Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
With Tom Heasman
122 Plays2 years ago
In today's PEP Talk, Andy chats with a church pastor with a passion for evangelism through the local church. What are the challenges for developing a culture of evangelism, whether your church is rooted locally or a "commuter" congregation? What is pre-evangelism? And how can pastors "lower the bar" on evangelism so that everyone feels confident to do it?
Tom Heasman currently serves as Co-Pastor at Widcombe Baptist Church, in Bath, having moved there recently from a church in SW London. His biggest passions in life are telling people about Jesus, making nice coffee, and spending as much time outdoors as possible with his wife, Josie, and three young children. For an idea of the various evangelism tools Tom has worked on, visit somethingbetter.org.uk
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from Solas and I am, well, I'm not joined by my co-host, Chrissie Mayer from Oak
Tom Heaseman's Journey to Bath
00:00:23
Speaker
Hill. She's got some strange theologians thing going on this morning and has left me flying solo, but I am joined by a fascinating and wonderful and exciting guest. I am joined all the way, well, not that far actually from where I'm recording this. I'm joined by Tom Heaseman, who's over in a bath.
Cultural Transition from London to Bath
00:00:39
Speaker
Tom, how are you doing?
00:00:41
Speaker
good to see or hear you this afternoon. Yeah, I'm doing all right. I don't think I've ever been described as fascinating before. So I'll take that. Thank you. Take that to the bank and let that just inflate that you go slightly and it'll come back down again when you listen to previous episodes. And we've introduced most of our guests that way.
00:00:59
Speaker
But Tom, you're a pastor, but you've been on a fascinating journey, because when we first connected with you at Solas, you were a pastor at a Donald Church up in London. Now you're a Whitcombe Church down in Bath. And my immediate thinking is there must be differences, right? I mean, London and Bath are not two cities that you often hear mentioned in the same sentence. How has it been? How has it been transitioning from the massive city to the slightly smaller one? Are there similarities of the differences?
00:01:28
Speaker
in terms of what you do? Yeah, differences in terms of my role. I'll say a bit more about that at the moment. Certainly culturally differences as well coming from London with the pace of life and pace of ministry in many respects and just 8 million people
00:01:44
Speaker
in a big city and lots going on all the time. London's got its own subculture, which if you're from London, you'll know. Coming out of that into certainly West Country, I was preparing myself for a change of gear and it's been something of that to an extent, although Bath is a city and it's home, and it's a smaller city obviously by quite some margin, but it still has all the same city things in terms of mixed demographic and
Adapting Evangelism for Different Demographics
00:02:13
Speaker
those kinds of needs within that city, seeking to reach out to it, but just having to learn the kind of different flavor of ministry in a slightly different part of the UK, but enjoying it.
00:02:24
Speaker
And are you finding as you learn that different culture and the demographics being a little bit different, are there kind of lessons that you learnt, particularly in terms of reaching the community, evangelism and outreach, are there lessons that you learned in London that you're actually finding actually with a little bit of tweaking, actually work perfectly well in Bath, even though the culture may have some differences? I think, yeah, at a root level in terms of trying to engage a church family to think
00:02:50
Speaker
carefully and creatively about evangelism. I think those things remain the same at a root level. There are obviously differences in terms of how your church is structured. Certainly in London, lots of people still living pretty close to the church. You can really do a work of engaging the local community because everybody lives locally, whereas where I am now, people are traveling from 45 minutes out to driving to get into the middle of Bath to come to church. You're dealing with people who are
Engaging a Traveling Congregation
00:03:18
Speaker
in living in little hamlets and villages all over the place and so it's just a slight different thing when you're thinking about you know let's go door knocking say actually it's in a community where lots of people aren't based so just having to rethink I guess what local evangelism looks like when lots of people aren't necessarily living locally.
00:03:36
Speaker
Actually, before we press into a couple of things we really want to talk with you about on this episode, let's just press into that one a moment. Because as you alluded to, I grew up in London, where everything was quite local, because it was so big. I was in Toronto for a while, Dundee. I guess Swindon, actually, in some ways, is like that. But Solas, we also do loads of work with smaller
00:03:59
Speaker
churches and towns and medium-sized cities where exactly the situation you describe holds. Is there any advice you'd have for sort of pastors who are wrestling with that question of going, you know, a lot of my congregation come from miles around? So, you know, if you do an evening event at the church, are people going to be willing to drive an hour into that or not? But I guess at the same time, there's also strength, right? Because you're influencing quite a wide area. What are some of the strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons of having that kind of distributed
00:04:26
Speaker
congregation, how have you learned to work within that in terms of outreach? There's a bundle of questions for you. To an extent, I want to say it might be back on in two years and ask me again because I've got five months in here and I feel like I'm still learning the land in terms of that respect.
