Discovering answers to the biggest questions about Jesus
By Sean Wood
What’s the biggest question that you have about Jesus (or that you’d like to ask to Him)? Back in October 2022, this is the question that we asked to 600 students at universities across the UK. From their responses the Discover Jesus campaign was born!
We really hope that you had a chance to hear about the campaign from one of our e-mails (you can sign up for those here) or through a social media post. If not, the campaign took the top five questions about/for Jesus that we learnt through our surveys and made use of a few different newly developed resources that help get conversations started and help people begin to discover answers to those questions.
We even partnered with OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics to put together five podcast episodes in which experts from OCCA attempted to answer one of our top five questions.
As part of the campaign, we also created The Challenge. This was – believe it or not! – a ‘challenge’ that we created for students who are already Christians.
As new episodes of The Podcast were released each week over a five week period, we challenged Christian students to discover which of the campaign’s five questions most resonated with their friends and other students on their campus. Once they learnt which of the questions was most relevant to someone, they could invite them to explore it more by joining a discussion group or simply introduce them to the podcast series that they could go away and check out on their own.
Here are some stories from the campaign from the students who were taking steps of faith to start new conversations about faith and the students who were discovering Jesus:
Joel was having a long phone conversation with one of his friends who isn’t a Christian and decided to take the plunge and tell him over the phone about the Discover Jesus campaign and invite him to one of the weekly The Conversation discussion groups that was taking place in Cambridge. He was a bit taken aback by the enthusiasm with which his friend agreed to join the group. As a result of Joel, bringing it up, he even told Joel that he’d like to try going to church with him!
Frustratingly, Joel then had to go away on a trip for a couple of weeks, but when he returned it was his friend who enthusiastically reminded Joel about the invitation to join the discussion group!
Mona had been praying for an opportunity to have a conversation with one of her colleagues at work about Jesus. It was just after this that she was introduced to the Discover Jesus campaign. She felt that this was God’s provision for her to start a conversation with them.
After being inspired by the new approach that the campaign would give her to start new conversations, Mona said, ‘I really want to tell others about how joyful it is to have Jesus as our Saviour!’
Marie* bumped into a group of students visiting Birmingham on a Global Project from the USA. The Global Project team were helping out the Birmingham Agapé Students group with the Discover Jesus campaign by using The Quiz resource on Marie’s campus.
Marie is from a Catholic background, but she’d never had the opportunity to consider the possibility of having a personal relationship with God. The students from the US invited Marie to join a The Conversation group to chat through the Discover Jesus theme questions. Marie especially enjoyed the ‘afterlife’ theme. She has also started reading the Bible for the first time in her life and has been working through The Exploration YouVersion Bible reading plans.
During the Discover Jesus campaign Monica decided, for the first time ever, to see if she could find some strangers on her campus who might be interested to have conversations with her about Jesus. She went out with Agapé Students staff member Suzanne and they used The Quiz resource to see if they could introduce some students to the Discover Jesus campaign.
Monica and Suzanne were really encouraged by the conversations that they were having. Monica even discovered that she was actually quite good at it! They felt like the Holy Spirit was clearly directing them to people who were ready to have conversations about Jesus. One group of girls that they approached and chatted with had even been talking about Jesus just before Monica and Suzanne introduced them to The Quiz!
The Discover Jesus campaign is now officially over. We suspect that we’ll be running it again soon though, so watch this space.
In the meantime, all the resources will remain available online. If you’ve been inspired, please make use of them yourself! Perhaps it’s a campaign that your church might be interested in having a go at? Or maybe you have a friend or colleague who you think might be interested to explore one of the campaign’s questions with you?
*Name changed for privacy.
If you’d like to think about running the campaign with your church, or a group of friends, and you’d like some advice or just to ask us some questions, please feel free to contact us at students@agape.org.uk. We’ll be making The Quiz resource available in the ARC (Agapé UK Resource Centre) very soon. If you’d like us to let you know when it becomes available for purchase, please also e-mail us.
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