Many years ago I was captivated by a phrase uttered by a friend who was at the time doing youth ministry at Willow Creek Church. He mentioned to me that the truth he believed was that “what we win people with, we win them to”. What was ironic about the statement was that Willow at the time was using a very entertainment driven model of ministry. They put on an incredible show each Tuesday night (competition, drama, bands, message) for 1200 high school students to persuade them with the gospel and then fed the converted into a worship driven teaching model on Sunday nights. About 600 attended that each week. I learned a lot of cool stuff from my friend and from Willow Creek, which I implemented into our ministry. Basically we scaled down their arena sized outreach to a café or club style presentation. Within a few years though, we saw more growth and transformation coming in our Sunday night worship and teaching program! Few made the transition from our way cool Tuesday nights to our deeper Sunday nights.
A few years back, I was speaking to a class at Eastern University and made the statement that “what we win people with, we win them to” which generated more than a chuckle in the classroom. It turns out they considered this a ‘Duffyism’ or term they heard often from Duffy Robbins. Ironically, if I had been doing Duffy style ministry over the years, I would have sought to ‘win’ students with fun games and exciting events and then try to funnel them into ever deepening levels of discipleship. My experience showed otherwise, which is why I made the statement. Students are far too consumeristically obese in regards to fun and entertainment to fit into funnels! A later visit to the same school, speaking in an evangelism class, I unpacked my experience with evangelistic efforts and explained the phrase again. After class a guy approached me and told me that I had just contradicted everything he had been taught about youth ministry from Duffy!
Now, today at the Christianity Explored Conference, Rico Tice made the statement that ‘How the start is how they continue’. What he meant is that our method of evangelism will become our means of disipleship because that is what got people into the faith to begin with. In other words, people in the process of conversion gain a preference for ingesting truth. So, the Christianity Explored course (and CY, the youth edition) seek to get people into the Bible from the start of their encounter with Christianity so that they will know where to turn to in order to continue growing. Hence the Discipleship Explored course follows the same pattern of digging into scripture.
It is amazing that with an ocean between us and very different cultural climates, that God would show us the same truth!
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