Running Introducing God in a café or church hall

Neil Fitzpatrick has run three Introducing God courses—two in a golf club and one in a church!

Introducing God is the most successful course we have run in terms of people becoming Christians. This is how it has worked for us. We began by organising an explanation and training dinner for 70 people, from our evening church at the golf club.

This won the confidence of our church members in the Introducing God approach. They worked really hard at inviting friends. The club worked well for us because it was a neutral venue, and we put into practice the values of the course in a non-threatening environment where people could have a good time.

When the course started, each week I reworked one of the talk scripts. Each script took me half a day to rework, changing names, personalising illustrations and familiarising myself with the PowerPoint graphics. This was very cost-effective and much quicker than working up the material from scratch. On the night we played the multimedia segments from the DVD before each session and then used the PowerPoint during my presentation. I loved how Introducing God enabled the Christian hosts to meet and talk about serious matters with their guests every week for the nine weeks. Introducing God has powerfully reminded us how important relationships are in evangelism. We knew this in theory, but by doing the course we have seen how much better a relational course is than “one off hit” evangelism. In a sense, the nine weeks is only just the beginning. The guests who came really enjoyed coming. We have seen our guests getting on board with the ideas as we have gone along. Even when they hadn't yet made a decision to become Christian, we saw them gradually integrate a biblical framework into their worldview—almost by osmosis.

At the same time as running the dinners on Wednesday night, I tried out the series, in parallel, on our new morning church plant in the local school hall. Here we weren't able to use the discussion groups so this was an adaptation from the original concept. About a dozen guests have joined us through that course and are now being integrated into our regular church life.

The other benefit for us has been that working through the Introducing God material has been really good for our church members, not just the guests. Everyone has been helped by being given the big overview of God's biography at a popular level.

Rev Neil Fitzpatrick, St Paul's Anglican Church, Carlingford, NSW

Find out who does what in an Introducing God course.