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00:00:01
With Rachel Jordan-Wolf
344 Plays8 months ago
After the Covid pandemic, we've all had enough of statistics! But sometimes they can reveal amazing surprises about things we take for granted. Today Gavin Matthews learns more about the fascinating "Talking Jesus" report, which tells us so much about the nuances of faith in the UK and the untapped opportunities for sharing Jesus today.
Find out more about the Talking Jesus research here and watch a summary on YouTube here. The Talking Jesus course for churches is here.
Dr Rachel Jordan-Wolf is passionate about sharing the gospel of Jesus and has worked for various churches and mission agencies in places such as London and Amsterdam. She’s involved in a church plant in London and is a adjunct lecturer in mission in the UK. She holds a PhD in Church History, focussing on women in mission in early 20th Century Britain. She has been an advisor for the Church of England on mission. Rachel is the Executive Director of Hope Together - a ministry which works with local churches to share the gospel of Jesus. She also loves chocolate!
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Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Well, as the whistling thing falls into the background, it's my privilege to welcome you to another edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Gavin Matthews from Solace, and this week I'm delighted to be joined by a remarkable guest, Dr. Rachel Jordan-Wolf. Hi, Rachel, how are you? I'm good. Thank you so much, Gavin. It's a privilege to be here.
00:00:30
Speaker
And you're joining us from the other end of the country. You're in London, is that right? Yes, I'm in London. So I'm in East London, near Liverpool Street Station, actually. Yeah, which way?
00:00:41
Speaker
Excellent. Part of the world that I know. I'm kind of joining you from Scotland from the other end of the country, so thank you so much for joining us. I've looked at your biography, it's quite an uncomfortable biography. This is what it says in line. Rachel is passionate about sharing the gospel of Jesus and has worked with various churches and ministries doing this in places as diverse as London and Amsterdam. She's involved in a church plant in London.
00:01:04
Speaker
is an adjunct lecturer in Mission, holds a PhD in Church History, advises the Church of England on Mission, and is Executive Director of Hope Together. Now that is quite a CV, have I missed anything?
00:01:16
Speaker
Don't think so, no. I like chocolate. I don't think that's on there, is it, Gavin? We need to add it in, really. It's an essential thing.
Rachel's Research on Women in Mission
00:01:26
Speaker
It says that you did a PhD in church history. What was your area of research? What was your academic background? Well, I looked at women and mission, which of course was a great topic. But I looked at them in this country from 1900 to 1959. I spent ages discovering people like the joyful news evangelists. Had you ever heard of them, Gavin? No.
00:01:45
Speaker
They'd have got on very well in Solas. They were an extraordinary group of women, the joyful news evangelists. So that was an absolute joy. People like Catherine Booth, who's one of my heroines, absolute legend. Obviously that happened right near here, so I love living near the founding place of the Salvation Army in Catherine Booth.
00:02:03
Speaker
So that was the joint. I was looking at 1900s, 1959, what was happening, not abroad, where people were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there were loads of people abroad. I wanted to know what was happening here. And I discovered some extraordinary stories. Some of them were still alive. And so I met some of the women who were in the first days of the Elam movement.
00:02:23
Speaker
in this country, one in particular, who was a bit of a rising star, and she had been their youngest person at the Bible college, age 14. She left at age 16 to plant a church and was sent off with a bicycle. So I do think that was really like their kit, you know, Jesus, the Bible and a bicycle. If I was going to write like a just a fun book about them, that was the kind of common ground of them all. And off she went.
00:02:50
Speaker
extraordinary stories of God's provision, of what they did, of how people came to faith. And I met these women all over the country, many of them in the sort of forgotten, in the back of extraordinary old people's homes, with boxes still sometimes of their notes. It was a delight. So I was trying to bring alive a story of incredible women in mission in this country. So yeah, that's my other pet theme.
Mission of Hope Together
00:03:23
Speaker
You're involved in mission and you're executive director of an organization called Hope Together. Now, I hadn't come across your organization until 18 months ago, so tell us a little Hope Together. What do you do? What's your aim?
00:03:37
Speaker
Well, our aim is that everyone everywhere will know Jesus. That's nice and simple. I'm sure it's the same as yours Gavin. So that's our big vision. And how do we do that? We work through local churches. So we're here to resource and equip local churches. And everything we do comes out of a research basis.
00:03:54
Speaker
So we did this piece of research called Talking Jesus and everything that we do has been shaped by that research so that we can, if you like, maximise what we're bringing to local churches when it comes to what we're seeing and researching across the UK to find out what we could best do, if you like, to bring Jesus to everyone. And that's what we do.
