We are really blessed in our church to have Amy. Amy works for our church full time doing various things including pastoral ministry but focusing on evangelism.
She has been brilliant at mobilising the mums in our church in their outreach. Before lockdown she was helping us to run several courses inluding “wonderfully made” and “Christianity explored” and we were seeing exciting fruit from that.
But during lockdown she’s continued to encourage us to reach out with the gospel despite social distancing.
I wanted to share her event idea with you, because it was really encouraging and fruitful, and perhaps it is something that your local church could do too (although aim to do it quickly, as who knows when lockdown restrictions will be lifted?!).
So the event was called “COVID-19, Homeshcooling and Hope”. It included three 5 minute slots by a different mum in our church who shared some stories about trying to homeschool their children during lockdown (funny, real and sweet stories) and then a “tip” of something that they had tried and had some measure of success with during crisis-schooling. The tone was very conversational, of ordinary mums trying to muddle through, and certainly not as experts. After each slot, we would go into breakout groups (we tried to keep friendship groups together to make conversation easier, to give people another reason to attend the event – i.e. to see friends virtually, and to make follow-up easier). Then there was a 10 minute evangelistic talk at the end of it. If you would like to hear an audio of the event, either for your own encouragement or out of interest then subscribe to our mailing list and you’ll receive a link to all our downloadable material, including this talk. If you’re already a subscriber, look out for this week’s round up of posts in your inbox (it should come on Monday), and we’ve added a link to the download page into that email too.
Also, if you would like to do a similar thing at your church then I am happy to send you my evangelistic talk script, and you can just edit it to use your own anecdotes.
We were really excited by the response to the event. We had 25 mums attend, 17 of which were guests. There seemed to be a real appetite for connecting with other parents, for chatting this stuff through and for the message of hope too.
So Amy and her graphic design fiance designed a 5 week follow-up course and booklet. Based on the same themes as “wonderfully made”, but edited to make it applicable to parents of older children who are crisis-schooling.
The format is similar – 1 mum will have a 5 minute slot on an area of crisis-schooling, another mum will have a 5 minute slot to talk about a common problem area in parenting, and then a 5 minute pre-evangelistic talk (we hope this might lead onto a Christianity explored course once wonderfully made is finished). Between each of these talks, there is time for discussion in breakout groups.
We would encourage you to try something similar with your friends or as your local church. If you have any questions about how this could work in your context just send us a message, I’d be really happy to help, or maybe get Amy to call you – she’s so winsome and encouraging, you’ll be pumped up to do it!
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