Course Top Tips

We hope you will be encouraged by the feedback, advice and encouragement from the church leaders and course facilitators who feature below.

• Top tips for church leaders

• Top tips for course facilitators
  

• Top tips re the take-away actions and day of action
  

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The following comments are from a range of church leaders and course facilitators as well as course participants

Top tips for church leaders

• 'It’s vital that people buy into it – make sure you cancel your small groups for a while'
• 'You will be challenging the existing mentality so will need to integrate the course with everything else you are doing, such as tying it into a sermon series.'
• 'The whole agenda needs visiting regularly particularly if your church is word-based and conservative. It has to filter out into regular teaching and ongoing drip-drip to see ongoing change or the church can drift back into being inward looking.'
• 'You need to recognise there is a hill to climb!'
• 'Challenge yourself to come back to the agenda in different ways.'
• It has reassured those who felt instinctively that these issues are right as well as those who felt they were a distraction, that they are solidly biblical and inherent to gospel ministry. We have all been reminded that orthodoxy is radical!
  
  

Top tips for course facilitators

•  'You’ve got to have the church leader on board – I would even say it’s a waste of time otherwise and you will struggle. There is a likelihood it won’t take root unless the leadership team are on board. '
• 'One of the best things about the course is that the material is good and easy to deliver – tell the church leader it’s all there and requires no work to adapt. '
•  'The course leader needs to grasp the vision and ideally get input from others ahead of time – maybe talking to someone else who’s done it, or lead a course, to enable them to prepare and get the most out of it.'
• 'The course works best where people are prepared and open to engage personally with the issues and not just assent intellectually.
• 'I believe you have to be realistic, if at the end of the course you haven’t achieved what you wanted to achieve focus on those for whom you have been a catalyst and encourage them to continue to engage – particularly if you don’t have the clout to engage with the whole church.'
• 'Be creative with the material – don’t be afraid to add things in, break it up, etc. We added video from Amazing Grace, video from the youth version*, graphics and stories we had prepared for the youth version, own powerpoints on a couple of occasions. e.g. For the reflection time in the final session, we used a powerpoint of key phrases, quotes, ideas from the course (prepared for youth version) with some euphoric dance music – and at another point in the session, we used Faure’s requiem.'
• 'Deliver it as a team/partnership if possible – we found it was much more effective having two of us involved rather than the same voice all the time. This also obviously helped with ideas etc during the planning stage – and for the longer term follow-up.'
• 'We also created handouts for each week, including the discussion questions for the group sessions, the biblical references, a few key points and the homework. This was helpful both during the sessions and as a reminder to take home. This also served as a partial catch-up for some people who couldn’t attend.'
• 'Adapt it to the needs of your group. We felt the Youth version* was a bit too tailored to articulate, engaged, academic young people, and we felt we needed to make it much more interactive, multi-media, varied in delivery, etc. We carried this same approach forward into the adult version'.
• 'One of the things that made it work well for us was that we were so well prepared – especially as we wanted to make the delivery varied and interactive, we needed to know exactly which of us was doing what and for how long. This helped the sessions run smoothly, and people appreciated and commented on the quality of what was done.'
• 'Integrate it into the life of the church as much as possible. We were fortunate to be able to do this - making a particular feature of the course as a temporary replacement for housegroups, reinforcing it with a preaching series, etc. This obviously requires the enthusiastic support of the church leaders, which we had. The church also paid for resources, materials, etc.'
• 'Give people space to make their own response and follow their own path. Some people’s attitudes changed significantly during the course – because God was speaking to them through the material, not because we were telling them what to think! We were careful not to be too prescriptive about our own views of the black & white of the issues. E.g. some people are still thinking through who “the poor” are – those living on less than $1 a day overseas, or the vulnerable in our own community.'
• 'In terms of practical action, find out what other groups are already doing in your community – don’t reinvent the wheel; don’t cut across what others are doing. Maybe there’s something you can join in with – it doesn’t have to have your church’s logo on it (“walk humbly…”).'
• 'Don’t assume you already know the needs of your community – take the time to try and find out more. It’s easy to assume there are no poor in our community.' 
  

Top tips re the take-away actions and day of action 

• 'The take-away actions are good and it’s essential to get people engaging with them – they are not onerous and because it’s are all about living it out it helps to root the teaching and really transformed it for some. ' 
• 'Doing the take-away action was hard but it actually became the best part of the course for me. I found out a lot about the community I live in.'
• 'Having the discussions was a great way to learn for me and doing the  meant we were applying what we were learning and I really liked that.
• 'Getting everyone involved in the action day and doing something is essential – it was the action day that topped it out – people will have many more memories of the course and the day.'
• 'For the day of action we helped with a local Christian teenage initiative and two years on from running the course the church has a good and supportive relationship through a handful of people being involved with a local teenage initiative which is had no contact with before. We have also taken on Adopt a cop.'
• 'We didn’t do a day of action during the course but we have established a ‘small steps group’ and are planning one now based on some of the outcomes of the course where we explored the needs and opportunities of the area. The message is that it is now part of the life of the church –we now see engagement with the local community as a core part of why we are here and most of the church is happy with this.'
  
  

* Please note, these comments come from a church which trialed the youth version, but it is unfortunately not yet available for general use.