00:04:18
Speaker
No, that's fantastic. It was in that context that I first came across you. Somebody said, have you seen this talking Jesus report? They said, no, tell me. And I got sent it. It was quite a remarkable piece of research. I don't think there's anything else quite like it been done for a while.
00:04:31
Speaker
a very long time, if ever. So beginning then with talking Jesus, why do research? Some people will say, oh, just dig in and get on with mission. Just go and run your Sunday School group. Why do we need a research basis in order to make our mission for Jesus today more successful, more fruitful, more honoring to him?
00:04:51
Speaker
So it's really simple. There are many things that we can, if you like, borrow that people use in other places and spaces. So the first time we did this research was actually 2015. And at that point, I was the National Advisor for the Church of England in Mission and Evangelism. And I was working with Hope together with Roy Crown, who was leading at the time, and the Evangelical Alliance. And we were going to do this, I love it, Denominational Leaders Summit. Doesn't it sound grand, Gavin?
00:05:19
Speaker
So we were off to do this denominational leaders summit. We were pulling together the leaders from all the different churches.
00:05:26
Speaker
And we were going to talk about evangelism. We were going to look at putting evangelism in the heart of the church. And I said, look, this is all lovely and very well, but you know what's going to happen. We're going to get there. And everyone's going to talk about what their anecdotes. So a bit like that, well, what happened on Sunday was, or I met this person on the bus last week, or we sat, you know, we had a conversation over a coffee with my next door neighbor. And then from that, they'll extrapolate a strategy.
00:05:52
Speaker
But that is just based on anecdote. And so that's one person. So say somebody we meet, which I did hear, there was something crazy about them meeting somebody in a pink banana outfit and that helped them come to face. It's very obscure. But say we then agree, I know what we need. We all need to wear pink banana. Obviously not. We'd have the sense to work that out. But actually we do that a lot because what we haven't got is this ground basis of what's happening across the UK.
00:06:20
Speaker
And then again, for this research, we can break it out. For example, Northern Ireland is really distinct as to what's happening there. It's a very different culture. So this kind of information can mean we are the best informed practice as opposed to anecdotally informed practice.
Significance of Talking Jesus Research
00:06:38
Speaker
And we found it to be quite groundbreaking. It's really helped in the scene for mission evangelism and say, yeah, I'm really into research.
00:06:49
Speaker
How did you go about doing the research? The UK is huge and very, very varied. How did you set about finding out what's going on in the church and also outside the church in terms of how people perceive faith? Jesus, the Bible, all the questions that you've looked at. What was your research basis?
00:07:06
Speaker
So what we did is we worked with a really good research company. So they did the data collection for us. So again, we did this in 2022, this last piece of research. And so we went back to the same data research company that had done 2015 because that means we can track because the same processes will be used so it's comparable.
00:07:26
Speaker
which is partly what I wanted to do, be able to compare what we'd done in 2015 with what the situation was in 2022. And we are committed to doing it again so that we can actually track the research at regular intervals to see if there's change because that's also important. So we went to, so just imagine I was working for a big company or I was working for the government. We did what we would do if we were them.
00:07:49
Speaker
which is you go to a big data research company. So we work with Savanta Con Res, who are really well respected, and we then asked them to help us to find out the answers to these questions. I also had an amazing advisor. She's currently working in Oxford Diocese. This is her whole world of expertise in her past life with surveys.
00:08:11
Speaker
So we were able to like, you know, I want to know this, will this question give me the right answer? And she would be able to say, you want to know that that's good, but sharpen it here or take this out or your so she was really helpful as well so that we could get the right question shaped. And then we did a 10 minute. So Savannah Comrades did us a 10 minute online survey.
00:08:33
Speaker
And they wait it. What that means, Gavin, is it's like the soup of the UK. So they could make sure that enough people from Scotland were asked, as well as enough people from London, as well as enough people from Northern Ireland. And they could also make sure that the gender balance was correct, that the ratio on our ethnicity was correct.
00:08:55
Speaker
so that if you had a recipe that was called the UK, it'd be like one teaspoon of chili flakes, one teaspoon of this, a half a pint of that, so that it makes up, if you like, the recipe that means when we talk from this data, it's weighted, it truly represents the UK population.
00:09:16
Speaker
What were some of the most significant things that you unearthed? What do you think was the biggest surprise for the church in the country? What were the most significant things that came out of this? Obviously you've got time in next few minutes to do it all. It's a big piece of research. A few highlights of maybe significant things for people who listen to this podcast who want to be sharing their faith in today's world.
00:09:39
Speaker
Great, so there are quite a few highlights. If I was summarizing it, Gavin, in just one sentence for everybody, the one sentence is that the harvest is plentiful.