00:04:46
Speaker
In terms of equipping church family evangelistically, perhaps in a London context, you might be able to run three consecutive Tuesday evenings or whatever at church where you're doing a bit of training or whatever it might be, or you could run something in-house. For so many people here, because people are travelling far and wide to come here often, what we're trying to do is create a training platform where Sundays are really the focal point of your training and your church life. You come to church on Sunday, you gather with the Lord's people,
00:05:16
Speaker
and you might have a training session on Sunday. You might have a seminar or something else. In terms of demands on people's time, we're saying, look, come on Sunday, give us your Sunday as we think about being equipped for these sorts of
Cultivating a Culture of Evangelism
00:05:28
Speaker
things. Then the rest of the week, go out into your wherever you might be and do those things. There's an element of that, I guess, with equipping people. Also, we really do want to be local. We're not
00:05:40
Speaker
a church that's solely seeking to reach people 45 minutes away. So we do have a local community. There are thousands of people in our doorstep. So we do want to be intentional about reaching those guys.
00:05:49
Speaker
But again, it's using Sundays for that. So it might be, you know, on Sundays after church, we go out and do not go to the local community or Sundays after church, we go and run a coffee stall when they're doing the bath, half marathon near where our church is based. So it's just thinking about how, okay, when do we have everyone from church here with us and using that time well, so either for training or for local mission stuff. But again, it's a work in progress and I'm figuring it out as we go. So ask me again in a few minutes. Ask me again in a couple of years or whatever.
00:06:19
Speaker
But I guess one of the advantages that strikes me immediately in what you described is I know some churches in perhaps bigger contexts where I have friends who are ministering, so the challenge there can sometimes be that the Christians spend all of their time in church activities. They are there every night of the week doing something which doesn't leave a lot of margin around the edge of the sort of field, as it were, for engaging non-Christians, whereas actually the model you describe, right, presumably that gives people that time
00:06:45
Speaker
And that capacity, are you finding ways to then encourage people to be thinking about how they use that in terms of friends and neighbors where they live? I think that's what we're working towards. Certainly. I mean, you know, I haven't made this stuff up. This is, you know, lots of this stuff's come out of a.
00:07:03
Speaker
my reading of, you know, working through some of the nine mark stuff as well, in terms of their philosophy of industry, in terms of thinking, okay, well, you know, Sunday's a focal point, let's get together community there together then. But then six days of the way you want to release people as much as they can to go into the world and be so aligned in the community. So I think that's what we're trying to do. And then equipping people accordingly and recognizing that it's not a kind of one size fits all approach in terms of training, because everyone's in different areas and spheres. So
00:07:30
Speaker
you know, the person who's trying to reach their neighbour over the fence is going to be different to the person who's chance they're calling at work. And so providing kind of more bespoke training according to the situations. I think it's helpful and we're working towards that end. But again, you know, you're not wanting to overload everybody because you could run training for, you know, the next 100 years and there'd still be more to say.
Maintaining Evangelistic Momentum
00:07:53
Speaker
So you don't want to fill people's time up to such an extent, they're not actually going out and doing it.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, which perhaps ties into one of those kind of bigger pieces I alluded to earlier, Tom, which is the whole question of how do you begin to grow that kind of culture of evangelism that you've alluded to there in a church? I mean, obviously training is great, but if people haven't already caught the bug and got the buzz that evangelism is something they want to be doing, they need to be doing, they're not going to sign up for the training anyway. So it seems to me the cultural piece is the front end.
00:08:28
Speaker
works for that? What are some of the ways that you can begin to kind of raise the temperature for evangelism in a congregation? I think there are, I mean, there are obviously unhealthy cultures of evangelism in the local church. So, you know, there's the kind of
00:08:42
Speaker
we're too busy for this. I'll get to that later. I'm seeing other things we need to be doing. Maybe we'll come to advantages and lace down the road. There's that kind of culture. There's the stuck in a rut kind of culture, which is rinse and repeat. We've done this for the last 20 years, so we might as well just keep on doing it.
