Steve Smith is pastor of Grace Church, a small but growing church family who meet in a school hall in Worcester Park, Surrey. Here, he tells the story of how a couple completely unconnected with church ended up on a CE course.
“A couple in our church downloaded a poster about Christianity Explored from TGBC’s website, and put it up in their block of flats. The poster had the website www.christianityexplored.org on it.
“A little while later I got an email from a couple who were South Africans living in our area. They’d been to church many years before, but were totally unconnected with church now.
“They’d never heard of CE until they saw that poster. They went to the website, decided they needed to do the course, and searched for their local course.
“I’d booked our course on to the website as soon as we got the materials to start running the course. So they found us, their local church, and emailed. They signed up for, and came along to, the CE course.
“He’s become a Christian, and she’s signed up to go through the course a second time. They’re both now regulars at our church.
“Without the new Christianity Explored website connecting us to this couple, they’d never have known about or come on the course. That website has been greatly used by God to connect us to those people.”
If you’re running a CE course, you need to make sure your details are on the CE database, so that if people in your area search for a course, they find yours. Sign your course up. You can check whether you’re already on the database by searching for your course.
Why not get some posters for you, and people at your church, to stick up round your community? Just go the TGBC website in the UK or in the US.
Carl is Editorial Director at The Good Book Company and is a member of Grace Church Worcester Park, London. He is the best-selling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as series editor of the God's Word for You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
