Witnessing Taster & Chill-Out

After Sunday service 31 blessed children gathered to spend the afternoon together, the programme including promoting True Father’s autobiography and playing board games afterwards. The participants ranged from ages 12-29 and included people who had never witnessed before as well as people who had already witnessing experience through STF or otherwise.

The aim of the witnessing taster was to make witnessing easy for 2nd generation, and give them a chance to explain their faith. We used leaflets designed by Kensei Thomas as a base for witnessing. Those who felt confident talking to people could explain about the autobiography with leaflets, and those who felt more comfortable just handing out leaflets could do that as well. In this way, participants could choose how they wanted to witness, and they could also choose to do this on streets or go house to house.

Before going out, we did some short role play and gave suggestions as to what to say. Everyone went out in pairs for a bit over an hour and afterwards every pair shared about their experience. After this we ate together in our South London Peace Embassy and played board games.

The leaflets advertised a free book and included a short explanation. However, to obtain a free copy, they should take initiative and get in touch with us. This way we hope to ensure that those who get a free copy are actually willing to read it and we can hopefully build a relationship with them when delivering the book.

The witnessing taster turned out quite well in the sense that we found it an interesting and fun experience, had some good conversations, and came up with creative ways of delivering the leaflets, including talking to a pastor in a church and someone wanting to get into an apartment house guessed the entrance code on their first try. We also met a few people with negative attitudes. Three days later, one person has got in contact about receiving a book. We had expected some more and hope there will be more people contacting us. We are not exactly sure how to do the follow-up, since building and maintaining relationships with people is in some ways the hardest part, but hope we can be guided. Those who participated in the witnessing taster would like to do something like this again, so we are looking into perhaps making this into something regular. Next time we could improve the programme by adding onto the spiritual aspect of witnessing by e.g. doing a prayer condition before and keep people in mind afterwards in our prayers.

We think similar activities with leaflets could work in other communities and even people’s own neighbourhoods as well.