This post was originally written when I had the privilege of involvement in the growing IFES student ministry in Europe. It’s attached here in the hope that it can still be an encouragement, and as a resource on a number of key issues…
This is a good time to be a Christian student in Europe. A new wind is blowing through the continent!
Not long back, the situation of Christian student groups in many of Europe’s universities seemed so discouraging. In several countries, the total number of students active in evangelical witness was under 50. Even in countries with quite large evangelical communities, the outlook was often grim: apathy, disinterest, materialism, secularism. I remember Berit, a faithful Christian student from a Scandinavian city with large churches, who was nonetheless astonished to hear of situations elsewhere in the continent where students were turning to Christ in large numbers: ‘How can this be? Non‑Christians won’t come to Christian meetings, will they ‑ they won’t have the time?’
So much of this has changed. In many places adventurous outreaches have been taking place where they never have before.
Still, there are many situations where the work is small: large, cold, sprawling universities where five, ten or twenty believers are wondering how they can make an impact on tens of thousands of pagans. But taking the continent as a whole, we see Paul is right (Eph3:20)….
‘To Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, be glory…’
God wants to accomplish more through us than we have thought possible: more than we have dreamed!
How? What follows sets out to offer just a few of the possible practical answers to that question…
STIRRING UP THE FIRE
On my wall I have a sticker that a friend gave me after we’d spent some time together in door‑to‑door evangelism. It says: ‘Miracles happen to those who believe in them.’ The opposite is also true: ‘Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall certainly get it!’
William Carey’s watchword is famous: ‘Expect great things from God: attempt great things for God!’ But maybe in Europe we’ve been drugged into hopeless inaction by the enemy; expecting nothing, attempting nothing.
Anyone travelling round Europe’s student groups will be asked these questions: ‘How can we motivate our people? Our group aren’t committed: what can we do?’ And in one sense the answer is: there is nothing we alone can do. Only God can wake the dead and stir His people into flame.
But He does do it. And all over the continent He’s using ordinary people to do it. How? Six ways at least…
Let’s start by recognising that we genuinely can build commitment by modelling, by example. Some of us doubt whether God could possibly be capable of creating anything in us that could ever be a good example to others! But He does (fortunately it’s His work, not ours!) Again, some of us feel a bit nervous of this whole idea ‑ we know about the cults and strange movements that tell their members to pattern themselves totally on their leader. But leadership by example is a thoroughly biblical notion. Paul, for instance, tells the young church in Corinth, ‘Follow my example as I follow Christ’s example’ (1 Cor 11:1).
And we do indeed tend to follow the examples set by one another. When a Christian student comes to university at the start of their academic career, they look around ‑ unconsciously, perhaps ‑ at older Christian students, and observe what it means in their lives to be a Christian at university. What part does evangelism play in their lifestyle? Or prayer, or the Bible? How do they spend their time? What do they live for? (That’s why it’s so important to take time with your new members when the new year begins; take them out for pizza and share your dreams for the work with them.) Enthusiastic commitment is infectious (so is cynicism): if you’re living all out for God, and drawing on His strength to keep you from discouragement, God will slowly give you a team of likeminded people who have come go share some of your dreams. It’s always easier to mobilise by enthusiasm than by guilt!
Secondly, we can build commitment by teaching. If your group is sluggish and disinterested in giving themselves to the work of the Lord, maybe you should take a long, hard look at your programme. Is your group a place where people really hear God’s word speaking into their lives in a compelling way? (Do you believe that’s possible?) Are the topics on the programme genuinely designed to draw out the nature of discipleship and mission, practically and relevantly? Are you bringing in speakers – if necessary from a distance! – who really are gifted by God to give your group a vision for what He wants to do with them, for why their group exists?
What passages of Scripture have a bearing on these issues? Many do ‑ even some unexpected ones! For example, if you’re struggling with a group mentality that is afraid of stepping out and challenging the secular university, you might like to plunge into the Old Testament and study Joshua ‑ that book of breakthroughs and conquests by the power of God, with just a few blunders and defeats, as there always will be. You might like to compare its opening section with the end of the first chapter of Judges (the book of decline and disintegration). You know which of the two situations you want to be in, and you’ll want people to see the point of these passages: when we go forward, like Joshua, God goes with us; when we settle down in disobedience to God’s call to mission, we decay inside and end up losing what we think we have. Or maybe our group find it hard to think of ourselves ‑ with all our weaknesses ‑ as the bridgehead of God’s power into the university. Again the Old Testament can help us: even Jesus, we find, ‘had no beauty that we should desire Him… He was despised and rejected’ (Isaiah 53:1‑3). Alongside that we could consider 1 Corinthians 1, and Paul’s comforting insistence that God has chosen ‘the foolish things… the weak things… the lowly things’ to accomplish His purposes (vv26‑31)!
