Discover Diary

Today I heard Dave Jensen speak at a conference for the second time. He said much the same thing as the first time. He was answering this question: as churches, what can we do to see more people rescued from sin and its consequences and brought into the kingdom of God?

I found his answers persuasive for three reasons:

• He’s a passionate and persuasive speaker. (Not sufficient in itself, but it helps when the presenter of the ideas is clearly driven by a deep love for the lost.)
• The basic strategy that he proposed made sense—it made sense sociologically and it made sense biblically. It very much aligned with what I believe from the Bible about how God makes new disciples of Jesus.
• He told us—and I know from independent sources—that when implemented well the basic plan is seeing good numbers of people becoming Christians at a growing number of churches.

Let me pause for a moment to give you a bit of background. I am a regular congregation member at my church, Chatswood Presbyterian (in the north shore area of Sydney). It’s a large church of nearly 1000 members across four Sunday services, and Stephanie and I have been part of the church for just over 7 years.

It’s a solid, welcoming, evangelical church with good Bible teaching and well-run ministries for kids. It has experienced strong growth over recent years. However, I think it’s also fair to say that much of that increase in membership has been through people transferring from other churches (or by members having babies!). Only a small percentage has come from people being converted through our ministry. Certainly nowhere near the annual 5% metric that suggests “a healthy evangelistic culture”.

In terms of church-based, specifically evangelistic initiatives, our two main ones over recent years have been ‘Easy English’ classes (in which people spend time engaging with the Bible) and a three-week evangelistic course (Hope Explored) run three times a year. In terms of the latter, church members have been asked to invite friends to the course, but the number of guests has generally been low relative to the size of the church—something like 5-10 non-Christians each time—with a pretty modest amount of fruit in terms of people converted.

In 2025 we also started a Street Evangelism team that goes into Chatswood Mall to talk to people about Jesus. It’s a small team, generally less than 10 people each time. We have lots of good conversations, but—as you’d expect—we don’t see many people taking active steps of faith. A lot of seed has been sown, but not much that “produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” (Matt 13:8).

Anyway … back to the conference.

Fortunately, one of the assistant pastors at my church, Marty Cole, was also at that conference. Marty and I lead a Bible study group together, and he has been one of the key people leading the Hope Explored courses. On the staff team, this is kind of his area of ministry responsibility. Talking in the car on the way home from Nexus, we could both see that what Dave was proposing was a better way forward.

A partnership in a new ministry together was thus forged during that car ride.

Being on the inside at Matthias Media, I know that Dave’s new Discover evangelistic course—built around this methodology that so resonated with us—is due out soon. So Marty and I will come back to our plans once we have seen that course.

Today at our church weekend away I had the opportunity to spruik the idea of running the Discover course as a core new evangelistic initiative for Chatswood Presbyterian. Although the course manual has not been released for sale yet, I had shown a preview of it to various staff so they could check it over. It got their blessing.

Here’s what I said to several hundred church members:

Brothers and sisters, my name is Ian Carmichael, and I want to ask you to do a little thought experiment with me.

I want you to think of the non-Christian person you would most like to find the hope and joy of becoming a Christian—maybe it’s a family member, maybe it’s a good friend. Have you got someone pictured in your mind? Now I want you to imagine that they move across the country to start a new job. And somehow—perhaps they’re invited by a work colleague—but somehow, much to your surprise and amazement, they end up walking through the doors of a church over there one Sunday.

And here’s the really important question I want you to think about: bearing in mind your desire that they become a Christian, what would you ideally love them to experience after they walk through those doors? What would you hope and pray would happen that day and over the following weeks and months?

Why don’t you quickly share your ideas on that question for 30 seconds or so with the person next to you. [30-60 seconds discussion time]

Okay, how did you go? I know it’s a hard question to answer with just 30 seconds of thinking time. But I’ve had more time to think about it, so I’m going to share my answer with you.

