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With Matt Frost
330 Plays9 months ago
Today on PEP Talk we chat with a church pastor about how sharing the gospel is a natural part of both his church work and personal relationships. With a particular emphasis on the essential role of prayer, Matt talks with Gavin Matthews about the formal and informal elements that make up a vibrant evangelistic lifestyle.
Our Guest
After 14 years as senior pastor of City Gates Church in central London, Matt Frost moved to Cirencester in July 2009 to become pastor at Cirencester Baptist Church. Matt loves playing cricket for North Cerney CC, praying for the sick, supporting Liverpool, sharing the good news of Jesus with all kinds of people, listening to jazz-funk, bringing change, watching films of all kinds and chatting with God. You can follow Matt on Twitter here.
His podcast “Two Pastors in a Pub” is available from Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Introduction of Matt Frost on PepTalk
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another edition of PepTalk, the persuasive evangelism podcast from Solas. I'm Gavin Matthews, standing in for Andy Bannister this week, who I believe is somewhere on the road between Swindon and Southampton at the moment. But Solas carries on with PepTalk. And this week, we have another exciting guest for you. I'm pleased to introduce you to Matt Frost. Matt, good afternoon. How are you? Very nice to be introduced as an exciting guest. So I appreciate that. Much appreciated.
00:00:38
Speaker
Well, there's a billing you need to live up to, obviously. And you are dialing in to us today from Syrancestor, which is that Gloucestershire? Syrancestor, Gloucestershire, yeah, a bit north of Swindon, not far from Bristol, that sort of neck of the woods.
Matt's Pastoral Journey
00:00:54
Speaker
And you've been a pastor in Syrancestor, Syrancestor Baptist Church, is that right? That's right, yep. For 10 plus years? 15 years here and previously 15 years pastoring a church in central London, in the West End.
00:01:08
Speaker
Wonderful. I was intrigued by your bio on the church website, which, and I quote, says, Matt loves playing cricket for North, is it Kearney? Certainly. Okay. Praying for the sick, supporting Liverpool, sharing the good news of Jesus with all kinds of people, listening to jazz funk, bringing change, watching films of all kinds and chatting with God. That's quite a CV.
00:01:32
Speaker
It's good. They're all true. I think all of those are reasonable. I'm not playing cricket at the moment. It's the wrong time of year in the UK.
Integrating Faith into Daily Life
00:01:45
Speaker
I've been watching Liverpool and listening to jazz funk.
00:01:49
Speaker
But we're here to talk about sharing the good news of Jesus, which is in there with all those interesting things in your kind of little CV on the website. So how do you kind of practically go about the business of sharing Jesus where you are in Syrancestor at the moment? And I'm guessing some of those things are going to be informal and some are going to be more kind of formal in the church context. Tell us what practically being someone who shares Jesus means for you in Syrancestor.
00:02:14
Speaker
I pray every day and I've done this since I first became a Christian, which is 30 years ago. I grew up as a non-Christian, as an atheist, my family are atheists and changed my mind about the time I went to university at that sort of age. And got very excited early on about wanting to
00:02:34
Speaker
share the Christian faith with people that weren't Christians, that became a priority for me. And so prayed every day and continue to do that. My prayer is, Lord, let me point somebody towards Jesus today. That's that prayer. And that could be in a very explicit way.
00:02:55
Speaker
or in a more gentle way, but that's my prayer, and I find I'm always amazed again and again and again how God answers that, even on days when, inevitably, working in a church, you spend a certain amount of time with people that are already Christians, which makes that more difficult to share your faith with people that aren't Christians.