Or perhaps a few of your members are finding it hard to get mobilised because they come from unhealthy church backgrounds where they were trained simply to be a passive audience. Perhaps they need to encounter the teaching of Ephesians on the body of Christ, that God gives ‘each one of us’ a part to play (v7), that the Body only grows and builds itself up as ‘each part’ does its indispensable work (v16). Or maybe you’ve got the common problem of people seeing the Christian community as a fortress, not an army. Maybe then it’s the ‘outward‑bound’, adventurous nature of discipleship that needs to be preached: that we’re followers of a Christ who came into the world to ‘seek and save that which was lost'(Luke 19:10), who wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and who now challenges us, ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you'(John 20:21). Maybe we need to preach the fact that the prime purpose of the Holy Spirit’s coming, according to Jesus, was not just for our own blessing but to equip us to impact the world (Acts 1:8); and indeed that, if we aren’t giving ourselves unstintingly in love for the lost world, we aren’t growing much like the God who `so loved the world that He gave His only Son’ (John 3:16) at all!
Thirdly, by clear objectives. Often the reason why people aren’t committed to the student group is simple: nobody has ever explained to them why it matters so much! No one has pointed out just why student work is one of the most important things happening in evangelism today: that this is where we reach our world’s future leaders and people‑shapers ‑ the future political leaders, business leaders, media leaders, scientific leaders, social workers, managers, and (maybe most strategic of all) schoolteachers ‑ and reach them at that time in their lives when they’re making all the big decisions, and are free to explore and experiment with new ideas. In fact the Christian student group isn’t just a hobby for believers; it’s arguably the most important thing happening on campus! God has given us many important things in our student lives ‑ studies, exams, relationships, career possibilities ‑ things that will affect our lives for decades to come. But consider: what we’re doing in student evangelism will affect people’s lives for the next million years! What is at stake is nothing less than heaven and hell.
Our aims must also be expressed clearly and enthusiastically in terms of our vision for a particular term, semester, or academic year. This is part of the task of our group’s leaders. God is sovereign, and He has overruled that they should be brought into leadership; and that means He has promised them the availability of wisdom (James 1:5) to think prayerfully where the group should go during the year to come. It is then the leaders’ job to share with the group, ‘This is what we think we should do this year: and we believe God wants to bless us!’ Unless our direction is clear, we cannot expect people to be committed.
Fourthly, we can build commitment by news from elsewhere. Europe is one of the harder continents for the gospel in today’s world. If we lose sight of what is happening elsewhere, we might well despair. Here is where world vision is so important. If our group know about the hundreds of students coming to Christ every year in east Asian nations ‑ the African nations that have seen 10% or more of the students actively involved in student witness ‑ the numerous South American countries with backgrounds combining occultism, traditional Catholicism and political extremism where nonetheless students have seen breakthroughs…… Inevitably it raises the question: maybe the God of these lands is God of our city too?!
Fifthly, we build commitment by praying, systematically, by name, for our fellow Christian brothers and sisters. Look at how Paul prays for his friends in Ephesians 1:15‑20 or Colossians 1:9‑12. Why not follow his example in your own prayer time, one night each week?
Sixthly, we build commitment by pastoring. There are many things in our lives that can cripple our willingness to venture out for God: sin; doubt; old emotional wounds; past occult involvement; wrong relationships; grudges; guilt… God calls us to care for one another, to love one another. And as we do, He may help us sense that something is hindering a brother or sister from really going forward with God. We may be wrong ‑ or we may be right. Perhaps He will use us sensitively to draw the issue out, to talk it through and pray together, so that our friend can be liberated for the work of the kingdom. Sometimes it may be something beyond our experience to help; but that’s precisely where God may want us to link our friend up with a staffworker or local pastor or older Christian who has the experience needed. That person may never come to know about the situation unless God brings us in to act as a link.
But there is a `more excellent way’ which sums up all of these. It’s important enough to need a section on its own…`
LEARNING TO KNOW THE LIVING GOD
She was an old missionary who had spent many years in India. I was an impatient, activistic young Christian who was really enjoying the progress we were seeing in our highschool student group and had also just discovered how valuable and enjoyable street evangelism could be. I was all for ‘getting on with the job’, all the time. Patiently she reminded me: When Jesus chose His disciples, it wasn’t, first of all, that they should serve Him. Rather, it was primarily that they should ‘be with Him’, and then, only then, ‘that He might send them out to preach’ (Mark 3:14).
It’s true, of course. Some of us find it a really hard lesson to master: it is not easy learning the discipline of prioritizing our time with God. But if we don’t, there’s an emptiness under all our activism; our message becomes shallow, and one day we hit discouragement or trouble or simple exhaustion, and we burn out. For our group, too, the same lesson holds. If they are to venture out on the life of faith, they must have a clear vision of the living God. When Stephen told the story of the people of God in Acts 7, this is where it all began: ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham…'(v2).