00:08:58
Speaker
whether that's run a Christianity Explore course, or that's not me knocking Christianity Explore, but run a Christianity Explore course, or do an event, you know, we do a craft night every February half term. So of course, we're going to keep doing that. And people kind of get stuck in a rut with regards to an evangelism culture. Or there's a kind of, I guess, a kind of chucking up stuff at the wall and see what sticks kind of approach, which is, well, we want to be doing some evangelism. We really know what we're going to do. So we're just going to kind of fire off stuff willy nilly and hope that something sticks to the wall. And I think
00:09:27
Speaker
when I was at McDonald's certainly, and then trying to apply here. And I've been helped in thinking this through Keller's stuff and Ray Evans over in Bedford on this. Just thinking about the kind of twin track approach of both encouraging people to, inviting people to come and see something of Jesus. So that's what we're trying to do in our evangelism in church, inviting people to come and see, but also equipping our church family to go and tell the gospel. So if we're trying to do both those twin things in tandem, I think often churches can
00:09:56
Speaker
major heavily on inviting people to come and see so they run a whole bunch of events all the time they're running program courses and they think oh well as long as we're doing that then that kind of ticks the box of evangelism job done and we kind of go a bit lighter on the equipping church family to go and tell because we think oh maybe that's for the specialist I think if we can try and create a culture in a church where we're doing both those things simultaneously where we're providing a suite of things to invite people to come and see but at the same time we're equipping our church family intentionally to go and tell the gospel
Making Evangelism Accessible
00:10:26
Speaker
those two things feed one another. What I'm trying to say to staff teams or my leadership team where I am now is that at the start of a year, say, as we plan our year, let's be thinking about both those avenues. What are we doing to equip our church family to go and tell in whatever spheres they are?
00:10:44
Speaker
And also alongside that, how are we going to be inviting people to come and see because those two things are going to save each other. So we almost kind of got that up on a flip shot. We're writing things down underneath each of those columns to make sure that we're not too over-weighted in either one. So I think that's been a helpful framework, I guess, for us thinking about.
00:11:01
Speaker
I think it's very helpful actually the way that you separate those but also see them interlinking because one of the things I've often I've seen many churches run into and friends who are in pastoral ministry run into is that you know if you start doing things like Christianity Explored or Alpha or all those invitational things it can be it can depending on your church context be relatively easy at first you know lots of people got low-hanging
00:11:22
Speaker
fruit, perhaps spouses who aren't Christians, you know, friends who are so, you know, warm towards church. But then in a year or two, you've burned through all of your low hanging fruit, anyone who was going to come to that first wave of invitations has and then things get that little bit harder. Right. And presumably that's where the go and tell becomes helpful, that you've then got to go and start those new conversations to get people warmed up so that they are then ready to come when there's invitation. Right. I think so. And I mean, certainly with the go and tell stuff,
00:11:50
Speaker
what we've really tried to major on as well is you know big thing I keep saying is we're trying to lower the bar and that's not to say we're watering down the content but we are trying to lower the bar so that everyone feels like they can have a go at going and telling the gospel because often when it comes to this people can think oh I'm just going to leave that to the elite evangelist or to the pastor or whoever it might be but actually we want to encourage everyone in our church to feel like they can have a go at this so whether that's
00:12:16
Speaker
you know, producing really accessible resources that aren't too wordy, that people feel like they can have a crack at it in terms of talking about Jesus with somebody.