00:09:50
Speaker
I think you might have heard that before. Someone we know very well has already coined that phrase. But that is actually what the Talking Jesus Report shows. It shows that there is real openness right now, today, that we can guarantee from a research basis for people wanting to find out about Jesus or experience him for themselves.
00:10:12
Speaker
So that's the highlight. So even if people switch off now and they've had enough, they get the big highlight. So once proof of the pudding, as in how we got there, then there are some different stats. So for example, the resurrection jaw-dropping statistic, Gavin, is that 45% of the UK population believe that Jesus rose from the dead. When we first brought this to that amazing summit, they were like, absolutely no way. We cannot possibly believe. We had to go and do the research again.
00:10:42
Speaker
So we had to do a huge sample. So we did an even bigger sample to prove that the research was correct and that the anecdote that we were all holding in our head of disbelief in the UK population was actually untrue. Now, in that 45%, there is a scale.
00:11:03
Speaker
16% believe it word for word, you know, there are more committed people. And then there's this 29% I call the wobble factor resurrection. So they believe to some extent in the resurrection of Jesus, but not wholly. And like, so what we've done from the research is worked on our live series, especially for Easter to reach that 29%.
00:11:22
Speaker
And that 29% is across generations. So it's not just that there is an older group of people who are left believing in the resurrection or having some belief in the resurrection. It's actually across generations. That's another really important point in this research.
Openness to the Gospel in Younger Generations
00:11:38
Speaker
The most open generation to the gospel are the younger generations.
00:11:44
Speaker
So our younger generations, 18 to 24 and 24 to 35 age bracket, come out as the most open generations at the moment to hear about Jesus. And I expect you're seeing that actually as you go around the country. So that's another finding in there. So then there's this, we looked at, you'll just have to track with me for a minute here. So we looked at when a non-Christian knows a Christian, then they've had a conversation with a Christian, what happens after that conversation?
00:12:14
Speaker
And in 2015, one in five of those people who knew a Christian and had a conversation with a Christian, about one in five of them wanted to know more about Jesus. And in 2022, it was one in three.
00:12:28
Speaker
So the openness to finding out more about Jesus had gone up. And it's also about wanting to experience or encounter Jesus. So again, one in three people wanted to experience or encounter Jesus. When you go to the younger age bracket, it's like 46%, which is incredible, that want to know more after that conversation. So you've got such an extraordinary opportunity when you look at that age bracket.
00:12:53
Speaker
This is amazing and it shows that the openness to finding out about Jesus or experiencing him for themselves has gone up in this country not down and that again is wonderful news that people kind of struggle with they can't they find it actually the Christians go oh
00:13:10
Speaker
Oh, really? But that's the case. So there are people, we can guarantee to people listening right now that they've got friends, neighbours, people in their family who genuinely want to know more about Judas or experience him for themselves. It's not everybody, but don't worry about them. Find the person that is open because we will see something extraordinary if we do that.
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's fascinating. I was also struck, I think it's section six, when you look at the questions that non-Christian people are asking today. And some of the statistics in that I thought were really remarkable. 19% of people asking, will everything be okay? One of the most popular talks that Andy Bannister from Solace does is called, Plagues, Pandemics and Putin, where can hope be found in a broken world? And we found that do a talk like that and people will come and it maps directly, our anecdotes onto your big research, which is helpful.
00:14:01
Speaker
17% what will make me happy? Again, one of the talks that we regularly do through Solus is on the search for happiness. And then this struck me as well. 15% asking what should I do with my life? And 10% asking is there a purpose to life? So if you bulk those two questions together, that's 25% a quarter of people say what am I here for? What's it about? What should I? But only 2% of people asking is there a God? Now that's really significant. How do these sorts of questions shape how we should share the gospel today?
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you can look at those and you can go, ah, okay, will everything be okay is the biggest one. So there's this wobble factor. Now, the wobble factor, I've had more than one wobble now, haven't I? So basically, people are more open to finding out about Jesus when the world is less certain.
00:14:54
Speaker
Does that make sense? So the parameters of which the world they're living in, the foundations they've built their world on, currently feel a lot less stable than they used to. And that is why I think we're seeing this uptake in openness. And that's reflected in this question of will everything be okay?
00:15:12
Speaker
That's also reflected at the other end of the report. So if we add that in with the number one way that an adult, an over 18 comes to face, the biggest influence of bringing an over 18 to face is a life event, either positive or negative.
00:15:28
Speaker
So when you look at that, what's happening is we're going along in our lives, but something happens to us that creates and reopens these bigger questions. Will everything be okay? What should I do with my life? Is there purpose? Is there more? And they happen around life events. So when you look at the pandemic, it was an a massive life event that we all went through. When you look at an economic crisis, it's a massive life event.