Informal Evangelism through Conversations
00:03:19
Speaker
But I remember
00:03:20
Speaker
Oh, a couple of weeks ago, again, it'd been a busy day with stuff and they were all Christians, which was nice, but why is the person who's not a Christian that I can share something with? And something I do from time to time is just towards the end of the day, before it gets dark, I'll pop up, I play golf as well as cricket.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I popped up just to play a few holes, five holes on my own, bit of exercise before the evening. And a fellow I know, Scottish chap, I saw him behind me. He caught up with me and I said, let's play the last two or three holes together. And we walked in together and within two or three minutes, of course, he asked about church because it's my job. And then off we go. And we're talking about
00:04:02
Speaker
deeper things that he's interested, what's it about? He's doing all that. And I got to the car park at the end, I thought, thank you, Lord, there's that one little thing today where I've, in a gentle way, pointed someone towards Jesus in a friendly way. And I thought, thank you. So he keeps doing it. He surprises me.
00:04:19
Speaker
And is that a regular occurrence, those kind of informal conversations that you get with folks? Yeah, absolutely. That's very much at the heart of how I want to live, is that in the context of all the conversations I have with friends, with strangers, with the hairdresser, with someone in the shops, is that
00:04:44
Speaker
my prayer is that those might find a way to point someone towards Jesus again, whether it's the whole nine yards or just a little thing. But that's my prayer. And yeah, that happens. That happens a lot. It's intentional in the sense that I'm looking for it and I'm praying for it. But it's
00:05:05
Speaker
I'm also not trying to shoehorn something into an encounter where it feels uncomfortable in that sense. So I'm looking for those open doors, those opportunities. And what are more formal things? Does the church do more formal sort of structured evangelism courses or campaigns? Or is there anything sort of more structured that the church does alongside your informal sort of sharing your faith with people?
Formal Church Programs for Community Engagement
00:05:33
Speaker
We, like the majority of churches, do things that create a warm fringe. That sounds a bit dubious, a warm fringe. But you create a network of relationships around the church that people that are warmly disposed towards the church, at least, because of the connections and the relationships.
00:05:54
Speaker
We do lots of the things that would be very common in lots of churches. We run a parent and toddler group that's big and active. We run a youth club on a Thursday night, so lots of teenagers come. We do a lunch for people that are older. And so it goes on. There's lots of things in that. We run a board games group that started in the last couple of years. That's got really popular because that's a whole popular group. And so it goes on. There's that and other things that go on. And so in that context, you're developing a
00:06:22
Speaker
that fringe around the church of people that you're warmly connected to. And of course then, lots of us, as individual Christians, we have our own friends, the people that we connect with, and so on. But within that, within all of those things that we do, we culturally are committed to, and it does happen.
00:06:41
Speaker
that we want to be relatively explicit about the fact that we're Christians and in appropriate ways extend an invitation towards people to think about it or to think about Christianity or to invite them to something at church. So we don't just run a toddler group where we're nice to parents and their kids. We are nice to parents and kids most of the time.
00:07:03
Speaker
But there's an explicit desire that we want to extend an invitation to people, not forced, but an invitation to people to say, hey, would you like to think about it? So when we run an alpha course, which we do every year, would you like to come to an alpha? When it's Christmas, do you want to come to a carol service? We do messy church, which is a very explicit, invitational thing aimed at children and families. Do you want to come? And a lot of them come. And so that would be the
00:07:32
Speaker
part of what we do. There's explicit events that we do that are specifically designed for people who are outside. We've just had Christmas and so inevitably Christmas is a good opportunity, lots with children and youth stuff, inviting people too. And then perhaps the biggest thing is culture. It's a culture
00:07:56
Speaker
where we seek to encourage Christians to be doing the sort of thing that I described in my little story at the golf course, that that becomes a part of our
00:08:11
Speaker
day to day or at least week to week or month to month life that we have an expectation that, oh, I might chat to someone at work. Oh, I might invite a friend to come along to this thing that's going on, that that's a cultural thing. And that's one that we have to constantly talk about and address and encourage.
00:08:32
Speaker
That probably more than anything is the most important thing is that we try and encourage a culture with ourselves, but also with the whole church of saying, let's have these sorts of conversations when you meet, when you chat someone at work and they say they're sick, have the courage to offer to pray for them for healing. And when it's Christmas, invite your neighbor to the carol service because that's part of what it is to be a Christian.