First up, I want my friend to feel warmly welcomed. I want him to quickly feel like the church cares about him, and that this is a warm and loving community he’s walked into. I want him to get to know people who are living, breathing examples of what it looks like to be a faithful Christian. And I want him to meet people who care deeply about his lostness and people who will pray for his salvation.

After that I want him to be given an opportunity to hear God’s gospel message as clearly and persuasively as possible. It would be great if he could quite quickly learn everything he needs to know in order to become a Christian, and be encouraged to take that step.

So what might that opportunity look like? It might be, for example, that he’s invited to attend a five-week gospel course the church runs. A course where it’s assumed he knows very little, and where he can ask questions and raise objections, and have them gently addressed. And it’d be great if he could do that course in a group with some Christians in it, and some other non-Christians, meeting in a comfortable and socially warm space.

Then, after the five-week course, I want him to have the opportunity to keep learning more and more from the Bible, in a way that’s appropriate for him, given how much he doesn’t know yet. I’d love it if he could do that by continuing on in that group of people he’s got to know pretty well over those five weeks of the course, as opposed to being thrown into one of the church’s normal Bible study groups where he feels a bit out of his depth.

To summarise, I want my non-Christian friend to have the chance to engage at an appropriate level with the word of God, with the help of loving and prayerful Christian people, for an extended period of time.

The Word. People. Prayer. Time. Those are the ingredients for the experience I want for my friend.

And guess what? There are many churches where they’re seeing a steady stream of adults becoming Christians by intentionally offering exactly that experience.

And that’s what we want to do here next year.

It’s not that we haven’t done something like this before—we’ve been regularly running the Hope Explored course for a while now.

But we’ve got some ideas on how we can do it better, and how we can improve and extend the learning experience for our non-Christian friends.

Part of that will involve using a fresh new Australian course called Discover, which is presented by a guy named Dave Jensen. But that won’t be the only improvement to the way we help non-Christians become Christians at our church.

We’re still working out some of the practical details of all the improvements, so expect more info to come.

But here’s what I’m excited about: it’s the God-given potential we’ll all have to give our non-Christian friends the conversion experience that we’ve just imagined for them. Without traveling to the other side of the country! To give them the experience that lots of other churches are finding very fruitful in terms of seeing people become Christians.

So please pray even now that so many of our friends and family will become Christians through the Discover course that our poor old staff team will have to start planning a fifth, sixth and seventh service* on Sundays.

I was encouraged afterwards by the number of people who share with me how excited they are by the idea I had outlined to them—some of them, I suspect, will become our first Discover team members.

*Our church had recently started a third morning service on a Sunday because the existing two services were getting too full.

Tonight the Bible study group that Marty Cole and I lead together started Discover. Most of the group are Christians, of course, but they have agreed to be the guinea pigs as Marty and I get our heads around just how you run a group through the course. It’s a dress-rehearsal of sorts, but going over the essence of the gospel is always helpful, no matter how sure we are that most (not all) group members are Christians. And watching how a skilled evangelist (Dave Jensen) goes about explaining concepts like sin, judgement and forgiveness to a non-Christian audience is also a useful and encouraging experience for the group members.

Despite the fact that they are guinea pigs, we’ve asked the group members to genuinely and prayerfully engage with the course material over the five weeks, not just to ‘play the part’ of non-Christians. However, we did also ask them, when it came to the question times, to think of questions they thought some of their non-Christian friends or family might ask, so that Marty and I would get some practice at answering those sorts of questions.

We learned some important things through this dress rehearsal.

Firstly, Dave talks very fast. For some of our group members, English is not their heart language. An Aussie speaker who speaks at Dave’s pace is challenging for them. We did two things to address this: we turned on the video’s English subtitles and I installed a browser extension that allowed me to slow the video down to 90% speed. The video hosting platform (Vimeo) allows you to slow it down to 75%, but the rest of the group found that speed painfully slow—not to mention how bad the music on the video sounded! But 90% seemed to be a good compromise point—it still sounded natural, and it was “just” followable by the group members who struggled with full speed.