Time and again, this is how God prepares the people He wants to use. He is going to send Moses to lead His people out of Egypt, but first He takes him to the burning bush for that dramatic revelation of His nature expressed in His Name I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3). He is going to send Isaiah on a career of being perhaps the foremost of the mighty Old Testament prophets, but first of all He brings him into a devastating vision of His majesty and holiness; only then can Isaiah be ready to say, ‘Here am I, send me’ (Isaiah 6).
The vision of God’s glory gained during our time ‘with Him’ must come first. This is what we were made for! The staggering thing is that God longs for us to be in His presence. God wants us indeed to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’, but one thing matters even more to Him: `Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’ (Mark 12:30). Moses could be used by God to liberate the people from Egypt because at the core of his being was this hungry longing to know more of God: ‘I beseech you, show me Your glory’ (Exodus 33:18). So if we are to be used by God to bring His gospel of liberation into our sick world, we too need to be people who have seen the glory of the living God.
For that there is no replacement for time spent in prayerful, worshipful Bible study. Alas, this is where our superficiality shows through so often. Whether we are young Christians or leaders and staffworkers, we face the lifelong struggle: the enemy sees to that. Looked at purely logically, it seems so strange: we know our academic work demands hours of disciplined study; yet we expect to accomplish with far less effort the highest objectives this world offers, the knowledge of the Holy One who is Lord of all creation, and the overturning in His Name of all that is dark in this world. We know in our hearts that the Bible should, logically, receive as much of our attention as social media or the television. Well; there’s a target we can begin with, at any rate.
When I was a student one of my friends turned up one day with a grubby little tract that urged us to read five chapters of the Bible every day. It did us good ‑ that was taking the Bible seriously! And after all, that’s how we read any other book. We don’t read other letters in the slow, fragment‑by‑fragment, get‑through‑the‑letter‑in‑a‑month way we approach Paul’s epistles. (And then we complain we find it hard to remember what he’s talking about!) Perhaps the tract was a little over‑ambitious: perhaps three or four chapters a day would have been better. (That gets you through a book like 1 Kings in a week, and the whole Bible once a year. By the fourth time round, even the obscurer books will begin to seem familiar.) Nor would we want to deny the value of different patterns of Bible study: of reading three or four chapters in our morning prayer time, perhaps, then using our evening prayer time to dig in greater depth into a few verses, paying attention to the things we find hard to understand or would have expressed differently if we’d written it ourselves. Maybe we’d want to vary between quantity‑study and depth‑study on alternate weeks, or different days of the week. Nor, again, would we want to exclude biblical meditation: slowly chewing over a verse from our passage, letting the full weight of it sink into our consciousness.
But the main thing is that we really come to know God’s Word, as a whole. Too often our Bible knowledge is like a `Greatest Hits’ compilation: we know our favourite passages in the gospels or Acts, and one or two chapters here and there in the epistles, but that’s about all. (The Old Testament in particular gets neglected.) God has prepared better things for us than that. He has made ready for us a full diet, to give us a broad, rounded picture of what He is like. It’s not for us to tell Him we don’t need what He wants to give us in 1 Kings or Malachi! We need the unique insights into His glory that we find in each Bible book. Without Genesis, we cannot understand how our world got to where it is today. Without Job and Habakkuk and Hebrews, we are under‑equipped for the times of bleak darkness that come upon every believer at some point. Without Exodus 33 or Isaiah 40, we are deprived of the vital awareness of the unimaginable majesty of God.
We need it all! Without a real knowledge of God’s self‑revelation in Scripture, we will be ill‑equipped when we find ourselves in the thick of the battle. When ‘the enemy comes in like a flood’, when everything seems to be collapsing around us, the crucial question will be: How firm is my grip on the reality of God? What is true of us as individuals is also true for us as groups. Oliver Barclay was once asked the secret of the prolonged faithfulness and effectiveness of the British student movement of which he was general secretary. His answer was quite specific: the ‘full biblical diet that is really taken into our minds and lives’, expressed at three levels ‑ in the personal study of individual members, the collective Bible study of small‑group gatherings, and the Bible exposition of large‑group teaching. (It’s noticeable how local Christian student groups tend to go off at a tangent in contexts where Bible exposition in the churches is weak.) As John Stott has said, we are called to be ‘radical conservatives’: unshakeably, fundamentally committed to the trustworthiness of the entire Bible and its teaching, and courageously radical in its application to every area of lifestyle and society. But it is only if our radicalism is soaked in God’s Word that we will remain truly radical, avoiding being blown around by the changeable fashions of the world’s thinking.
