It was something of a trip down memory-lane for me, when I was invited to speak at Dundee University Christian Union recently. They still meet in the same place (The Dundee University Chaplaincy Centre) that they did in the early 1990s when I was an undergraduate and member of the CU! My time in the Dundee University Christian Union was formative for me, and I can still vividly remember some very profound talks I heard there from people like Jim Clarke (then of Central Baptist Church, Dundee) on Psalm 32 and the late Dominic Smart on the ‘parable of the wise and foolish builders’. It was also the place where I met my wife, almost three decades ago – so many reasons to be grateful and nostalgic!
One of things that was most heartening for me was to see that student Christian witness on the campus is still alive and well, and in good hands! I left the CU there in 1996, and that means that seven ‘generations’ of students doing four-year degrees have come and gone since I was there. What was exciting to see was that just as the baton had been passed to our cohort by the people like Ian Gall (Riverside Evangelical Church, Ayr), and Jamie Grant (Highland Theological College) who went before us; so it has been passed on, and on and the flame has not gone out. This little glimpse of local ‘church history’ is perhaps more moving to observe than the young might appreciate. I know that when I was a student, hearing such things would have made me dismiss the speaker as being too sentimental! But perhaps with age comes a little insight!
DUCU were in the middle of their build up to their Events Week, their major outreach for the year; featuring our friend Michael Ots as the main speaker. As such, I was asked to speak about how we go about answering tough questions. The aim of the session was to help the students to have the courage to speak about their faith – and not to fear the ‘killer-question’ which stifles open faith conversations.
The approach we took was certainly not original to me, but was based on work by people such as Solas’ Andy Bannister, Glen Scrivener, Randy Newman and others. We have come to call this approach “the 5 Re’s” as the steps we work through are:
- Relate: feel the weight od the objection, reach the person
- Reflect: expose any flaws in their worldview
- Reframe: place the issue in a biblical worldview
- Retell: tell the gospel story through the issue
- Resource: admit what we don’t know and recommend good resources
The CU students then went into a series of discussion groups to look at the great question of suffering and God. Each group thought about one of the five steps and then thought through the implications for the problem of pain and fed back their conclusions to the whole room. We only had 45 mins for all of this, so it was rushed; but hopefully beneficial.
The students seemed to be in good heart, very up for mission and engaged well with our session together. Our hope and prayer at Solas is that sessions like these will help to equip the CU for more effective mission on the campus.