Secondly, Dave’s arm tattoos could be an obstacle for those from some Asian cultures. For them, tattoos signify the person is a bit ‘shady’ and not to be trusted. Fortunately, in the first video Dave is wearing a long sleeve shirt; it is only in the second week that his arm decoration becomes apparent. In our group, people weren’t particularly bothered by it—they had lived in Australia long enough to know that tattoo culture is different here. But it could be something we have to explain in future versions of the course.

Thirdly, it’s very hard to plan in advance how long to let the discussion times run. Half-way through the talk and then after the talk people break up into subgroups of three or four and chat through some questions they are given. As leaders we just had to be attuned to when the discussion ‘buzz’ seemed to be dropping away and people had now said what they wanted to say.

Fourthly, we learned that there’s a lot for the MC to remember. So it’s important to be prepared and to know what to say (and not to say!). I wrote out my script in advance and stuck pretty closely to it. (Those scripts for video presentation have now been made available as one of the online Discover leader’s resources.)

Fifthly, we learned that we can have a high level of confidence in the gospel presentation Dave Jensen gives. We had a pretty discerning group, and they were impressed with it. They made some helpful observations about where it could be improved—the perfect modern gospel presentation has yet to be written, I suspect—but overall these were minor and, when we debriefed at the end of each session, group members seemed very happy with the thought of bringing non-Christians along to engage with this content.

Sixthly and lastly, the format works really well. It shows all the hallmarks of having been extensively trialled and refined over many years and in various contexts.

As part of the Matthias Media team, learning those fifth and sixth things was, I have to say, a bit of a relief. If I’d come to the realization that this course wasn’t going to work well for our church, I would have been pretty disappointed! But I came away from our dress rehearsals eager to give the course a crack in 2026 with some genuine non-believers.

Today, having worked through the Discover Leader’s Handbook and put together a list of church people we’d love to have filling the various roles on our Discover team, Marty and I sent out an email to invite them to join us in this new evangelistic ministry.

Here’s what we wrote:

As you might have heard, in 2026 Chatswood Presbyterian Church is planning to implement some new plans for engaging non-Christian family, friends and contacts with the life-changing truths of the gospel.

Central to those plans is running a new, video-based course called Discover. We hope to run it twice this year and at least three times next year.

In some ways, Discover is similar to the Hope Explored evangelistic course we have been using in the past. But the plan is to do more than just upgrade and refresh the course content. We also want to:

• make the opportunity to bring friends to hear the gospel at Discover a much higher-profile part of life together at church
• put significantly more effort into creating a positive environment and ‘vibe’ for each session of Discover
• get many more non-Christians coming along
• ensure there are plenty of mature Christians at Discover who are ready and able to engage meaningfully and lovingly with all the non-Christians who attend
• offer an ongoing group (More to Discover) at the end of the five-week Discover course for people to continue exploring the truths of the gospel and having their questions answered.

But achieving all this requires a team. It can’t be done by one or two people. That’s why we’re writing to you.

We want to invite you to consider becoming part of the Discover team. We think you have qualities and gifts that would make you a real asset to this team we’re pulling together. More importantly, we think you have the gospel heart that wants to see more people saved and brought into Jesus’ kingdom.

We want to invite you to consider becoming part of the Discover team. We think you have qualities and gifts that would make you a real asset to this team we’re pulling together. More importantly, we think you have the gospel heart that wants to see more people saved and brought into Jesus’ kingdom.

What would joining the team mean for you? What would we be asking you to do?