00:15:54
Speaker
So basically anything that brings question, particular uncertainty into people's lives will make them ask those kind of questions. And as a response to that, we are able to come in with the hope of Jesus because our lives built on something else. It is not built on the economics of this country surviving. It isn't built on whether there's a war. It isn't built on any of those things. We're built on a solid foundation that God is in judge.
00:16:21
Speaker
So even if it all disappears and everything wobbles, the person we're building our life on, we can trust because he doesn't do that, he does not fall apart. So the connection means we've got greater openness because of what the life events are that people are going through right now. So we can shape just how you've done, we can shape our resources to work and our conversations even that we're having over a cup of tea with somebody,
00:16:50
Speaker
around some of these themes. Absolutely.
Practicing vs. Non-Practicing Christians
00:16:54
Speaker
Another couple of stats that came out of it. 42% of people in the UK describe themselves as non-practicing Christians. What does that mean and who are these people and what do we need to do to reach this large group of people who describe themselves as Christian but not practising?
00:17:10
Speaker
Now, interestingly, Gavin, the actual stat is that they didn't describe themselves as non-practicing. What we did is we looked at the mass of population that say that they're Christian in the UK, and it's 48%. And we thought, well, they're not all in church on Sunday, are they? Unless I've missed something. So we looked at that 48%. And what we wanted to do, we wanted a new measure of the Church of Jesus Christ.
00:17:37
Speaker
So I don't know if you read the headlines during the census. Decline, decline, doom, doom, doom. Do you remember that? Yeah, decline, decline, doom, doom, doom. So what we've been wanting to measure, which we've been trying to do since 2015, is work out. Is that a true measure? Well, obviously not. We know those people aren't with us. So why don't we measure the people who are in and work out? Is there a way we can do this through this research? I can't interview them all.
00:18:02
Speaker
So hello, I've got my, I'm not, you know, and also I've got the Lord. So, you know, hello, how often have you been to church? What's your prayer life like? So we tried to think of some measures that we could use, you know, through this, through this research that would work. So we went for three things. We went for, are you part of a worshiping community?
00:18:21
Speaker
regularly regularly it's now once a month i know when i was brought up in the brethren we went at least five times on a suntan three times in the week anyway so regularly has dropped off so are you regularly part of the worshipping community do you pray at least weekly and do you read your read or listen to the bible at least weekly they were what we wanted to put in to find out who's actually practicing so we didn't ask people are they practicing
00:18:44
Speaker
we concluded that 6% of the population were practicing by our measures, part of a worshiping community praying regularly reading their Bibles. So then that left this other huge group of 42% who are not, and there's a whole, you know, I said about the gradient, there's an entire spectrum and gradient in there of some people who are part of a worshiping community, but don't regularly pray or read their Bibles. And there's the whole thing we could unpack.
00:19:10
Speaker
But this 6% of the population is practicing. And the joy about that Gavin is that that has not dropped since 2015. So the core church of Jesus Christ is not in decline. It's stable and it's stable across the generation. So people kept saying to me there's a missing generation. There is not a missing generation in the UK church.
00:19:32
Speaker
if you look at this core group of practicing Christians. And actually, they are really fired up for mission and evangelism. So when you look particularly at these younger generations, they're not missing, and they're the most vocal groups that we have when it comes to sharing their faith. So there's some really good news for the church and good news for the future of the church. Then this 42% of non-practicing
00:19:54
Speaker
We can look at them, some of them are regularly in our churches, but they haven't got spiritual disciplines that feed them. So there's a whole job there to actually help them to become solid disciples of Jesus, which I know many of our churches are engaged in.
00:20:10
Speaker
And then there would be a whole group who are a bit further out, who probably pray a bit and go to church at Christmas and Easter. Any of us see that? And then there's an even further group who are so far out, they don't...
00:20:25
Speaker
They've got an element of some belief or something, but it's totally cultural. And that is the group that's particularly, if you like, hemorrhaging. So that's what we're picking up when the censor says we're in decline, is we are declining people who are culturally Christian. People are giving up, going into hospital and ticking on a form, yes, I'm Christian. They don't see the point in that anymore.
00:20:49
Speaker
So that's the piece that we're actually hemorrhaging. That's the groupies. So if you look at the older age demographic, there are a lot more people who would be culturally Christian. But if you example, look at the 18 to 24 year olds, only 29% of the 18 to 24 year olds would say that they're Christian.