00:12:24
Speaker
Or, you know, often lots of the training we're running is kind of pre evangelism training. So actually getting to the point of having a conversation about Jesus. So we're not kind of spending weeks going through how to do two ways to live. We're thinking about, okay, but how do you get to the point of even having that conversation with somebody? So just trying to lower the bar in it so that everyone feels like they can
The Role of Pre-Evangelism
00:12:43
Speaker
have a go. Same with the door knocking. So often with door knocking, we might have a specific door knocking team who are kind of going out, doing it week in, week out. But also we're trying to encourage the whole church family perhaps want to turn
00:12:53
Speaker
I'll do a morning with the kind of invite the community morning and I say to church, man, look, come along. Meet me for half an hour at church. I'll give you some invites and I'll give you 20 homes to go on. Here are three top tips. Go and have a knock on the door and meet some people. And it's just, we're just trying to, in all these kind of go and tell things that we're doing, we're just trying to lower the bar so that everyone in church feels like they can have a go. And that generates a culture of evangelism, a healthy culture, because it's not just
00:13:18
Speaker
evangelism left to the kind of slightly zany individuals who, you know, are a bit out there and wildly extrovert, actually, it's something that everyone can have a go at. I think the other place that's crucial, you know, Tom, I love that phrase, the bars, I look back to when I was a young Christian, I was so grateful, but I was in a, you know, sort of church in the community, where there were people who were doing evangelism, who'll be very happy to take along young people. And so door knocking, like I'm doing door knocking, didn't go quite as well. But you know, I learned some stuff.
00:13:48
Speaker
when I was 15, street evangelism and then ultimately for me speakers corner, getting dragged up a stepladder at speakers corner. When I was way too young, but I think particularly with younger Christians and youth and stuff, this is vital because otherwise they don't get on to the conveyor belt, but they don't get on to that sort of process into evangelism becoming natural.
00:14:07
Speaker
Right. So I think that's I think that's brilliant. But look, you throw another word in there that we occasionally come across on pep talk. And I know some people are not quite sure what we mean by it. So you mentioned the word pre evangelism. What what is pre evangelism? I had someone ask me that the other day. They said, oh, I saw someone refer to that. What do we mean when we say pre evangelism? What is it and why is it important? How are you kind of leaning into it, what you're doing through the church there? I mean, I think what it is is the is the work
00:14:36
Speaker
the conversation of work that is done before being able to share the gospel with somebody. So, pre-evangism isn't the work of sharing the gospel, because that's caught up in the word of evangelism, but it's the work that needs to be done before that point sometimes. It's the tilling of the ground before the seed can be planted. Recognizing, I guess, that so many people on our culture are about a million miles back from even beginning to think about who Jesus is. Say something like Christianity Explored working through Mark's gospel,
00:15:06
Speaker
Often, you know, I found over the last five, six years, people is not at the point of thinking, I want to read Mark's Gospel because they've got absolutely no interest. They've got no consideration to think that it might even be important to think about who Jesus is and why he came, what it means that he died. And so actually, just what needs to be done to get somebody to the point of thinking, actually, maybe this is worth thinking about.
00:15:26
Speaker
So, that's what we're kind of meaning by pre-imagining. So, thinking about how we listen well to people, how we ask good questions, you know, all that kind of Randy Newman stuff. I think you might have had him on actually. Yeah, we had Randy on here, yeah. That sort of stuff. I just think really helpful as we tee people up today in gospel conversations. It's what we put together in my old job, put together a course called Something Better, which is a kind of four week, four sessions on humanity's pursuit of meaning and identity and satisfaction and hope.
00:15:55
Speaker
with the chance to discover how Jesus holds out the offer of something better, with precisely that aim in mind that it was to engage people who are coming from point zero, who've never thought about Jesus before. But he might just be thinking about some of these big existential questions with the view that that's really the on-ramp to then getting into a gospel conversation from Mark's Gospel or wherever it might be. So it's that kind of pre-tilling the groundwork, I guess, which is important.
Leveraging Cultural Themes in Evangelism
00:16:21
Speaker
I'm glad you mentioned something better because I think where we first came across Utah when we first were chatting, I remember seeing some of the videos that you put together around that. I'm being quite impressed at the way you were leaning into those themes. If they're still on YouTube, we'll put a link in the show notes so people can go and watch.
00:16:39
Speaker
Some of those. I was going to ask about that very issue, actually. You mentioned some of them. Are there other topics, other themes that you think really matter right now in culture that we can be plugging into? Because, of course, the famous place in Scripture everyone goes for this is Acts 17, where Paul does his oldest, the Unknown God.
00:17:00
Speaker
business. What are some of the you mentioned, you know, identity and meaning and stuff? Are there other, as it were, unknown gods in culture right now that we should be thinking creatively about how we use the starting points for conversations? Yeah, I think there's I mean, there's lots of lists is in some respects endless, but and again, you know, Keller is really good on this. Glenn Scribner's recent stuff is really good on this. Certainly big themes at the moment, you know, thinking about things like justice and people longing for justice.
