Pod Bhogal talks to Richard Cunningham about reaching students and resourcing churches
Pod Bhogal, UCCF’s Head of Communications, talks to Richard Cunningham, UCCF’s Director, about the Uncover Gospel Project, the impact it has had in the student world and its potential for helping ordinary Christians — in a local church context — to introduce their friends to Jesus.
PB: Uncover is arguably the most successful evangelism initiative UCCF has ever developed. Could you share some highlights? RC: More students have been coming to faith in the past year than at any time I can remember. 2013 has seen over 100 UCCF Christian Union missions in our leading universities — at which an estimated 80,000 Uncover Luke Gospels have been used by students. Many thousands of whom will be in Uncover Seeker Bible Studies (SBS). I’m sure you’d agree, we’ve never seen fruit like it in our time at UCCF.
PB: UCCF are now making these resources available to local churches on a significant scale. What’s the reasoning behind this? RC: All of this remarkable activity with students hasn’t gone unnoticed in UK churches. Significant church leaders have asked UCCF if we would train their church members to do Uncover Gospel Projects, lead Uncover Seeker Bible Studies (SBS) and for us to make available all the Uncover resources as soon as possible. This was a difficult request to respond to, since we had purchased only enough Uncover Gospels and SBS guides to supply our mission to the universities. On top of that, we didn’t want our staff to be distracted from their primary student mission-field.
We do, though, realise that this is a key moment in the life of the UK church and understand the shared nature of our mission. It has been widely acknowledged in Britain that ordinary church members have lost the confidence to share their faith with unbelieving friends, neighbours and colleagues. PB: Why do you think that is? RC: This may be in some part due to the widespread secular intolerance towards Christianity, but probably has more to do with the fact that there has been a profound lack of modelling and resourcing in personal evangelism. This paralysis is adversely impacting on the life of the church at all levels. For example, it is increasingly difficult for many churches to attract good numbers of unbelievers to Alpha-type courses and to other setpiece outreach events, simply because so few Christians have been doing personal evangelism with their friends and neighbours and so don’t feel confident inviting them to church events. If we could rapidly equip ordinary Christians to do everyday, life-on-life, personal witness and be confident in using a high-quality resource like Uncover, we believe that we could witness a rich harvest.
We believe that the moment to deal with this is now. There is a buzz across the student world resulting from thousands of excited Christian students who have felt enabled, through the Uncover Gospel project, to read the Bible with their friends and personally lead them to faith in Jesus. This excitement has been communicated to the churches who longing to see the same thing happen are amongst their congregations.
PB: How are UCCF responding to the need? RC: UCCF has responded in three ways: Firstly, as an act of faith, we have commissioned another 50,000 Uncover Gospels. ‘Uncover to churches’ was launched at this year’s (2013) Word Alive Conferences, with about 6,000 adults present. Becky Pippert and the UCCF student team were at both weeks of Word Alive offering motivation and training in using Uncover.
Secondly, UCCF has teamed up with IVP (thinkivp.com) to make copies of the Uncover resources widely and cheaply available. At the time of going to print, almost 10,000 Uncover Luke Gospels have been distributed to churches who are seeing the potential of Uncover to introduce their own friends to Jesus.
Finally, in 2013/14, UCCF is going to be running nine UK training events — specifically for churches — in a major city representing each of the nine regions of the UK (Scotland, North East, North West, Midlands, Wales, Central, South East, London and South West). Becky Manley Pippert will speak at each of these day conferences to which churches in the surrounding area will send their appointed delegates to receive training in using Uncover resources.
By making the Uncover resources available, in the context of vigorous and inspiring training, to the living churches of Britain we can build on the momentum of the students and help ordinary Christians to be able to read the Bible with friends and lead them to Christ. The present conditions (which may change quite quickly) make this a unique opportunity to go forward with this nationwide campaign. We believe that many thousands of unbelievers could come to faith and that churches will become reinvigorated by their grass roots members being trained and motivated in personal evangelism.