00:09:01
Speaker
So you embed this sort of invitational culture into the church and expressing that informally and through. Sounds really great. You mentioned that you were a pastor previously in London. It's a London wall that's out between the city of London and East End going out. Not far from where my dad used to work actually, that part of the world.
00:09:20
Speaker
Do you meet very different people in these two contexts, moving from the east side of London out to
Pastoring in Different Cities: London vs. Syrancestor
00:09:25
Speaker
Gloucestershire? And does gospel ministry look different in the two contexts and cultures that you've ministered in, and how do you have to adjust? The church I was in in London was in the west end, actually. It was Soho and around there. That was there. The church now does meet over near Liverpool Street. So anyway, this is now a nerdy London geography conversation. So for people that aren't from London, they're getting bored. But anyway, that's fine.
00:09:49
Speaker
So you were on the West side when you were there, okay. Interesting. The two most obvious differences between
00:09:57
Speaker
being in the centre of London and being outside of London in a smaller place. The two most obvious things are the people that you meet are, it's a much more international group that you get in the middle of cities. That would be true of most modern global cities in Britain and elsewhere in the world that you get a very, very diverse
00:10:20
Speaker
you might meet someone from Kazakhstan, and then Japan, and then someone from Brazil, and so it goes on at any moment. And so, for example, I used to do quite a lot, but I used to do a lot of street evangelism in central London, in Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, these sort of places. Lots of just one-to-one conversations, chatting with people. And I got to the point where I taught myself to explain the gospel, basically in French,
00:10:46
Speaker
because I met a lot of French-speaking West Africans from Ivory Coast and Congo. So I thought, right, I can manage French. Let's see if I can do it. So I learned the words for believe and the cross and Jesus and you're a sinner and in French.
00:11:04
Speaker
Places like Thailand are less mixed. It's more mixed than it used to be, but there's more of those cultures. But perhaps the most obvious difference is that people move house less frequently. So in the middle of a city, the turnover is huge, which changes the way you think about
00:11:19
Speaker
the connection between a church and our wider community, because it's turning over all the time. People move out every six months, constantly coming and going. Whereas in a place like Sirenschester, and it's true in lots of other places, you can build much more long-term relationships with individuals and with a wider community. So, for example, our church here now, we have a relationship with all the schools in our town and some outside the town. I'm chuckling at the hospital and the little university we've got here.
00:11:46
Speaker
They're very deliberate things, they're long-term relational things in which we're praying that God would give us opportunities to share the gospel. In the middle of a very, very busy city, you're dealing with people that are coming and going, you've got to, you know, you grab the moment. So that's the most obvious difference. Mm-hmm. That does sound like quite a shift. So working there, sorry, Sister, you've mentioned some of the opportunity schools, hospitals, the university.
00:12:09
Speaker
What kind of significant challenges that you and I suppose your church are facing in sharing the gospel with the people that you're ministering to?
Engaging the Indifferent Public with Christianity
00:12:16
Speaker
There isn't.
00:12:18
Speaker
much in the way of hostility towards Christianity or the church in most of our interactions with the people around us and as I say for us here some of the institutions schools hospital the local council and so on are well disposed towards us and we have good relationships so like us going to visit lots of them come and use our building we have a big
00:12:45
Speaker
building where people can do stuff and people rent stuff all the time. We've had a school in here today doing a tour. What do you get up to at a church?
00:12:55
Speaker
So there isn't that hostility. The issue in the UK, more than anything else, is you chat with someone and say, do you think there's a God? And the vast majority of people say, don't know, not sure, never really thought about it. Maybe there's somebody up there somewhere. And so the challenge is not.
