Sharing your faith...WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

It is one thing to think about telling a stranger a few facts about who Jesus is and what Jesus did for them but it is an entirely new level of pressure when it comes to talking about Jesus with our friends. This week at REMIX we asked teens to consider what it might look like to talk to their friends about their faith. We even gave them a tool called the Lifebook (click to check out the lifebook project, a great idea!) to give to their friends to start the conversation. As I spoke last night I was reminded of what a big deal it is for all of us to have spiritual conversations with the people we love the most. We wonder what might happen! We wonder if we will be embarrassed. We wonder if they will ask us something we do not know. At the same time, we know we want our friends to discover Christ...to belong...to find hope...to discover a new beginning. Here are some of the ways we are trying to help teens at RELEVANT and people at Grace Community Church share their faith.

• Create environments where people are safe to ask questions and discover truth. // every environment around GCC is aware that each week might be the week someone brings a friend who they have been investing in. We promise we will be ready to help people hear clear truth every week. If our message is confusing it is our fault not our guests fault and not God's fault. We expect people are going to invite friends so we prepare for that!
• INVITE<> //we stress the power of the invitation. Never give up on people, never stop looking for people to invite. For most people they do not come because they have not been invited by someone they trust.
• Serve, Love, and value people...then share and invite // we are not selling something when we talk about our faith with someone. When we talk about Christ we are simply telling the story of how God gave us new life. We all need to focus on loving people, understanding people first before we share our faith. People will listen when they can trust us.
• Pray // God cares more for those who don't know Christ than we ever could. Why would we not make prayer a major part of sharing our faith? God can work in ways we can never imagine or dream of. We need to continually invite God into the process.
• Never give up // if sharing our faith is about relationship then that should drive us even more to not give up on people. We never know when someone might be ready to cross the line and follow Christ. We need to be known as a people who don't give up on people.