00:17:30
Speaker
People's pursuit of freedom, what does freedom mean? I did a talk last night actually, an evangelist giving on our search for rest in a kind of weary world. So just recognizing that we live in an age of overload, just kind of constant noise from technology and busyness and that sort of thing. And what does the search for rest look like within that framework and signpost the Jesus within that?
00:17:55
Speaker
stuff on, linked to that stuff on anxiety. I think it's a big thing that we can kind of speak into as Christians. So just some of these kind of cultural touch points that are underlying narratives that people are trying to figure out in their life, but often perhaps don't have a kind of full and coherent answer for trying to show them how actually Jesus makes sense of that in a way that nothing else does.
Enthusiasm for Ministry in Bath
00:18:17
Speaker
That's very, very helpful. And as you say, we've had Randy Newman and others who played around with this for a long time. We've had on the show as well. We're almost at the 20 minute mark, Tom. So I guess one last question I'd like to...
00:18:32
Speaker
I throw out to you would be, you know, I know sometimes Christians living in today's very kind of secular UK, you can get a bit disheartened, you know, the news looks a bit depressing, you know, it wasn't that long ago, the census came out and media was making lots of, you know, hay out of the idea that Christianity is declining.
00:18:51
Speaker
I get the sense listening to you talk, what you saw ministering in London, you don't strike me as a glass is half empty person. You strike me as someone who's quite positive. And yes, there are challenges. So are you excited about doing ministry? And if so, what really excites you about doing church based ministry? Well, where you are now in someone like someone like Bath, what gets you it gets you fired up to continue doing that? Absolutely. You describe my personality well, and also
00:19:19
Speaker
I mean, in Maine, let me tell you one story, perhaps from yesterday, just kind of normal church Sunday in many respects. I was preaching in the morning on Mark 10, 1 through 12, just, you know, not that straightforward passage on divorce and remarriage. And it was heavy, you know, felt like a heavy sermon as I was looking out across the room.
00:19:40
Speaker
but had this remarkable chat with this guy afterwards who'd come for the first or second time, not a Christian, not thought about Christian things remotely, had a vague connection with somebody in the church and decided to come, and had one of the most engaging evangelists and conversations that I've had in about a year with this guy off the back of this sermon on divorce and remarriage.
00:20:00
Speaker
And, you know, we're hoping me out late this week for a drink to kind of chat next steps and what next. And I think I left that thinking, particularly given that in the evening we would then have this kind of big evangelistic event. I got home last night late last night thinking, man, the most powerful evangelistic conversation I've had today was not off the back of this evangelistic event we ran in the evening, but it was off the back of some guy coming to a sermon on divorce remarriage.
00:20:22
Speaker
If I was going to pick an evangelistic talk, that would be about right down in the bottom 1% of pastors to go to. I think it reminded me that for all the go-and-tell-come-and-see stuff, the principle aim and everything is I just want to get people to church on a Sunday. I want to get people into the room on a Sunday to see the gallery community, to see the plausibility of people meeting together who actually believe this stuff.
00:20:46
Speaker
singing who have joined the Lord and also to hear the word preached because actually that's what that's where the power is right it's as the spirit works through the proclaimed word of God's even if that's on a passage like Mark 10 1 through 12 that's when we're gonna see lives changed and so yeah I'm really excited for ministry now in Bath as I was in London that the Lord might do a wonderful work of calling people to himself through
00:21:12
Speaker
weak clay jars as we are because his word is powerful and because his word won't return to him empty. So that encourages me to keep going. It encourages me as I sat down this morning to start work on next week's seven. It's not an evangelistic talk per se, but I'm praying that there'll be unbelievers in the room and that people will get converted as God's word goes out.
00:21:35
Speaker
What a great prayer.
Conclusion and Future Episodes
00:21:36
Speaker
Well, Tom, that was great. Thank you for ending there. So it's used drastically and inspiring us. So it's been great having you on pep talk. Thank you for taking the time and God bless all that you're doing down there in Bath. And I hope everyone listening found some of what Tom shared helpful, put links to those videos I mentioned into the show notes. You can see Tom in action, showing how the gospel connects some of those big themes in our culture right now.
00:21:59
Speaker
and I hopefully joined by Christy. We'll be back here in two weeks time with another guest and another episode of PepTalk. Thanks for listening.