00:21:06
Speaker
So you can see where we're going to head with the census. But the really good news is that the actual practicing, vibrant Church of Jesus Christ isn't in decline and is still solid in that age bracket. That was quite a long explanation to your question, Gavin. That was very helpful. I mean, there are so many more things I wanted to ask you, but our time has gone in a flash. I can talk to you about this all day. This is fantastic.
Resources and Course Availability
00:21:30
Speaker
But what I need to ask you then is, people get hold of this research themselves and how much does it cost?
00:21:35
Speaker
Great. You can download the report for free off the Talking Jesus website. You can run a course in your church, which you can find on the Talking Jesus website. If you go to YouTube and go to Hope Together and look for our Talking Jesus website, you will see a 15-minute me buzzing through the headlines. So a 15-minute buzz through all those top headlines
00:21:59
Speaker
I've got on YouTube and you can see you can find that on Hope Together on YouTube or you can find if you go to the hopetogether.org.uk page and look up Talking Jesus you will also find it there. So you can download the report, you can share it wherever you want, you can run a course where you are, you can find a 15 minute
00:22:16
Speaker
you know, highlights from me on YouTube and you can share it wherever you want because that's the joy. What we want is people to grab this and take it wide, scatter it out because it's really, really good news for the Church of Jesus Christ in the UK.
00:22:35
Speaker
put all the URLs to everything you've just mentioned into the show notes so that anybody listening to this can just click through and find all that, that's not a problem. You mentioned a course and has the course aimed at church leaders or sort of church house groups or who's your course pitched at and what does the course do? Yeah, so it's six sessions and it helps people to, it's not aimed at church leaders, it's aimed at everybody and it's got amazing reviews like I remember, I think one mother and toddler group ran it, very interesting.
00:23:01
Speaker
But they, oh no, one little group came out of a church to run it and then this woman went back into the toddler group completely fired up to talk to everybody there. And we got that feedback that one person who used to go out and did loads of dog walking, he's got a dog, and never thought to talk to the people that he met when he was dog walking, did the talking Jesus course and has become, you know, the most amazing witness whilst out dog walking. Because once you realize people want to know, your confidence levels go up and you say, great, I'll tell them I'm a Christian, I'll start a conversation, let me find the open ones.
00:23:30
Speaker
So you can run it in small groups, you could run it like as a church-wide thing, you could even run it if you wanted to in your church services for six weeks. Any of those things would work. There's a workbook so people can scribble away and fill in everything and say what they're thinking. We get them to pray for five of their friends and family who don't yet know Jesus because that's really important. Praying for that opportunity and looking. So it's for everyone.
00:23:58
Speaker
Fantastic. So final question
Hope Together's Future Initiatives
00:24:00
Speaker
very quickly. What's next for Hope Together? What are you doing now that you've completed this? Well, we keep going. So I've been many places to speak on it. Happy to do that too. When people, particularly when they gather to actually lead us together, that's great. We are working at the moment on a live for Easter. Well, it's out.
00:24:18
Speaker
So I don't know when this podcast is going, but right now we are doing a series, a film series with Bible Society, it's on that resurrection. We want that 29% people who are a bit like, resurrection, maybe, I don't know, maybe there's something after, they're really saying there's something after death. I think that's what they're saying.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so we want them to meet the risen Jesus and we want them to do it through your church. So what we've done is the whole campaign, you can chalk your streets with stencils, Easter Saturday, am I alive? Get that question going in their heads, are they alive? Is Jesus alive? There are newspapers at 15p cheaper than a cream egg so that everybody in your community can find out about the resurrected Jesus.
00:25:02
Speaker
And there is a film series to run, probably after these two holidays, if we're honest. So East is the big push, but you're pushing them to come and join this film series, beautifully filmed, the five encounters, resurrection encounters of Jesus with living testimonies of people today who have met the risen Jesus and have their lives changed.
00:25:19
Speaker
That's one of the things we're having and we could go on. But if you go to hosttogether.org.uk, you can find everything we're up to. And if people want to just sign up to our e-news, you'll not be out of touch. But we understand you might not want to read it every month, but if you drop in when you can, you can at least find out what we're up to.
00:25:39
Speaker
the links to the Easter materials into the show notes. Right, our title is more than gone, I just have to bring this to conclusion. Rachel, thank you so much for telling us that that has just been really, really helpful, inspiring and encouraging. We hope that everybody listened to this, kind of picks up and reads the report and is equally fired up by it. So thank you so much for joining us. You will hear from us again in a fortnight's time with another exciting guest talking about sharing Jesus and the faith that we have in him and the truth of his resurrection and the hope that he brings to our lives.
00:26:07
Speaker
in a fortnight's time. Thank you for listening and goodbye.