That depends a lot on what role you play. Here are the main roles we need people for:

• Connectors: mature and friendly Christians who will attend each of the five sessions of the course to welcome and warmly engage with the non-Christian guests—sticking with them and building good relationships with them over the duration of the course.
• Vibe team: people who can design and create a really warm and welcoming physical environment with nice hospitality (food, drink, music).
• Set-up team: the people who will faithfully get there early each week to set up that warm and welcoming environment before the guests start arriving.
• More to Discover leaders: depending on the number of guests who come to Discover, and how many of them choose to keep meeting after the course ends, we may also need some people who can lead the ongoing small groups that are formed. Although this would be a longer term commitment than some of the other roles (which are only for the five weeks of each course), leading will give you an exciting front row seat to watch the journey guests are taking towards faith in Jesus.
• MC team: down the track, as we run more courses, we may need to train one or two more people who can serve as MCs for the course sessions. This is a bit more than being a confident MC; you would also be the main person answering the guests’ questions.
• The whole team: ‘talking-up’ the course to other church members and encouraging them that they can confidently invite their non-Christian friends.

We realize this is only a very brief outline, and you’ll no doubt have lots of questions. That’s why we’re having a ‘briefing and training’ session in a few week’s time. Coming along to that session doesn’t lock you in, but it will tell us you’re interested enough to want to find out more. The details:

When: Tuesday 14 April, 7.30-9.30pm
Where: in the church classrooms
RSVP: please reply by email to let us know you can come by 10 April

If you have questions, and you can’t wait until 14 April to have them answered, feel free to give Ian a call on xxxx xxx xxx.

The plan is to start our first Discover course on 28 April. Even if you don’t feel you can join the team, we would be grateful for your prayers as we try to get this up and running.

Warmly,
Ian Carmichael & Marty Cole

P.S. If you’d like to, you can watch a 1-minute video in which the developer and presenter of Discover, Dave Jensen, talks about the course. You can also watch some or all of the actual course videos.

As of yesterday, it’s four weeks until our first Discover course begins. So it’s time to start ramping up the awareness among our congregation members. We want to make sure they all know when the course is starting and that they have a key role to play in making this a fruitful evangelistic ministry.

So last night I went to the Bible study group leader’s training session to talk to them about how the course works. I also wanted to recruit the leaders’ help in encouraging their group members to think of, and start praying for, two non-Christians they could invite along to Discover. I asked the leaders to make praying for those friends part of their group prayer time, at least for the next couple of months. I also asked them to ‘talk up’ the course, and reassure people that it is something they can be confident about asking their friends along to. Even though none of those leaders have experienced a Discover course before, I explained how we are recruiting a team and trying hard to raise the bar in terms of the quality of the course content and its presentation, as well as the warmth and hospitality of the course environment. Hopefully the leaders will have faith in us and be very helpful advocates for Discover.

I’ve also been liaising with the pastor on our team who takes care of our church communications. He’s going to include Discover in the weekly announcements in church this week, including inviting guests who come to our Easter service this weekend to sign up for the course as a way of finding out more about the meaning of Easter. Here’s his wording:

“We’ve got a great new course starting soon called Discover. It’s a relaxed five-week course where we’ll explore the message of Jesus and what it means for life today. There’ll be video input, discussion and plenty of opportunity to ask questions. It starts on Tuesday 28 April at 7:30pm and runs for five weeks in the meeting rooms here at church. If you’re visiting with us this Easter, this could be a great next step to keep exploring. And for those of us who call this church home, this is a great opportunity to invite a friend along. You can find more details and register via the link in the events page of our church website.”

We’re also including a paragraph in our weekly email to church members over the next few weeks. Here’s what we’re saying:

Evangelism
Discover – New! – Our new 5-week evangelistic course, Discover, is kicking off on Tuesday 28 April (7.30pm in the meeting rooms at church). This is a wonderful new opportunity to invite friends and family along to discover more about Jesus.

To learn more about the course and see why it is such a wonderful opportunity, click here.

To RSVP for Discover, click here.

