This year Solas has sent all three of our speaking team to Belfast as part of our ongoing friendship and collaboration with the C.S. Lewis Institute there. I was there for a short flying visit to speak at the orientation evening for their new cohort of fellows who have just enrolled in their wonderful year-long discipleship programme. During the ‘Fellows Programme’, all those who sign-up commit to a deep dive in intentionally following Christ, reading scripture, praying, mentoring, as well as reading important workd of theology – and engaging with evangelism and apologetics. It is an ambitious and very fruitful ministry. One of the highlights of the orientation evening for the new cohort, was hearing from one of last year’s fellows about the challenges of the year as well as it’s fruitfulness in life, character, enjoyment of God – and in evangelism.
My role was to speak about ‘The Fatherhood of God’ to the new cohort of fellows as they embark on this special year of their lives. The aim was to ground all our discipleship in the gospel of grace, as God is our Father! Because God is the perfect father he both welcomes us with all our flaws, but also disciplines and ‘prunes’ us for further growth. We have access to God – but we also need to walk before him with humility and in awe and obedience. Peter was a gung-ho disciple who made very bold proclamations about his level of commitment to Christ; and so was devastated when he denied Jesus. When Jesus restored Peter and ushered him into a relationship based on love, grace and forgiveness – he made him far more useful in the kingdom than the self-made man he was previously. So we looked at the way that sometimes in the Christian life, it’s failure and God’s gracious restoration that helps us to grow; more than our obvious successes.
The C.S. Lewis Institute in Belfast has recently expanded to Edinburgh too. Edinburgh is not a fully fledged Institute yet, but operates as a hub of the Belfast operation. So in addition to all the people there in the T3 Conference Centre in Lurgan, the evening was sent live to the hub site in Scotland. it’s encouraging to see this profound and important work starting to take root this side of the Irish Sea too!
After the meeting Andy Bannister arrived in Northern Ireland to speak at the CSLI for the rest of the weekend, with public lectures, evangelism and the commissioning of last year’s CSLI Fellows. Solas’s partnership with the CS Lewis Institute is really valuable. If you are a Christian in Ireland or Scotland and are looking for a way of accelerating your discipleship – then it’s really worth considering the CS Lewis Institute fellows programme – and you can find more information about it here.