If we want to make an impact for Christ, worshipful Bible study is vital. It is possible. We can set aside priority time for God’s Word, reading and rereading it, getting an overview of a book, summarizing its flow of thought in a page or so, going back and studying it in smaller sections and more detail; worshipping God for what He shows us, asking Him to search our hearts as we ask: What are You teaching me here about Yourself? about people? about salvation? Is there a sin for me to avoid, a promise to claim, a command to obey, an example to follow? Why did You want this passage or section here ‑ what specifically does it emphasise? What did it mean to its original readers ‑ and what is its application to me now, today? (Our group can experience the same process in ‘manuscript Bible study’.) We can read books like IVP’s helpful ‘Bible Speaks Today’ commentary series; we can take notes of our discoveries, use them as fuel for worship, and file them for next time round.
But especially, we can share (or preach!) what we’ve learned. Again, we can be models, examples, in this. A student group where it’s considered super‑spiritual to be making your own discoveries from the Bible will soon be impoverished. By sharing in our small‑group meetings something we’ve learned that week in our Bible study, we can help set a different trend. (Share briefly and simply, of course ‑ the aim isn’t to show off what you’ve learned, but to encourage others that they can easily make the same discoveries ‑ and to listen yourself and be enriched by each of them too!) One phrase seems perhaps to mark off sections of the book of Acts: it occurs in several forms, but they’re mostly variations on Acts 12:24: ‘The Word of God increased and spread’. That’s a definition of growth, of impact. When we as group of Christians are full of the Word of God, it will tend to leak out into our conversations and our life in the world around. All too often we have nothing to say about God. If every day we are meeting Him face to face and worshipping Him as He reveals Himself to us, that will cease to be a problem. Indeed, our enthusiasm about our latest discovery from God may have more impact on a non‑Christian friend than the most polished gospel outline we could ever hope to memorise. We live in a culture that has lost ‑ and is hungry for - ultimate reality. If we give ourselves to worshipful Bible study, God’s Holy Spirit will dazzle us periodically with the glory of God, the wonder of Christ. Then, when we speak, people will listen: they will know we are not merely `religious’, that there is reality here that religion can never provide. Something in them will sense that with all our oddities, we have glimpsed the glory; that we actually know the living God…
LEARNING CONFIDENCE
So as we encounter God, day by day, we come to know Him more deeply, we have something to say. Yet still, somehow, we are afraid to speak of Him and be known as one of His children. What is the reason for this lack of confidence?
There may be several reasons. One may be that we have never really sorted out what exactly it is we want to communicate. We know all kinds of things about our faith, but we’ve never really sat down and clarified what we want to say.
This is where one aspect of evangelism training can be of real help to our group, by teaching us a gospel outline. There are numerous ‘packages’ available: the Navigators’ “bridge diagram” is one; Agape’s “Knowing God Personally” is another. You could adapt any of these to suit your own context and personality; but the point is that they can help in enabling us to summarize and present the fundamentals of the gospel clearly… who God is, his glory and holiness and love; who people are, and where we stand, loved but sinners, before God; what God has done ‑ the coming of Christ, His death and resurrection; the new life of discipleship in the Spirit that God offers us; and how we can enter into that new life by true repentance and faith. Many of us who don’t use any of the widely‑known ‘packages’ or booklets nonetheless carry around in our heads some such ‘map’ of where we’re aiming to go in a conversation or a relationship as we share Christ with a friend. Gospel outlines aren’t to be used mechanically, nor should we feel we always have to unload the whole story on every soul who crosses our path! That wouldn’t show much sensitivity to their particular needs; and besides, we may only be one link in a long chain of Christian contacts through whom God will face that person with the challenge of the gospel. But mastering a gospel outline does avoid the situation where a Christian is asked to explain their faith and can only stammer out, ‘You’d better talk to my pastor/staffworker’. Often in northern Europe we can gain a hearing with students who have rejected religion when they learn that we too aren’t religious – rather we’re followers of Jesus… but then we must be able to explain the difference! Learning an outline that suits us, and practising it in roleplay with Christian friends, can take away a fear that might otherwise cripple us.
Another thing that can destroy our confidence is a lack of awareness of the reasons for faith. I once heard an Australian Christian student asked why she believed, and to my horror she replied, ‘Well, I was brought up that way, and I’m comfortable with it!’ That was fine for her, but totally unhelpful for any non‑Christian who would probably say, as many European students do, ‘That’s OK for you, but I don’t need it’! The apostle Peter tells us we should ‘always be prepared to give… the reason for the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3:15).
