What is the 'Facing the Challenge' course all about?
Facing the Challenge is a training course to help Churches, Christian Unions, home groups, organizations and individual followers of Christ get to grips with the particular challenge of our times. It takes six sessions, and is designed to be customized to meet your needs.
Session 1: Why do we need to understand the challenge?
As followers of Christ, recognizing the Challenge of Our Times is hard work. Do we really need to do it? Isn't it enough if we just share the Good News of Jesus Christ with people? This session looks at the Biblical basis for understanding the challenge of our times.
Session 2: Understanding the challenge
Seven key ways that our times are different from any other times the world has ever known:
- The Death of Truth - something can be true for you without being true for me too.
- The impact of the Mass Media
- Consumerism and personal choice
- Right and wrong as a matter of individual lifestyle decision
- Re-inventing yourself in different situations
- Tribalism, tolerance, and political correctness
- Christianity as private truth, with nothing to say to the wider world
Session 3: Truth Matters
Some reasons why truth is so important, and why we can be confident in the truth of the Bible's message.
Session 4: Cross-cultural 'missionaries'
Why we need to become cross cultural 'missionaries' to our friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Four practical steps towards achieving this:
- Recognize that coming to faith in Christ is a process, not just an event
- Make time to be with people
- Start where people are (find a point of contact)
- Ask people questions - both to understand their beliefs, and to undermine their beliefs
Session 5: Desperately Seeking Something
The Challenge of Our Times is also a golden opportunity for followers of Christ - if we know how to make the most of it. We need to be alert to the openings, and prepared to make use of them. This session looks at one important opportunity - the way people today are more open to 'spirituality' than they have been in the past.
Session 6: How can you be so arrogant?
How can we respond to accusations that followers of Christ are arrogant and bigoted? We live in a world that is suspicious of explanations that claim to account for everything. The Bible is such an account. It is different from other accounts because it comes from God. However, we should not try to force it on people, but rather to persuade them. We want a genuinely open society, in which people of different beliefs can live together. Because the Bible is the foundation and authority for all we do as followers of Christ, we need to understand the Bible's 'plot line' and how to use it as individuals, in sharing the Good News with others, and in Church.
Appendix A: Changing church
How does the Challenge of Our Times affect the Church? People will come to Church looking for evidence that the Good News works in real life. They come looking for community, and looking for a hope for the future. The Good News also confronts the thinking of Our Times: The message is true for everyone, whether or not anyone believes it; you cannot 'pick and mix' elements of the Good News with elements of other messages - you have to accept or reject the whole package. The Good News makes moral demands that require changes to peoples' lifestyles as they come under the Lordship of Christ. Some things must always stay the same, while others may need to be changed to fit changing times. How can we tell the difference? What kind of changes might we need to make?
Appendix B: Confident in the truth?
Faced with the Challenge of Our Times, can we still have confidence that the Good News of Jesus Christ is reliable and trustworthy? If the Good News is so reliable, why do we still need to have faith? This vital appendix looks at some contemporary evidences for the reliability and trustworthiness of the Bible's message.
'It
has changed my thinking'
What users say about Facing The Challenge