We’re inviting church members to find out more about Discover by watching a short video in which I attempt to:

• give church members a bit more of an idea about what the new Discover evangelistic course will be like
• explain how they can make use of Discover to share the gospel with their friends and family
• not be embarrassed by my own voice and appearance on video.

Hopefully 1 and 2 are achieved—number 3 was, in all honesty, never very likely.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that I’m giving people four words to remember: Care. Pray. Invite. Bring. I’m hoping those words will become an established part of our church’s lexicon and will help enculturate the ‘bringvitation’ (as Dave Jensen calls it). Time will tell whether this ‘takes’ and how enthusiastically and boldly our church members ‘bringvite’ people. I also tried to give people an example of some words to use in inviting someone—because I suspect that the act of inviting someone to a gospel event is actually pretty foreign to many people. I hope any guidance I can give them on that front will make it seem less daunting, even if they decide to use their own words.

We’ve also added Discover to the ‘Get connected’ information on our website, and made the next course one of the ‘Upcoming events’ on the website events calendar.

Finally, we’ve now set up the Discover RSVP form. As we’ve explained to our church members, to help configure the room and for catering, we’d love to have a rough idea of how many people to expect. But we’ve also said that we understand sometimes people drop out (or in) at the last minute, and we’re only expecting it to be an approximate estimate of numbers.

The RSVP form (see below) has been worded for church members to use and let us know the first names of their guests, but also with a view to not alienating any outsiders who see the course being offered and want to register themselves to come along. Everyone who submits an RSVP gets an email reply with the dates and time of the upcoming course, and saying that we’re looking forward to seeing them there.

Unfortunately, we’ve timed our Discover course so that the lead up to it includes school holidays. So the effectiveness of all our communications about the course starting soon—and the opportunity to invite people—might be disrupted a little. That’s a lesson learned for future scheduling of Discover. Hopefully people still read their church emails while they’re on holidays … And when I say “still read”, I recognize I may be eliciting a wry and cynical laugh from those of you who have access to your church’s (disappointingly low) email open rates. 😅

Tonight we had our inaugural ‘Discover team information and training’ session. As I described in the last Discover diary entry, we invited a bunch of church members who we thought would be suitable and interested.

We ended up sending that email invitation, and two follow-up emails, to 32 people. And tonight we had twelve people come along. I guess it’s a bit of a sign of the times we live in, and part of the ongoing challenge of effective church communications, that we didn’t even get an RSVP from nearly half of the people we emailed. Phone calls might have been better, but I didn’t have the time—and I hate making phone calls!

I’ll come back in a moment to how the training session went (spoiler alert: it was very positive), but I think I need to say something about this issue of church communications.

Some thoughts on church culture and communications

In my previous Discover Diary I mentioned that the Discover course was going to be promoted in the weekly church email, with a link to my video in which I explain what the course experience will be like and urge church members to ‘Care, Pray, Invite and Bring’.

I’m not really surprised with the low number of video views. Open and click-through rates for any sort of mass email are generally low. If more than 1 in 4 or 3 people open a regular church email, that’s considered a pretty good result. (Besides, in the first two emails the information and link for Discover were right at the end—so of those who opened the emails, only the really conscientious readers would have even seen these.)

Here’s the thing it’s all brought home to me: if we treat Discover as just one of the dozens of worthy activities of our church—only promoting it in the standard ways—we are not going to successfully build a healthy culture in which the established norm for all church members is to be praying for and bringing along non-Christian friends to Discover.

The commitment to building this sort of culture requires very clear prioritizing, especially prioritizing it in our communications—even if it means having to slightly reduce the prominence of other good and worthwhile church activities. We will only do this when we are convinced that a core evangelistic ministry like Discover is worth doing at an exceptional level. That is, we generally may not want A-frames in the church courtyard to raise awareness of church events, but we make an exception for Discover. We may not normally include images in our church emails, but we make an exception for Discover. We will only make these exceptions when this evangelistic project becomes vitally important to us and we recognize that congregation members won’t prioritize it unless leaders prioritize it first (in all these little ways that flag its importance to us as a church).