Negatively, that means we should be ready to answer the questions non‑Christians may ask us. In chapter six of How to Give Away your Faith, Paul Little points out that there are a few questions that crop up over and over again: What about those who have never heard your gospel? How could Christ be the only way to God? Isn’t the Bible full of mistakes? Hasn’t science disproved Christianity? How could a good God allow so much suffering? Surely if I live a good life that will get me to heaven? In our student group, we can discuss these or more recent issues in groups, and pool our insights. (Incidentally, the best answers to these questions are those that point us beyond the merely intellectual levels to the central issues of the cross. We don’t want to waste time playing intellectual games over things like the complexities of evolutionary theory if we don’t have to!) Of course we can’t provide all the answers, and it’s precisely because we know Christianity is true that we can happily say to a non‑Christian friend, ‘No, I don’t know the answer to that question ‑ let’s talk about it again next week!’ Many would‑be witnesses for Christ find their fears disappearing once they know they need not worry about the questions they might get asked.
That’s defensive apologetics; it’s also important that we know how to present the positive reasons for faith. Now, it’s essential that we recognise we can never argue anyone into the kingdom of God. Paul tells us quite clearly that the devil has ‘blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see’ (2 Cor 4:4); ‘the person without the Spirit doesn’t accept the things that come from the Spirit of God… they cannot understand them’ (1 Cor 2:15). That takes a great pressure off us: we aren’t called to win heavyweight intellectual wrestling‑bouts with every atheist we encounter! It’s a supernatural battle in which we need supernatural weapons with ‘divine power’ (2 Cor 10:4): and Ephesians 6 tells us what our weapons that break through the demonic veil of blindness and bias are ‑ prayer and the ‘sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. So we come with our weak, faltering human words, crying to God to turn them into His penetrating Word of grace that will shine through into the darkened mind of our friend.
It’s on that basis that we share the ‘reasons for the hope we have’. Paul did it: time and again in Acts we find him ‘reasoning… explaining and proving'(17:2‑3), ‘trying to persuade’ (18:4), ‘arguing persuasively'(l9:8). The glory of the Christian gospel is that it is genuinely, historically, factually, true! And our group’s training programme should give our members confidence in the solid foundation of their faith ‑ helping them see the reasons for belief in God, in the trustworthiness of Scripture, in the deity of Christ, in the historicity of the resurrection. We can circulate books like Josh Mcdowell’s More Than a Carpenter or Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. All this will help our friends become people with the confidence to make an impact for Christ on their surroundings.
Two other things can cripple people’s confidence. They may find it hard to trust the power of God. Some have never seen a non‑Christian turn to the Lord and find it so hard to imagine it happening. Who can you bring in to share at your group as a living proof of what can occur? Again, news from student groups elsewhere is helpful here in expanding people’s sense of what is possible. But there may also be an emotional barrier: they have never ‘jumped in the deep end’, never faced the experience of standing up and being counted for Christ. Samuel Escobar wrote in In Touch of how the Peruvian IFES movement used an evangelistic march to throw their members into ‘public exposure as Christians on campus’. In my own university, a regular event where we sang and preached outside the main student building had the same effect: even the most timid Christian could stand with their friends in the group, but then their non‑Christian friends would see them and the sniggers would be got over once and for all… Involvement with booktables can have the same value in helping people across the emotional barrier that stops them sharing their faith.
LIVING WATER FOR A THIRSTY WORLD
It is a wonderful thing when we first grasp that the message we have truly is the ‘power of God’ (1 Cor 1:18). Often we feel tempted to slip back into unbiblical, pre‑Reformation ways of thought, that the gospel can only come with liberating power when it’s preached by a professional. But the Bible insists on God’s delight in using ‘the foolish things… the weak things of the world'(v27). As Paul puts it:
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling.(2:1‑3, NIV)
He certainly did: Acts 18 tells us Paul’s fears were so severe that the Lord Himself appeared to him in a dream to reassure him that nobody was going to hurt him! But fear can do one of two things: it can paralyse us, or it drive us to cast ourselves on God’s strength. Paul learned that his weakness made him usable to God (2 Corinthians 4:7‑12, 12:9‑10); and so that trembling man’s message was indeed the power of God to salvation; and the Corinthian church was the result. We have those same fears ‑ and the same all‑powerful message and the same Holy Spirit speaking within us (‘If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ’ ‑ Romans 8:9). So we have every cause to be prayerfully expectant; living hour by hour on the basis that the presence of God is with us; expecting him to lead us into situations where we can share His love and communicate a little of His truth; carrying with us always a gospel or a booklet to give to the people God has brought us into contact with.
But there’s an important point here that European students sometimes forget. Evangelism is not just what we say. In John 17, Jesus speaks of two kinds of evangelism. Firstly, the verbal: ‘I pray also for those who will believe in me through their (the disciples’) message'(v20). But He then turns to evangelism by how we live: ‘May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me'(v23). Evangelism has two sides: the verbal gospel, and the lifestyle of transformed relationships that validates the message. Both are essential. The message without the lifestyle is unconvincing; the lifestyle without the message is unexplained ‑ what is noticed may seem just to be our own ‘niceness’ rather than the transforming power of God.
