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News | Christianity Explored on the streets

15 December 2008

Rosemary Wright reports on how Christianity Explored is being used by All Souls Local Action Network (ASLAN), a group of 300 volunteers working to manifest God's love to homeless people in London

A couple of years ago, ASLAN decided to run Christianity Explored for our guests - those who come to dinner on Saturday nights at the Clubhouse. For years, many people had resisted the idea of doing any sort of formal Bible study at the meal, because of the old model of “Sit and listen to the Gospel first, then you’ll get your food.” It was strongly felt that this was not a Godly way to present Christ’s message.

But this was going to be different. Dinner was served first, so there was no bribery! Then anyone who wanted to do the Christianity Explored course was invited to go upstairs and join in. Those who stayed downstairs could still do the usual after dinner things - playing games, reading or chatting.

So in October 2006, we began, using the DVD version of Christianity sessions regularly and the questions and discussions after each talk were very interesting. The whole course was well received and it was obvious that our guests understanding of the message of the Gospel was deepening. Their responses to the claims of Christ on their lives were increasingly thoughtful and positive.

'You can't stop now. . .'

At the end of the series, the guests wanted to know what we were going to do next. “You can’t stop now!” was the universal feeling. We cut back to once every two weeks, to save leader burn-out and talked about what to do. We decided to go through some books of the Bible, with one of the leaders preparing a ten minute talk, and writing some discussion questions to do afterwards.

Over the next year and a half we worked our way through Romans, Acts, Genesis and Thessalonians. It was great to see the way our guests’ faith and knowledge of Scripture grew over this time. We realised that something precious that we take for granted - joining good Bible study groups where we can take time to study, discuss, question and reflect - is hard to get if you’re living on the streets. Homeless people find it difficult to be accepted into the usual middle class church.

Over summer, we ran Christianity Explored again. In November we started the Discipleship Explored course, just published on DVD, and we were delighted when new guests began attending.

Could you pray for this little group? The prayer Paul prayed for the Philippians would be a good one:

“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ - to the glory and praise of God.”

Philippians 1:9-11

Reproduced with kind permission of All Souls Local Action Network.

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