I think this raises a wider issue in evangelical churches. It is certainly something I know Dave Jensen is routinely coming up against—an apparent unwillingness in church leaders to make the necessary decisions to prioritize and commit serious resources towards an effective evangelistic strategy for their church.

It’s not just in church communications that some of these hard decisions about priorities need to be made. Discover has the potential to take some of our most ministry-minded people away from other valued church ministries, such as leading existing Bible study groups. Many churches struggle because they don’t have enough people willing and able to lead the Bible study groups for its members. Yet here we are suggesting to pastors that they take some of those most gifted leaders and deploy them instead in a ministry to people who are not even part of the church. Dave has put it this way:

Church life is busy. No matter your church size, or how many staff you have, there is a seemingly never-ending list of activities that can occupy the time of a ministry worker. There is never a shortage of things that can be done with, to and for the saints to see them grow in their love for and trust in the Lord Jesus. While most of us have deep biblical convictions about mission and evangelism, matched with an earnest desire to see the lost saved to the glory of God, itʼs very common for actual missional thought and strategy to gradually be pushed to the side. Why? Because it's difficult to prioritize people who you canʼt see at the cost of the spiritual needs of the people who are right in front of you. (Mission needs to start today)

In fact, Dave goes a bit further than just lamenting the lack of investment in evangelism. He points out that underinvesting in evangelism actually can undermine the effectiveness of the other ministries of a church. Here’s how I reported on his talk at the Evangelize2024 conference:

One of the most significant challenges of the conference—in terms of my own work at Matthias Media—was Dave’s argument about the relative priority of each of the four Es we use to describe the “moving to the right” ministry: Engage, Evangelize, Establish and Equip. Almost universally churches do a small amount in Engage, massively prioritize Establish, and invest a minimal amount of work in Evangelize and Equip. Dave argued quite convincingly that we ought to be prioritizing Evangelize above all the others, because if you do that then the other three areas naturally and organically follow, but if you prioritize Establish and Engage, Evangelism inevitably drops off the radar. And the anecdotal data from many pastors seems to back Dave’s theory up … I have a sneaking suspicion he is right and we need to radically rethink our ministry … (My evangelism fail on the way to Evangelize2024)

I think my own church leaders are kind of taking the view, “Let’s just see if this Discover thing works before we throw a lot behind it”. But that’s very much a chicken-and-egg scenario. So I think I’ve still got some more persuasion work to do.

Back to our information and training session

So how did tonight’s session go?

Well, I was encouraged by the people who came along, and at the end of the night I think almost all of them had committed to being part of the team in some way (with a couple of them quite reasonably wanting a few more days to think and pray about it and talk to their spouse). I certainly think we have a team we can start with. If we get a lot of guests with our first course we might need to recruit some more team members, but I’m confident we can do that if needed.

We looked together at Matthew 9:35-38 and thought about not just praying for workers in the harvest, but how we could be workers in the harvest through Discover.

But then I said this:

“We certainly want to be a team of hard workers in that gospel harvest. But more than that, we want to make being a harvest worker a whole lot easier for every single member of our church by giving them something they can confidently invite their non-Christian friends along to.”

I think this helped the team see the strategic value of what we are attempting to do—to see that recruiting every church member to Care, Pray, Invite and Bring has enormous potential for seeing many people saved. So that goal is going to be part of what we pray for as a team.

We talked through the format and structure of Discover and the purpose of the follow-up More to Discover group. I explained that Discover and More to Discover bring together the four key ingredients of “the work of the Lord” (1 Cor 15:58) that lasts into eternity: Word, People, Prayer, and Time.

We also ran through the core training that is outlined in the Leader’s Handbook, including explaining the different roles on the team.