Jesus had a lot to say about the impact of our lives on the world. ‘Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven'(Matthew 5:16). Obviously He is not asking us to make an ostentatious (obnoxious!) exhibition of our charity and piety! But at the same time He clearly expects us to be living in a way that provokes those around us to ‘think upwards’. Now, we may be a little too defeatist (particularly given the dismal track record of the institutional church) to believe that that could ever be the effect we have on our surroundings. But it is a simple matter of whether we believe God’s promises. If we belong to Christ at all, says Paul in Romans, we have the Spirit of Christ. And love, joy, peace, gentleness ‑ these are the fruit of the Spirit that appear as naturally as fruit on a tree, if we are spending time regularly in His presence, drawing on His nature in Bible study and prayer, and not hindering this natural process by sin or disobedience. ‘If anyone is thirsty’, Jesus said, ‘let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes on me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within them.’ John explains that Jesus was referring here to the Holy Spirit (John 6:37‑39). We live in a desert world. But Jesus promises that if anyone believes on Him, then out of them will flow that fertilising river of the fruit of the Spirit ‑ love, joy, peace, gentleness and all the rest ‑ flowing out into a dying, thirsty world; softly washing away the obstacles that keep people from Christ.
Do we believe Him? Well, if we don’t, we can give up hope of making an impact for Him. But the whole point of following Christ is stepping out in faith in Him; the just ‘live by faith’. The fact is that ‘those He justified, He also glorified’ (Romans 1:17, 8:30). The glory of being a child of God is that in reality, practically, tangibly, we are the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ right now (1 Cor 6:19). True, we ‘have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that this all‑surpassing power is from God and not from us’ (2 Cor 4:7). We know we aren’t perfect; the church of God is a hospital where broken people get mended (and some people outside the church may look a lot less broken than some of those God has begun mending). But although there isn’t perfection here, there is reality. We can see it ourselves in the ongoing lives of one another, of ordinary friends who are being faithful in following Christ. It’s His work, not ours; and Jesus is quite clearly teaching that He expects us to trust Him to do it.
If we believe Him, what are the strategic implications for our student group’s witness? Well, firstly, if the lives of ordinary, normal, weak’n’foolish young believers are supposed to include good works that will be seen by unbelievers and cause them to glorify the Father, then those believers’ lives had better be visible to non‑Christians. It’s no good staying in a totally Christian ghetto. In this same passage, Jesus told His (slightly decrepit) band of disciples that they (with all their imperfections that the gospels so frankly record) were the light of the world, and that nobody lights a lamp and hides it away under a bowl (Matthew 5:14‑16). Non‑Christians need to be able to see the lives we live.
In practice, this means it’s essential that every member of our group has prayerfully found two or three close non‑Christian friends who we study with, eat with, relax with ‑ who see us in our good times and bad times and see whether the life of the Spirit is real in us. (It is, if we belong to Christ at all, Romans 8:9.) During an extended friendship, the opportunity will inevitably arise sooner or later to talk naturally about the gospel; to lend books; ideally to pray together and at some point to look together at the portrait of Jesus in the gospels. (This is an incredibly important aspect of our group’s evangelism, which we won’t discuss in detail here. But Rebecca Manley Pippert’s How to Lead a Seeker Bible Discussion or something similar should certainly be circulating among your first‑year members!) In Britain, lots of students are turning to Christ each year in ‘missions’, week‑long evangelistic preaching outreaches – but the great majority of these have previously been exposed to God’s Word and Spirit over a long period of friendship, prayer, and (often) evangelistic Bible study. A Norwegian leader once told me that 80% of conversions in their country come from such friendships. (The tragedy, he added, was how few Christians had such non‑Christian friends.)
There’s another reason for this. We have to remember we’re asking our non‑Christian friends to believe some apparently improbable things: miracles, the resurrection, the supernatural, heaven and hell. You’re more likely to believe something improbable if you trust the person from whom you hear it. Once when I was speaking in a pioneering campus I stayed overnight in the house of an English lecturer and his wife. They had played a significant role in getting this group going, I gathered; I had good reason, therefore, to know the calibre of people they were. Overnight, perusing their bookshelves, I noticed a number of paperbacks on the Loch Ness Monster. At breakfast next morning, therefore, I asked why they had this special interest. I was told that they had seen it! On holiday one year in Scotland, they had seen this creature in the Loch ‑ they were actually mentioned in one of the paperbacks as a result. As a sceptical Londoner, what can I say? What would you say? The Monster is improbable, surely…. yet… what do you do when this improbable story comes from people you already have good reason to trust? That’s why in our outreach our friendships will pave the way for acceptance of the strange message we wish to share.
