrivener’s guest on the latest SpeakLife’s “The Way Back” programme. It’s a fast-paced lively and revealing conversation, as you would expect with Andy and Glen in the same room! The pressing issue of the nature and meaning of our humanity is an especially important part of the programme, all of which you can watch below:

 

Ethics, Comparative Religion and ‘The Problem of Evil’ at Bede’s School

An old friend of mine who I studied alongside at college called Savvas Costi is now the head of the Religious Studies department at Bede’s School, which is a large private school in East Sussex. He invited me and Sharon Dirckx, who often works with us at Solas, to join him for three days in the school.

We did a series of Religious Studies lessons, and lunchtime events – including an especially interesting open Q&A. Sharon did some work on God and Science with the students, as well as helping them to think through the question of God and suffering especially around natural disasters. These, of course, have been the themes of her last three books. Then I did a lunchtime event about human rights and where they are grounded, as well as an evening one entitled, “Does Religion Poison Everything?”. I also had the opportunity to lead a series of comparative religion classes.

As most folks around Solas know, I have been studying and comparing Christianity and Islam for years, especially the Bible and the Qur’an. So we did a session comparing the ways in which the two faiths explain the question of origins – how everything began. Then another one comparing what Christianity and Islam have to say about the problem of evil. We examined the contrasting ways that the faiths explain the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Obviously I can draw extensively on my background in Islamic Studies in those sessions and students are often struck by just how different the two worldviews are when you look in detail at how they apply to specific issues.

I was really impressed with something that one of the students (who wasn’t a Christian) wrote about the human rights session, for the school magazine too. He’d obviously enjoyed the meeting, and had really engaged deeply with the topic and wrote about it really well, so that was great.

Working in a school context is obviously very different from working in a church or a university Christian Union, in terms of what you can and can’t say – and the appropriate ways of presenting things. For example, in a school context you say, “As a Christian I believe that….. “ and there is a reasonable amount of freedom to explain the Christian perspective. What you can’t do is to simply state that something is true. So for example in the talk I gave on human rights, my big idea is that the concept of human rights doesn’t make much sense without God. In a church event, I might push that idea a bit further, but in a a school I might conclude by saying “what you believe about God is crucial because it affects things like human rights – because if you believe in God it is much easier to understand what we mean by ‘human rights’ and ‘human dignity’ than if you believe that we are just a random collocation of atoms”. And then let the students decide what they think. We also use a lot more interaction when working in schools than we would perhaps in a sermon.

The Bede’s students were really great when it came to interaction, discussion times and Q&A. In the classroom setting we’d speak for a few minutes and then ask the students to discuss and debate the ideas – and they were really interested and articulate. In the Q&A event, there were loads of really good questions from the 15-18 year olds who came along. Suffering, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and ‘why do you believe in God?”, all came up.

It was also interesting to observe what happens to a society which is losing its Christian worldview though. I asked one class, “Who here thinks that what Putin has done to Ukraine is wrong?” Every hand went up, So I asked them “why is it wrong?” And no one really knew. So I asked if some things are definitely right and other things definitely wrong – or are these things really just preferences? All but two students said that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are just personal preferences! Two lads had the courage to disagree and say that they thought that there might be more to it than that. The problem was that they all wanted to condemn Putin, but almost all of them had no basis other than preference for that stance.

It reminded me of a famous article by a secular philosopher in the magazine of the Ontario Teachers Association. He had done similar conversations about the basis of morality with High School students and wrote: “I fear we are raising a generation of moral paralytics, they know what they should believe but have absolutely no idea why they should believe it.” “What is going to happen when this lot grow up and have to face difficult decisions?” he asked.

Sharon Dirckx also really enjoyed the week at Bede’s School, and said,

“We had a really blessed time at St Bede’s school. I had the opportunity to take lessons on Am I Just My Brain? with sixth formers. In one lesson, a student began to see during the lesson that there was a lot more to human identity that he’d initially realized. This student then proceeded to come to many of the lunchtime/evening talks. St Bede’s is quite a secular environment but also one where several students were asking the big questions of life. It was a privilege and joy to be there.”