Mission Week

Last week was Mis­sion Week at my CU, I had orig­i­nal­ly planned to blog about it dai­ly but I was that busy and that tired I was unable to do so. As a result I am going for a bit of a mass post about the events and will then fol­low it up with anoth­er post about what I got from the week.
It all start­ed at 8am on Mon­day morn­ing. We had the first prayer meet­ing of the week which was then fol­lowed up with the first ses­sion of First Con­tact. First con­tact was basi­cal­ly a way of engag­ing with the uni­ver­si­ty. We went out armed with ques­tion­naires (well I did all except Mon­day) which were aimed to open up a con­ver­sa­tion and make peo­ple think about their beliefs. These ses­sions went on every­day based on a dif­fer­ent cam­pus each time, but all with the same pur­pose. On many occa­sions we were able to give the per­son we spoke to a book called the Life Gospel, which con­tained a small chunk of the bible in con­tem­po­rary eng­lish. This was par­tic­u­lal­ry encour­ag­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly as two or three of the peo­ple I spoke to dur­ing the week had nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to read the bible.
After First Con­tact we had a main event each night. On Tues­day we had a Pub Quiz in the SU Bar over at the Gloucester(Oxstalls) cam­pus. This was a real­ly good night, for many rea­sons. Not only did a large num­ber of CU mem­bers turn up but also lots of peo­ple who are in halls at Oxstalls came as well. We lat­er learnt that it was the busiest they have seen that par­tic­u­lar SU Bar since the start of term, mean­ing that it was a large amount of peo­ple who got to hear our speak­er, Michael Ots aka Mot­sy, talk about the Gospel. This kind of encour­ag­ing news spread across the whole week. On Wednes­day at our Da Vin­ci Code show­ing 4 peo­ple took a free book about under­stand­ing while the Bible is rel­e­vant today, there were only 5 book to give away! Mot­sy also spoke after the film about some of the issues it raised and he had some peo­ple come upto him at the end to explain fur­ther why the film is so wrong.
Thurs­day night was prob­a­bly the night which had the poten­tial to make the most impact. We held an acoustic night in FCH SU Bar. The SU Bar on this cam­pus is par­tic­u­lar­ly busy on a Thurs­day night and so it meant a lot of peo­ple would be present to hear Mot­sy speak. Sev­er­al tables around where I was sit­ting con­tained peo­ple lis­ten­ing to him and pick­ing up and flick­ing throught the Life Gospels we had placed on each table.
The Fri­day night event, and the final event of the week, was held in con­junc­tion with FNC. It gave us a relaxed envi­ron­ment, in which we could invite peo­ple along to here Mot­sy speak in greater detail about the Gospel. Unfor­tu­nate­ly only 1 non-Chris­t­ian was there to hear him speak, but he still spoke very well, as he did all week, and it was a nice relax­ing end to the week.
Through­out the week we were also plug­ging our fol­low up course, which is called Life. It’s very sim­i­lar to the alpha course in its aims and set­up and many peo­ple through­out the week showed an inter­est in com­ing along. Hope­ful­ly they will attend and gain the chance to hear more about the Gospel. Over­all it was a very good week, I learnt many things of which more news will fol­low. Please pray peo­ple con­tin­ue to show an inter­est in the Life course and that those who took a copy of the Life Gospel will not just dis­card it but will read it.