Appealing to people...

We tell lots of stories at King’s. Honestly, I would say that if you see someone saved tomorrow, tell everyone two or three times. People, particularly British people, always look on and say little! If you see someone come to faith here and there, you grow a bit and your people need to hear such stories. We tell the success stories; we’re not unreal, we don’t make them up, but we do tell the stories when they happen - I do that regularly. ‘We had 25 people at Alpha and on Holy Spirit day 5 people responded and became Christians’...

We want to stir faith in our people and of course we pray a lot as a church about people becoming Christians. So growth is on our agenda. Even more precisely - salvation growth is on our agenda. So we teach it, we model it as leaders; we set goals, tell success stories and pray about it in our prayer meetings.

I want to make some comments on gospel appeals and how we do them at King’s. At the end of a Sunday meeting quite regularly I would do a two minute gospel appeal. I might not be leading the meeting or preaching but at the end of the worship or if we’ve broken bread together, we might just feel it is right to go for a gospel appeal - literally a two minute thing. It is ‘God is here. God loves you. We’ve just celebrated His death and resurrection. We don’t know if you’re a Christian. We just want to give you an opportunity to respond to Christ here and now. So why don’t we all close our eyes. Is there anyone here that wants to become a Christian? Could you put your hand up now…?’

Sometimes when we do it that way we get no response but you’d be surprised how many times someone in our context will respond. If there is no response in the first meeting, there are always the subsequent meetings. That’s all we do. You don’t need to include the whole doctrine of salvation in there, with the creation and the fall and things like that! In that sense you don’t lose the whole meeting to the gospel moment because there are other things to include such as teaching for the church and worship. We would say to our preaching team ‘you need to present Christ every time you preach and everything you bring should go through the Cross or reflect the Cross somehow as you preach’. If you just preach and Jesus doesn’t appear in the material then we are ‘off message’.