Sonlife run an equipping ministry called SEMP, which stands for Students Equipped to Ministry to their Peers. They plan an eight day mission trip with teenagers that aims to get teens to share their faith with their friends when they return from the mission. Each morning, during the mission, they do training in evangelism, and they do outreach during the afternoons. The main objective of the mission is to equip youth to share their faith with their lost friends when they return home. It is a week of training for a lifetime of ministry.
Over the past few years Honeyridge youth have been part of a beach mission that has taken place at Margate on the KwaZulu/Natal south coast. This year we decided to lead our own mission at a local church in Richards Bay, on the KwaZulu/Natal north coast. We decided to follow the Sonlife SEMP strategy. Each day we built into the lives of youth from Honeyridge and others from the Richards Bay church who joined out team for the week. This training took place each afternoon and the morning was spent down at the beach where we played sports such as volleyball, touch rugby, soccer and cricket with the intention of providing a context in which our youth develop relationships with people on the beach and put into practise what they earn in the training each day. We used the following strategy: establish a presence at the beach; play a sport; invite others to join in the game; start a conversation; develop a friendship; plant a seed; share Christ with them; and invite them to an event at the church in the evenings.
Here is a detailed report of the mission:
Pre-Mission Training
As most of the training happens during the mission, all that was needed by way of advanced training was a one morning get together where we explained the purpose of the mission to the team (consisting of six young adult leaders and 14 teenagers). We met as leaders before the teens arrived and clarified the roles that each leader would play. By the time we had finished the orientation with the teens you could sense a genuine air of excitement growing in the youth. We were set aside for the mission during a Sunday evening service two days before we left Johannesburg for the coast.
Day 1
The first day consisted of travelling to Richards Bay - a trip which takes about seven hours, although it included us having to tow one of the cars for a third of the journey. We left the church at 7am and arrived in Richards Bay at around 4pm. After meeting the pastor and youth from the host church we dropped off the broken vehicle to be repaired and made our way down to the beach. Our aim was to allow youth to get an idea of the context in which they would be ministering during the week. We dropped youth off at their hosts (they were accommodated for the week in different homes of people from the local church).
Day 2
We began the first real day of the mission with a time of devotions at the church where we explored God's heart for lost people from Luke 15. After a time of prayer for the week we launched into the first of the four training sessions that we would have during the mission. The four sessions were structured around a four-step approach to evangelism that is presented in the Sonlife audio series entitled: How to Equip Students to Reach Students. The approach is called Eternal CPR - and consists of Cultivating friendships; Planting a seed; Reaping a harvest and Following up with new believers.
The first part of the training, CULTIVATING, taught the team how to build a bridge of friendship with spiritually lost friends by spending time with them. We saw how Jesus demonstrated this with the Samaritan woman in John 4:7,9. We taught the team to build relationships with their spiritually lost friends by following the TLC approach: (1) Target - We must open our eyes and make contact with people who do not know Jesus. The team had to identify four spiritually lost friends that they would seek to lead to Christ when they returned from the mission. (2) Listen - We must open our ears and by listening show that we are genuinely interested in our spiritually lost friends' life. We learn how to ask questions that will help us get to know people. (3) Care - We must open our hands by performing acts of genuine care and kindness to show that we care about them.
The first afternoon that we spent at the beach felt strange. The team felt uncomfortable being at the beach and simply did not seem confident enough to begin inviting strangers to join them in their sporting activities. They needed some time to reach a point where they felt comfortable in this new environment. We sensed that after a day or two we would begin to feel like we had a right to be there. While we did manage to pull some people into our activities, especially cricket and touch rugby, we did not see relationships forming at this early stage.
We had planned to have a coffee bar at the church each evening. The church was about five kilometres away from the beach and would hoped to have success in inviting people we contacted on the beach to attend. The first evening coffee bar was a good event that saw youth from Johannesburg and Richards Bay beginning to mix with each other, but it was not successful in attracting outsiders to the event. We realised early on in the mission that we needed to have done more to ensure that our youth became a team; that youth from both church became a team - before we could expect them to include others. This would happen as the week progressed.
Day 3
On this day we spent the morning at the beach. We had planned to have devotions on the beach but once the youth from inland had hit the beach it was virtually impossible to get them together. We would need to come up with a better venue for the next mornings devotions. During the morning we saw that our youth began to make contact with people. The leaders took the lead in showing youth how to pull onlookers into our sports activities. Volley ball on the beach was a big success and proved to be the sport most effective in including people. After a game we invited those we had pulled in to have refreshments with us, and then we told them about the evening coffee bar and gave them a map. We left the beach after lunch, allowed the team members to return to their hosts to shower and prepare for the afternoon training and the evening coffee bar. Training took place from 4 to 6pm at the church.
