The Back-Story
Last summer I led a team to work in uncharted territory with the IMB to go village to village to support an indigenous church planting movement amongst UUPG’s (unreached and unengaged people groups). We went to each village and gathered with the new believers to worship with them and to share with them a basic message of evangelism: Each person who Jesus has ever saved has a story to share and should immediately respond to his calling to go and make disciples by going and sharing Your Story and God’s Story with the world around them.
In India we used a basic teaching outline to equip the believers to go out and make disciples. Inspired by the believers in india, I asked God to help me know how to take these basics back to our campus and start a movement like I experienced God doing in India.
Three Biblical Examples to Follow
Each student should follow the examples of the women at the well (John 4:4-30;39-42) and the man released from a legion of demons (Mark 5:1-20) by:
- Immediately responding to Jesus
- Share your Story (2 minute or less testimony)
- Share Gods Story (Bridge illustration/Roman Road) with an invitation to respond
The Vision
We focussed our fall retreat around introducing this message, and shared a vision of what if every believer on our campus was intentional this semester about sharing their story and God’s story with someone else on campus?
We helped student understand what their story is and gave them time to pair up and practice.
We taught them the bridge illustration/roman Road (Roman 3:23.5:8 6:23, 10:9) and then gave them time pair up and practice sharing it.
Then we revealed that we would help them overcome their fear of sharing the Gospel by making a way for us to do it all together.
Campus Dialogue and Strategy:
- After equipping BCM students to share Their Story and God’s Story at our fall retreat and at our next large group meeting, we made available to each student a dark t-shirt with green writing that said “Ask Me About My Story.” This shirt was actually given in place of a generic fall retreat t-shirt.
- We challenged our students to wear them all on the same monday and to wear the shirt again later that week.
- In addition to add to the Buzz around campus we had six-foot tall green letters that spelled “STORY” in the center of campus. The thought was that this would create conversation around campus and people would ask our students “whats up with all the matching shirts and whats your story?”
- All together we had over 250 student in our ministry trained to share the Gospel and participating in evangelism that week.
- Each large group meeting following that week, we allowed students to share about their experiences or their personal testimony. This alone was amazing and a source of unity as student respond God’s prompting to share their stores for the first time.
- We shared the vision with other campus ministries and worked with them to train their students and launched the campaign again at the end of the fall semester.
- In all had around 500+ students trained and actively sharing the Gospel on campus with at least 20 student accepting Christ connected to this initiative.
Development
Since then, christians students in our local high-school launched their own Ask Me About My Story campaign, a few other universities have begun to adapt this strategy to their campuses (ASU added a Story Board element where students could stop on campus and write their stories), and one of our local churches used the shirts oversees in a market places to start up conversations and share the gospel.
We plan on retraining our students to share their story and God’s story and relaunching the project again this fall.
Email me for resources that you can use to train student to better share their and God’s story. tntechbcm@gmail.com
Baptist Collegiate Ministry 