Of course ‑ as a Dutch student reminded me once ‑ this is all somewhat dangerous; friendships with non‑believers may lead us astray: the evangelistic frontline is a spiritual battlefield. True (though to stay off the frontline is to be of no use to God in the battle!) Indeed the influence will not be in one direction only. We may be seduced into adopting materialistic or immoral attitudes from our friends; we may be tempted into unholy activities, or to slip slowly into a sexual or marriage relationship with an unbeliever (2 Cor 6:14) that will destroy our usefulness for God and leave us one day looking back from eternity on a life which accomplished little for Him. It happens! Jesus knew these dangers, and, in the same chapter where He urges us to shine our light before men, He also emphasises the absolutely essential nature of holiness: ‘If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell'(Matthew 5:30). There is a precise balance in His words in (once again) John 17. ‘As You sent me into the world’, He says to His Father, ‘I have sent them (His disciples) into the world'(v18): we are to be totally involved with people, just as He was. But at the same time ‘They are not of the world, even as I am not of it'(v16): our lives must be marked by as radical, unswerving holiness as His was. Both aspects are essential. If we are in the world and of it too, we become compromised, colourless, unclean, and ultimately useless; if we are ‘not of’ the world but ‘not in’ it either, we are on the path of ghettoized monasticism, making no impact and failing to follow in the steps of our Lord.
Regrettably, this monastic heresy affects some parts of the Protestant traditions every bit as much as it does the Catholic tradition. In our group we may have to preach Scripture and demonstrate the nature of the ‘Jesus lifestyle’ very clearly in our teaching programme to get the point across. (Don’t forget the value of lending books like Rebecca Manley Pippert’s Stay Salt around your group.) In your small‑group meetings, too, it’s possible to set an example of how we think of non‑Christian friends. When prayer topics are shared, the aim is not to be able to report a dazzling account of how you’ve won yet another soul to Christ. (Younger Christians won’t follow your example, they’ll just feel depressed.) But do set out to share for prayer the next small step you’re hoping to take that week in a particular relationship with a non‑Christian friend. That way, other people can do the same. There are other ways you can share your vision too. In the student house I lived in, we would eat, read the Bible and pray together each evening; and we hoped that when younger Christians came for meals with us, they would pick up a way of thinking about non‑Christian friends from the prayer times they participated in.
Do we find those friendships hard to make? Perhaps it’s because we’re not hearing Jesus’ words in Luke 14: ‘When you give a dinner, do not invite your friends or your rich neighbours… invite the poor, the crippled, the lame'(vvl2‑13). ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me’, He said in Capernaum, ‘because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor’ (Luke 4:18). Maybe the students around us aren’t financially poor. But there are those who are emotionally crippled or poor ‑ lacking friends, maybe even driving potential friends away by their behaviour, by the long and boring stories they tell… maybe by the emotional wounds they carry from devastated relationships in the past. (Or maybe just because of being from another country.) Christ sends us to seek to be friends to the poor. In fact the whole business of serving others, of seeking and meeting others’ needs, is central to discipleship. Spiritual greatness, He tells us, means being a servant, ‘just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve'(Matthew 20:26‑28); and in John 13 He showed what this meant as His disciples bickered about status by clothing Himself in a towel and washing their filthy feet. ‘I make myself a slave to everyone’, says Paul, ‘to win as many as possible'(1 Corinthians 9:19). That was his ‘evangelistic secret’! We see the radicalism of Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek, give away our cloak, go the second mile (Matthew 5:39‑42); not many people will want to do these things ‑ no one wants to be a servant, a slave. ‘The most powerful evangelistic impact which the church can ever make’, said John Stott, ‘…is by such self‑giving love that spectators are compelled to see that it is the love of God.’ All around us there are needs; if we are seeking to live lives of servanthood as followers of the Servant King, then others will be drawn to us, as they were to Him. And the friendships we thereby develop will enable the life of the Spirit within us to be seen, validating the things we say.
There’s a second strategic implication in all this. It’s noticeable that a lot of what Jesus says about evangelism by lifestyle has to do with the collective life of His people. ‘May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent Me'(John 17:23). ‘By this all men will know that you are My disciples, that you love each other'(John 13:35). The transformed relationships within the Christian group demonstrate the reality of the life of the Spirit among us. And it’s true; we sense it, when our group is working properly. So again the question arises: How can we best expose this to our friends? It’s not surprising that many conversions occur in situations where people are exposed to the collective life of the Spirit in some depth ‑ camps; conferences; Christian student houses. This is also one reason why university hostels, dorms and halls of residence should be priorities for our outreach: the Christians living there will be seen frequently, the life of the Spirit that is genuinely within them will be on general display. I remember working in an outreach with a small group in a hall of residence in a Welsh university. They were mostly young Christians, but they loved one another and they loved other people. The reaction of the non‑Christians in the hall was striking: ‘We’ve never seen people like this before. We’ve never seen real Christians before.’ Their lives made it so easy to bring the verbal message of the gospel. (Often the person who brings the verbal message may not be the one who has opened up the way by their lives. That’s particularly true of witnessing to our families; sometimes a friend from outside may be able to say things we never could ‑ but only because of how we have lived.)