Finally, we spent some time articulating the sorts of things we should be praying for as a team. This is our draft ‘big team prayer’ (one of Dave Moore’s suggestions in The Team Leader’s Handbook, see chapter 5):

Lord God,

We pray that many church members will prayerfully invite their friends and family to Discover, so that we might have the privilege as a team of lovingly presenting Jesus to around fifty unbelievers each time we run the course. And as these friends engage with your word, we pray that over time you would bring them to a maturing faith in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, to your praise and glory.

Amen

We’ve got some more work to do before our first course starts on 28 April, including: getting the message through to church members that now is the time to be inviting friends; coming up with a plan to make our somewhat charmless church classrooms feel warm and inviting; and figuring out the food and drink we are going to offer our guests. But it’s really nice to finally have more of a core team to work with on these things.

Iwill cut right to the chase: tonight we had 29 people in the room for the first session of Discover. Roughly 12 of those people we think are not currently followers of Jesus, 7 were inviters, and the rest were on our Discover team. Everyone in the room seemed highly engaged with the video talk from Dave Jensen, and the discussion in groups of 3–4 people was so healthy that I found it challenging (as the MC) to get people’s attention when we needed to move on.

The room itself—you’ll remember that I described it in an earlier post as “charmless”—we managed to make look pretty inviting, with good food and drinks on offer.* But as I said to our Discover team, it’s they who really gave the space its true warmth. And they did a great job of that.

Overall it was a very positive start to the course. The team was encouraged. I was too, although I still think that in a church our size the number of non-Christians in attendance was low. Our ‘big team prayer’ (see The Team Leader’s Handbook, chapter 5) is that God would regularly give us 50 people to share Jesus with. But I’m hoping word will spread that this evangelistic course is a step up in quality from the courses we’ve run at our church previously, and that a culture of ‘bringviting’ will be established. But culture isn’t built in a few short weeks.

So what did I learn from this first night of running Discover?

• Running the course mid-week means that most team members aren’t free in the late afternoon to help with set-up (because of their day jobs). So a lot of that early set up fell on me. I was grateful that once the team got to the church, they worked hard, but there was a significant amount of work that needed to be done earlier in the day. I potentially need to recruit one or two team members who are free to help at that time.
• Giving guests 20+ minutes of mingling time before we kicked off the formalities really helped put people at ease and I think this contributed to the healthy level of discussion once we got under way.
• I had worked out the timetable for the night pretty carefully, and I made sure we finished at 9pm. But it was encouraging to see how many people stayed back to keep chatting for a while.
• We didn’t have people sitting at tables. We just grouped four chairs around a little side table ($20 from Ikea). I think this helped with the relaxed vibe (less of a school classroom feel).

• In week 1 there’s quite a lot of introductory information for the MC to convey, and although I had scripted it out, I think I was a bit uptight. It was the first night of this new course that I really wanted to go well, and so I wasn’t as relaxed in delivery as I would have liked. I hope week 2 will go better, but week 1 is a key session, so I should have brought my ‘A-game’.
• It did not surprise me, but there were not really any questions asked in the Q&A time. We had one come in via Slido.com, but it was actually a question asked by one of the Christians there—a question she was being asked by one of her non-Christian friends who she is trying to evangelise but who was not in the room. Fortunately it was a good question, one that probably helped some of the non-Christians who were in the room. Hopefully we’ll see more questions asked next week.
• I was reminded that some non-Christians are much further on in their working out of the faith than others. One non-Christian guy came up to me at the end and asked why the course started with all this talk about meaning and happiness; he thought that was really an insignificant side issue. “It all turns on the resurrection, doesn’t it? If that’s true, it changes everything.” Amen!
• We prayed as a team before the guests arrived. But at the end, when guests had all left and there were a number of team members still helping with the pack-up, I should have thought to gather them around to pray and give thanks for the night. By the time I thought of it, there was only three of us.

It’s good to be finally under way with Discover, and good indeed to see some non-Christians engaging with the great gospel message. I’m keen to see how God works in their lives.