The second part of the training, PLANTING, taught the team how to sow the seed of their friendship with God by speaking the truth in love. Reaching out to spiritually lost friends involves balancing truth and love. There are three kinds of Christians. The Chameleon Christian has an overemphasis on the love-side as they have a receptive audience by no message. The Cactus Christian has an overemphasis on the truth-side as they have a powerful message but no audience. The Contagious Christian balances love and truth as they have a receptive audience and a powerful message. In John 4:10-14 Jesus made a conscious decision to steer the conversation into spiritual territory when he turned an everyday occurrence into a planting opportunity. Our aim here is to surface in spiritually lost people a need to know God personally. We plant in three ways: (1) Ask questions; (2) Paint word pictures; and (3) Tell your story. During this session youth had to write their testimony in three steps: (a) my life before Christ (or childhood years); (b) how I met Christ; and (c) my life since I trusted Christ.
The coffee bar consisted of as relaxed atmosphere, where our band played a few sets of songs and there was plenty of refreshments and eats available. Youth spent a lot of time socialising together outside of the venue, but we noted that relationships were forming. Even though many people expressed interest about the coffee bar when we told them about it on the beach that morning, and some even promised to come, just two people attended the event. We reflected later that perhaps it was too big a jump to expect unchurched youth to come to a church after such a brief contact was made with them. Possibly we could consider using a neutral venue in future or have evening events on the beach, with a final event at the church, once deeper relationships were formed.
Day 4
We had morning devotions at a spot that gave a great view of the sea and the harbour. One of the team leaders shared a devotion on our motivation for evangelism - God has so blessed us that we can't keep it to ourselves! We got to the beach at 9:30 and nearly got blown off the beach. The bad weather seriously affected attendance at the beach and we felt that we lost some momentum from the day before. We were unable to play volleyball which was a great crowd puller. We did manage to pull some children into a game of cricket, although they were mostly children. At the insistence of our team we spent the early part of the afternoon at the local mall shopping for gifts and other items. It was again a great time together as a team, something that we did not have enough of as we spent a lot of time travelling apart and staying in different homes.
The third part of the training, REAPING, taught the team how to give a clear presentation of the good news about Jesus with a call to respond. We discovered that without God's involvement in the conviction of sin and the drawing of the lost to himself there will be no reaping. Our job is to clearly and concisely present the Good News message about Christ and people to call them to respond to that message. God's job is to convict the spiritually lost of sin and convince them of their need for right living and to draw them to himself. Youth were then taught how to present the gospel by using the Sonlife Gospel booklet entitled Knowing God Personally; and by memorising a one-verse gospel presentation diagram based on Romans 6:23. We also explored how to call for a response - by visually painting a word picture and then verbally asking a question that helps a lost person to evaluate their spiritual condition.
The evening coffee bar was encouraging as people we had net on the beach the day before arrived. A successful part of the evening proved to be volleyball under a flood light at the church. We realised that we had not stressed the importance of including outsiders, nor had we provided training on how to do so, to people from the local church. The people who attended were unchurched and from the town.
Day 5
The fifth day followed a similar format as day 4 with morning devotions held at the main lookout spot in Richards Bay. Two leaders shared the devotion were the team were challenged to be witnesses of what Christ had done in their lives. We then made our way to the beach where we managed to again attract a lot of people into our sports events, including volleyball, soccer and cricket. We did notice that we our training and practise were out of sync. The team were by now starting to cultivate friendships, but were not yet taking the CPR process into the planting of seeds stage. We did remind ourselves that our objective was not to win Richards Bay for Christ, but to equip youth from Johannesburg and from Richards Bay to win their friends for Christ after the mission. The afternoon training took place at the pastors home as there was a wedding scheduled at the church. We had a good time of bonding as a team at the home and had supper there after the training session.
The fourth part of the training, FOLLOW-UP, taught the team how to deal with spiritually lost friends who trust Christ and with those who don't respond. Jesus spent time following up with new believers (John 4:39-41). We taught the team five steps to take with the responsive (1) Take them to a believing friends and have them verbalise the decision they made. (2) Give them a Bible and a follow-up Bible study and see that they get through it in the next two weeks. (3) Invite them to a growth level Bible study. (4) Report the details of the decision made to a youth pastor or youth leader. (5) Encourage new believers to go public with their decision by being baptised and to start practising Eternal CPR with their spiritually lost friends. We also taught two steps to follow-up with the unresponsive: (1) Faithfully endure (Galatians 6:9); and (2) Repeat the eternal CPR process with them. To keep youth focussed on reaching their spiritually lost friends we encouraged them to practise these daily affirmations: Jesus is the only way to God; Every person deserves to hear about Jesus; I can tell other what Jesus has done for me; All who die without Christ will spend eternity in hell; Deep down people long for a personal relationship with God; and It is wrong to keep the good news about Jesus to myself.
The evening did not include a coffee bar at the church because of the wedding, so the team went to the beach. The weather was not great so there was no one to make contact with at the beach.
Day 6
The team led the morning service at the local church. We put together a service that shared with people a passion for reaching out to lost people. We used a message from Luke 15; a drama net; songs and input from various team members on the training that we had experienced. After the service we went to a beach for a braai and some sport activity. The evening was spent at one of the host homes where we relaxed together.
Day 7
The team, after saying goodbyes, left the church at 7:30 for their trip back to Johannesburg and arrived home at 4pm.
It is going to be essential that we follow up with the team members to encourage them to implement the CPR process with their spiritually lost friends. This is where the success of the mission will be measured. I have returned from the experience convinced that it is possible and imperative to equip teens to evangelise their peers.
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