What other ways can we expose the collective life of the Spirit to our friends? What about evangelistic meals? I was involved for some time with a church youth group that was really finding their outreach ineffective. We trained and trained, and that was necessary, but nothing was accomplished. Finally we as leaders felt the time had come to step out in faith. We arranged to borrow someone’s home (a non‑religious context) one weekend: on Friday night there was a pizza party, on Saturday a Chinese meal. It was billed as an ‘introductory evening’: there was to be drama, and a brief talk. By the end of the meal, as we had relaxed and laughed together, I believe our guests had had an opportunity to sense ‑ if only subconsciously ‑ the reality of the Spirit’s life in the young Christians in our group. There was something here they could trust. After the message, one of our guests gave her life to the Lord (to the astonishment of the Christian who had brought her). Others followed. The meal format had exposed the life of the Spirit, and had got us off zero.
In all this a critical element is certainly the fullness of the Spirit. ‘You will have power’, said Jesus, ‘when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses'(Acts 1:8). We need that power! Charismatics and noncharismatics have argued to the point of breaking up the work of God as to how we get that fullness. Fortunately, in many countries the dividing lines are blurring as both sides become aware of the truths in the other party’s position (and where that isn’t occurring, the impoverishment of both parties is all too easy to see). But as Billy Graham said, the point is not how we get the fullness of the Spirit, it’s that we do get it! That isn’t a superficial way of closing the debate, but rather a challenge to each of us: if we want to see our group making a real impact in our university, then we are called to a yearning for more of God’s power in our own lives; how He answers that prayer is up to Him. (How He brings it about in the lives of other group members is His business too, and their experience may be very different from ours. There are a whole range of patterns in the book of Acts: there’s no one stereotyped route.)
The danger for both charismatics and non‑charismatics is complacency. ‘I’ve been baptised in the Spirit: praise God, I’ve got it now!’ Or: ‘Since my conversion I’m complete in Christ; praise God, I’ve got it!’ And all that time Christ is still wanting to do more in us than we ask or think, challenging us not to be so self‑satisfied with that which we’ve already attained (cf Philippians 3:12). ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled'(Matthew 5:6). The deliberate cultivation of a passionate yearning for more and yet more of God: this is what Christ seeks for and will reward. So being ‘filled with the Spirit’ is not a one‑off accomplishment. The verb Paul uses in Ephesians 5:18 is a continuous verb: ‘Keep on being filled with the Spirit!’ ‘Are you filled with the Spirit?’, someone once asked the great evangelist D.L.Moody. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘but I leak!’ We can’t be full of the Spirit when there are things in our lives that are not from Him. So day by day we must search our hearts, repent before Him of what is wrong today in our desires and actions, and claim again His fullness.
Jesus promises us that, for anyone who believes in Him, the Spirit will be like a river of living water flowing out from within him. But rivers aren’t always living, fresh, powerful. In Britain our government has confessed that our national water isn’t up to European standards and cannot be for years to come! In my old university we used to joke that you could walk across the pollution on the local river on a good day! Our lives can be that sort of river; filled up with garbage, rubbish bags, old cars, dead cats…. and in the middle of all that a dirty little stream is trickling down amongst all the rubbish, instead of the living flood that God intended. God calls us to search our hearts. ‘Come near to God, and He will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double‑minded. Grieve, mourn and wail… Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up'(James 4:9‑10). Then in repentance we can claim the unequivocal promise Christ gives us: ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?… How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?'(Luke 11:13).
The promise is for all of us. We may not know it ‑ we have no meter on our shoulders to tell us we are full of the Spirit’s power. We simply believe it by faith! It seems to have been in Paul’s experiences of weakness that he was most strong (2 Corinthians 12:9‑10). In Acts, the disciples seem often to be filled with God’s Spirit as they step out in action: when the job is there to be done, they are filled with the power to do it (eg 4:8, 13:9). So with us: how we feel is irrelevant ‑ we may, like Paul, feel weak. But we are called to live in repentance and faith, claiming God’s promise to give us His fullness, claiming His promise too that because we have His Spirit we have His almighty power to be His witnesses (Acts 1:8). This was a fundamental emphasis for early IFES leaders like Howard Guinness, who pioneered the student movement right across Canada in less than a year. It is not for us to divide our transdenominational groups by pushing our own narrow interpretation of how God should bring about this process in the lives of our fellow‑believers; that is between us and God as individuals. But one wonders how many believers there are in Europe whose salvation is sure and whose doctrine is orthodox, yet who have not obeyed Christ’s promise to claim from our Father the fullness of the Spirit’s power that we need to make a real impact by our transformed lives and words…
(Continued on https://petelowmanresources.com/student-outreach-dream-big-dreams-part-two/ .)