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* As the team leader, I made a ‘captain’s call’ to not serve alcohol. Why? Firstly, having heard in the past from some friends who struggle with alcohol addiction, I don’t like creating an environment in which people could struggle. Secondly, the Discover course is doing serious business with God and his message; it seems to me somewhat inappropriate to serve alcohol in that context. I want the environment to have a socially warm vibe, but not a party vibe. Having said that, I don’t personally enjoy drinking alcohol and that may colour my view, so other Discover leaders may take a different approach. Keep in mind that it’s the policy of some churches not to allow alcohol on their site. If you’re making the decision, that might be the first thing to check.

Tonight was the final session of our first Discover course.

It was a cold and rainy night, and our numbers were sadly a bit down from what they had been in previous weeks. Given that this night was the culmination of the course, and the point at which guests were asked to respond to the gospel, it was obviously a bit disappointing that so many of our guests were not there. Was it just the weather? Is it possible that some people skipped the final night because they knew—right from the beginning of the course—that a response was going to be solicited?

It highlights the main problem we encountered with running Discover: of the 23 guests we had across the five weeks, I think only two of them were there for all five sessions.

Although it would be, of course, ideal if every guest could have been at every session, I’m still viewing things positively. Here’s why.

Firstly, I think we can be thankful to God that people were exposed to any gospel truth. Truth can be true—and convicting—without being complete. I acknowledge the implications of ‘the indivisibility of truth’ for our evangelism. As The Briefing put it many years ago:

"Because of the fundamental unity of truth—its indivisibility—things that are truly ‘true’ will represent accurately the whole truth, even though we mightn’t have the time (or the knowledge) to expound every facet of truth."

To express it another way, exposing people to some, but not all, of the six boxes of Two Ways to Live is still very evangelistically useful. Box 1 raises questions that Box 2 answers. And Box 2 raises questions that Box 3 answers, and so on.

As a team, we can pray that God will take and use the gospel truths guests heard on whatever nights they attended (prompting people to ask those gospel logic questions) and ask that he will somehow bring guests into contact with all the connected gospel truths at some point.

Sub-optimal attendance is also still evangelistically very useful because:

• We put not one but two evangelistic books into every guest’s hands: Discover and The Essential Jesus (Luke’s Gospel). The Discover book gives them access to the course videos and has lots of other useful evangelistic content (as does The Essential Jesus!). We hope and pray that guests will engage with that content.
• We got to meet 23 new people and establish a positive relationship with them in the context of a socially warm event with generous hospitality. (Many guests expressed appreciation for being evangelised! Although that’s not quite how they expressed it.)
• It gives our ‘inviters’ something concrete to keep talking about with their guests.

In the end the invitation to become Christians was only put (face to face) to seven of our guests. Two of those guests were ready to accept that invitation, and did so. So we rejoice at God’s work in them. Many others are still thinking about it, and we hope and pray they will keep talking to the Christians who invited them, perhaps come to our More to Discover group next week, or both of the above.

I think the other thing worth saying is that, at the end of the course, most of our church members (and Discover team) were significantly encouraged and roused by their involvement in Discover and by the gospel conversations they had there. Our last two sessions of the course finished at 9pm, but on both nights nobody moved for 30-40 minutes. Deep gospel conversations filled the room as everyone stayed in their little discussion groups. It was super-encouraging for me to observe this happening and to see Christians—who before the course were nervous and tentative about their ability to talk to non-Christians—fully involved in trying to explain their own faith and answer questions. These church members really stepped up, and it was a delight to watch.

I’m now asking our team for feedback on what we can improve for next time we run Discover (probably in about eight weeks), and figuring out whether to use the same timeslot or change it to see if another day or time works better.

Next week, for More to Discover, we’re going to do the first study of You, Me and the Bible. We’ll see how many people show up. It may only be one lost sheep we meet with. But if that was okay for the Good Shepherd, then it’s fine by me.