Like many good ideas, this one was pinched from someone else. It was 2003, and Ben (my husband) and I were enmeshed in our first year of ministry training with the Evangelical Christian Union (ECU) at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. At a recent area committee meeting, we heard Peter Hughes (who was then a staffworker at the University of Western Sydney) talk about his decision to do away with main campus meetings and, instead, focus on small groups. He had started giving his students a double-sided A4 broadsheet each week as a way of building relationships, maintaining community and injecting a bit of sound teaching into their lives. The front featured a short article he’d written about the Bible or Christianity; the back had Bible study questions and prayer points.
Ben took an instant shine to the broadsheet idea. Our main ministry responsibilities lay with Christian students in the Arts and Creative Arts faculties, and he thought that the broadsheet would work well with them. So starting in the second semester of 2003, he spent his Sunday afternoons and evenings putting together our version of it, which he dubbed The Page. On the back there would be a short Bible study on the passage for the week (which usually mirrored the main meeting talks), some prayer points (which fell under the headings of ‘Another country’, ‘Another campus’ and ‘Our campus’) and a list of upcoming events (main meeting times and talk topics, mission events, conferences and so on).
On the front, he’d publish a 900-word article. These were written by us, by Pete (who would also borrow content back from us), by staff members and even students (especially once we started running a writing course during training time). The articles were about things like evangelism and guilt, how to read the Bible with non-Christian friends, philosophy, evolution and creation, hair, shopping, interviews with current and exiting staffworkers, interviews with students, testimonies, film reviews, and so on. Sometimes the articles were related directly to current events (e.g. interviews with the mission week guest speaker); sometimes the subject matter dovetailed with what we were learning in main meetings (e.g. various interpretations of Mark 13).
The Page was photocopied on the Monday morning and distributed to the students in our Bible study groups throughout the week. At first, this was just done for the Arts and Creative Arts faculties. But eventually The Page was given to all the Christian students affiliated with us, with prayer points contributed by the prayer committee and announcements/events contributed by other staffworkers. In addition, we started publishing the main article on the ECU website.
Fast forward several years to 2006: Ben was in his second year at Moore College and I had just started working at Matthias Media. It was January—that time of year when many visitors come along to church for the first time. One of those visitors was Cassie,1 a young woman who had grown up in a broken home in the country. In late high school, she had reached a very low point that had caused her to question whether or not there was a God. None of her friends and family were Christian. Nevertheless, the question plagued her, and she began trawling the internet, searching for answers.
She attended the University of Wollongong after high school, and went along to ECU main meetings once or twice, but didn’t like them. But she read just about everything in The Page published on the ECU website, and that, along with some other things, persuaded her that God was real.
University study didn’t work out, so she moved to Sydney, intending to look for a job. Initially she stayed with a friend who lived around the corner from our church, and she convinced that friend to come along with her one Sunday so she could check it out. That was how I met her.
In God’s kindness, she started coming along to our Bible study group. I also took her through the Just for Starters course one-to-one so that she could become more established in the faith.
It has now been seven years since The Page was launched, and it is still going, though its founders have long since moved on. Even now, it continues to have an influence: every so often, former students tell me they find it while cleaning their rooms, and take a moment to read it again (or read it for the first time) and think about its contents.
A good idea is worth pinching. Have you been gifted with written communication, editing and organizational skills? Do you have the ability to mobilize a group of people to write for you? Do you see any opportunities where something like The Page would be useful for Christian growth and/or witness? If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, why not pinch this good idea?
- Not her real name. ↩
