“A Better Hero” is a pocket-sized booklet which runs through four short passages from Mark’s gospel. There are three simple questions on each passage, and a ‘food for thought’ question which tees up the next study.
What’s the vision for these little booklets?
For multiple people across our church family to be reading the Bible with friends, colleagues and neighbours, all with the aim of ultimately seeing lost people come to Christ.
Now hold on.
Do we really need another one2one resource? What’s wrong with Uncover? Or Word One2One?
Answer – nothing’s wrong with them. They’re brilliant resources. But ‘Hero’ is a bit different…
Here’s why:
- The layout and structure of these booklets is different, in that there’s a lot less content. ‘A Better Hero’ is deliberately designed to be as straightforward as possible – with just three questions per study, on a 2-page spread.
- The aim is that these ‘mini-studies’ are a primer to a conversation on the Bible. When we launched these in December 2017, the line I kept repeating is that this booklet is designed to help start the conversation. They don’t provide all the answers, but they’re a launch-pad for a simple, straightforward conversation about the Bible.
- They’re designed to not require any training in advance. You don’t need to have a ‘Leaders Handbook’ to guide you through it. It does what it says on the tin. You can just open it up with your friend, read the passage, and then ask each other the questions. For some people, the conversation might be over in 5 minutes; for others, it might be an hour. But conversations will be happening!
- The design of the booklet is such that it can be done anywhere. You can have a couple in your back pocket. You can fit a bunch of them in your bag. And so you can read ‘Hero’ with someone wherever suits you – down the pub, in a cafe, at home, on the train, at work. And because it’s small, it’s cheap to print – you could order 500 and stick them at the back of church for members to grab whenever they want to start the conversation with a friend.
So – that’s ‘A Better Hero’.
We launched it at Dundonald just before Christmas. We put a copy on every seat at all of our events, and encouraged people to ‘start the conversation’. Within a few months, we discovered that at least 20 one-to-one’s had been started using the ‘Hero’ resource, with more beginning every week.
Here’s some of the feedback we’ve had from members of the congregation so far:
“Read it with a mate today, was really nervous going in – but worked really well. Having only 3 questions meant that it didn’t feel like a comprehension exercise, but we tackled chunky subjects… Spent 30mins on how sin may be a bigger problem then physical paralysis. Amazed how interested he was!”
“I’ve just finished reading through A Better Hero with my friend. She really enjoyed it and now wants to keep reading Mark with me 1 to 1. God is at work!”
“Recently completed it with a colleague, who now wants to investigate the resurrection claims further…and another colleague has just agreed to do it with me!”
And so we’re really excited about how God might use this resource to win people to Christ across London.
We know it’s not the only way to do evangelism – but we’re praying that as people are brought to see the person of Jesus in the pages of Mark’s Gospel, they might come to see and believe that he is the Saviour of the world.
