Getting the message out there
Discipleship is such a key priority for all churches, but of course we do struggle getting Jesus’ message of love, forgiveness, hope, redemption and the Kingdom of God across to a society assaulted by alternative messages from all angles. We are competing with the likes of Tiktok, Instagram, What’s App, Facebook, YouTube and Facebook- social media outlets that allow its users to disciple people more effectively than we as Christians have able to.
We can make the mistake of thinking that ‘discipleship’ is purely a spiritual activity when in fact the dictionary definition of discipleship is about encouraging someone or some people to follow the philosophies of someone or something-it should be acting out the message of Jesus Christ of course, but companies and society disciple us day in, day out in one form or another – you only have to look at how our world’s thoughts have been transformed through movements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘#Me Too’ & ‘# CancelCulture’ to see how successfully other people have been able to disciple society by changing the thinking and actions of organisations, businesses, governments and a lot of us -and depending on your point of view that may not always have been a positive thing.
So it heartened me a few weeks ago to see on the London Tube the above advert for the ‘Bible App’ (3,000 bible versions in 2,000 different languages) which in a marvellously inventive and funny way is going viral and interesting the ‘unchurched’ (part of its aim). If you cannot clearly see the advert, it is in the form of a review (like ‘Trustpilot’) of the Bible App where it is given ‘zero stars’, and the reviewer comments about it “would not recommend”. The user’s name is ‘Satan’. It is brilliant and instantly gets the message across to people about how good and powerful reading something like the Bible App (others like ‘The Bible with Nicky and Pippa Gumbel App are available!) is -so much so that the Devil doesn’t want people to read it. A great way to showcase humour to disciple people- as one person tweeted on ‘X’ : “I saw this on the train yesterday-I absolutely love this advert!!!”
What is refreshing is that the evangelical American church movement ‘Life. Church’ who run the Bible App is taking Jesus’ message out to the people, as Jesus and the original disciples did, to spread the Gospel amongst commuters, to make them smile and hopefully to be one of the 700m+ users who have downloaded the App. This is the kind of thing churches need to do to get people reading the bible and gospels again.
Tags: Bible App, #me too, cancel culture