00:13:15
Speaker
When I was at university 30 years ago and I was a new Christian and we were going out and trying to talk about Jesus with people, not all students, but there were some students who were vociferously anti, for whatever reasons, maybe for atheist reasons, or very vocal Muslims, or they were pro-abortionists and they assumed that there was an argument to be had.
00:13:37
Speaker
Nowadays it's more like, I don't know, I never thought about it, I'm not sure. I'd like to think there's something. So the challenge is inviting people to think about those big questions of life and to ask the questions, not that they've already thought about them and have come to a different conclusion.
00:13:57
Speaker
which would be the case if I was in other parts of the world, you go to Nigeria, everybody believes something and believes in God in one shape or another, and you've got a conversation. The UK, and that would certainly be true here in the environment we're in, that's the most common thing.
00:14:15
Speaker
That's very interesting. I think that maps onto a lot of what we are experiencing and so the speakers when they're out and about finding many, many people for whom they think there might not be answers. You know, they're not ragingly angry with you for having a belief, but they might think, well, who knows?
00:14:32
Speaker
What have you found that's helpful in speaking to you? Maybe it's your friend at the golf club or someone that comes to your alpha course who comes in with these sort of vague wooly notions. How do we take them a step further towards Jesus in our conversations? What are you finding that's the most helpful?
00:14:48
Speaker
Because Christianity to many people in the West is now something that's unfamiliar, or certainly the heart of it is unfamiliar, they'll know a few of the trappings or they watch the coronation on TV or something, that sort of thing.
00:15:07
Speaker
that's I think actually a benefit because you're not having to overcome lots of prejudice. You're dealing with people who don't know anything really, the majority of them, particularly of a younger generation, younger than me, they're saying, I don't know. And so the opportunity to intrigue people with
00:15:29
Speaker
some of the essence of what we might call real Christianity, the sense of a living faith in God is there because people are unfamiliar with that. And so I think that's a possibility. But above all, the thing I'm doing is certainly my individual conversations is either asking questions or inviting them to ask questions, to say, have you thought about
00:15:57
Speaker
I've just done some school assemblies with one of the secondary schools here and did each year group. And we talked about the five big questions of life. I said there's five big questions of life. I made that up, but I make it sound like it's an excessive fact. There are five big questions of life. But the question of where do we come from? Number one, is there a purpose to life? Number two,
00:16:20
Speaker
Why is there suffering? Number three. What happens if anything after we die? Number four. And is there a God? Number five. Those five big questions of life. And actually saying to people, what do you think? And inviting them to... A few people have some answers. A few people are like, I don't know. That's the most common. But actually invited me to say, look, have a think. You know, I've had a think and I've come to the conclusion that Jesus is the best answer to those questions.
00:16:44
Speaker
Have a think. Have a think about those questions. And those questions are in the human heart. They're deep within us. Every human being wrestles with them. We're very good in the West, particularly ignoring them, because we're busy. We've got lots of distractions. There's some great stuff on Netflix. So why do I have to think about what happens when I die? But they are there, and it's trying to draw those out of people. So that's the conversational level. And then there's also wanting to add
00:17:13
Speaker
Can I pray for you? You know, someone said, can I pray that you'd be healed? I'm concerned about this. Can I pray for that? And that that would very much be a dimension of what I'm doing and others in our church as well. Trying to do in sharing our faith is by introducing that answer to prayer, supernatural element to what we're doing, as well as the conversational questioning part of it.
Power of Personal Stories in Evangelism
00:17:39
Speaker
Do you think testimony has an increasingly important role in the current environment in the way that maybe sort of propositional argument did a generation ago? I mean, people have a story, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. People have always loved a story and you read through the book of Acts in the New Testament and the testimony, particularly Paul's, he gives a number of times both in small settings and in courtroom settings. So telling
00:18:08
Speaker
My own story or one's own story is essential. And then going on to, what's your story? You know, I can tell a bit of mine because people often ask, how did you end up? Why did you believe in God? Or particularly as it's my job, how did you end up in this job? And so I can tell that story or bits of it and then say, what about you? What do you think about? Is there a God or not? Wonderful.
00:18:36
Speaker
Time is kind of rapidly running out on us already, can you believe it? What's been the most encouraging thing in evangelism you've seen over the last year or so?
Success of Recent Alpha Course
00:18:45
Speaker
We ran the Alpha course.
00:18:48
Speaker
not very long ago, end of last year. And it was the largest alpha course we've run here. It's our ancestor. And, you know, lots of people who weren't Christians or were halfway there or try to work it out and, and a real variety of ages as well from 18 up to 80.
00:19:12
Speaker
And that's encouraging because each of those is a story. There's a story of how they got there. It's not just, oh, I come to Alpha. There'll be a friendship, a relationship, a conversation, a variety of things that have happened, but it's over a long time.
00:19:26
Speaker
That was brilliant to watch that and now some of those people are now sort of going on and we carry, okay, what's next on their journey of exploring. There was a chap on there who's 19 and he's training to be a heating engineer, which I think a very good job. There's a lot of work out there, getting your boilers fixed.
00:19:49
Speaker
But he said, what he's doing now is in his lunch break, if he gets a lunch break from a job, he'll go and sit in the van and we'll read it for the New Testament and just read the New Testament. I'll take that. That's great. This is a 19 year old heating engineer, never been around church, but he's fascinated by it. And he's on that journey and you think, that's, that's great. That's great. But he's there because somebody, somebody invited him, you know, and.
00:20:13
Speaker
signs of life. Wonderful. So then looking forward, what are
Future Evangelism Efforts
00:20:17
Speaker
your hopes? What are you planning, Avengers and Wise, for your community in the coming year?
00:20:21
Speaker
More are the same. I haven't got anything particularly novel. We'll keep putting on things that we invite people to. Massey Church is big. We have a lot of children that use stuff going on here. We'll have, we'll be running alpha course again. We'll carry on our ministry into schools and a hospital and the university and continue to encourage people to
00:20:45
Speaker
talk to their friends, chat to their family and share their faith. So nothing novel, more of the same and praying in the midst of it that God works, which he is. We're very encouraged.
00:21:00
Speaker
Wonderful. And you'll be praying in the morning. You'll be ironed by saying that you prayed every morning, Lord, bring someone across my path. I can share something. Absolutely. We're fascinated to hear how God answers some of those prayers. Well, thank you so much for your time, Matt. That's been really informative, hopefully encouraging to many, many people in their churches and their different contexts around the country.
Matt's Podcast on Christianity Questions
00:21:19
Speaker
Last thing, tell us about your podcasts and where people can find you online to hear. Two pastors in a pub? Two pastors in a pub. So that was inspired by wanting to have conversations with people, particularly people that aren't Christians or are having a look, have got questions. So Tom, who's another pastor myself, host of Our Lady Called Karen, we sit in a pub and we discuss
00:21:41
Speaker
some of the sorts of questions that might come up in these sorts of conversations with people you know are there aliens or why is there suffering in the world or isn't the bible just full of mistakes and those sorts of things and we chat around obviously tom and i are both christians so we're coming from that point of view but it's done in that style you can hear this every episode we have to drink a drink that we've never had before and we've now been going for three years and so we're really scraping the barrel i made somebody i made one of the other drink spicy tomato juice with
00:22:11
Speaker
with ginger beer last week when we recorded, which was genuinely disgusting. That sounds deeply horrible. But they can find your podcast on Apple Spotify. Yeah, Apple Spotify, usual places. It's two pastors, TWO, two pastors in a pub, and we're there. Each one's about 40 minutes long and we do one a month and they're quite fun.
00:22:33
Speaker
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Matt. Our time has gone. Thank you too for those of you who are listening today. We appreciate your company with us on pep talk and we'll see you again in a fortnight's time. Thank you and goodbye. Goodbye.