Occasionally, I am asked for advice on how to best serve Iranians, or asylum seekers more generally, or how to reach South Asian Muslims, or helpfully operate in a majority Muslim context. Basically, areas where people perceive we have some special insight because of the area we are in. They want to know how they too can engage with these groups of people that they are either finding coming into their church or the area around them has changed and they sense their model of church might need to change too.

It is always a bit awkward because I’m not sure I have any great insight to share. Yes, I have been here 10 years or so now. Clearly I have some experience doing what we’re doing. And yes, our church is growing and we are seeing people coming in from a range of different backgrounds. We are seeing the white working classes, Iranian asylum seekers, African immigrants and others joining the church and we are connecting with much broader groups more generally too. These are groups many churches are not reaching, some would like to be reaching, and want to know the secret. What did you do that we can do too? Give us the silver bullet.

But (and I’m sure you knew it was coming) there isn’t one. The fact is, when I first came to the church, we preached the gospel, we reached out, we tried to encourage people to grow and the church shrank! Ten years later, we preach the gospel, we reach out, we try to encourage people to grow and the church grows. Which suggests it isn’t any specific thing that we are doing because, like idiots, we’ve plugged away doing exactly the same thing over and over again, sometimes with frustratingly negative results and other times encouraging, positive ones.

But what particular insights do we have to offer? I don’t think there is a special way to reach South Asians or to connect with Iranians. Admittedly, so far as Iranians are concerned, we do translate what we can but it bears saying we can only translate because we have people available who can translate. God has gifted us Farsi-speakers with good English who are able to serve their fellow Iranians this way. But if you look at our engagement with Muslims, we tell them the gospel straight just as we would with anyone else. We don’t change it. I’m not even sure we do anything particularly contextually significant. I turn up in the same clothes as I do when I preach, I share the same gospel truths as when I am preaching and teaching anyone else, I answer whatever questions come in the same way I would any questions. I’m just not sure what to tell you.

I suppose we might be able to offer some small insights. Thing like, trying to invite people to a Christianity Explored course probably isn’t going to work and here are some of the things that we have found to be more effective. But, as with anything, most these things are a coming together of having the right people to run them and engage with folks coming. Just because we have found certain things useful doesn’t mean you are engaging with the same kind of Muslim, or have the same personalities available (among Christians or local Muslims) to make the thing viable. We might be able to suggest some books or literature that might be most suitable, but you all know how to hand out books to people and you’ve all got access to google and know trusted publishers/Christian book sellers to figure that stuff out easily enough. I don’t think these things are rocket science and, I suspect, you won’t when I tell you this stuff either.

What I suspect we are dealing with is a lack of confidence. Here is a group that we struggle to reach. We haven’t engaged with them before. So, we assume, we don’t know what we’re doing. How do we reach these particular people? In the end, making friends with people and talking to them about Jesus is the name of the game, isn’t it? What about that have you not done before?

I think we often fall into event evangelism, and things like it, because it is what we are comfortable doing. We know how to do that. We know how to invite the people we usually engage with. We know how to pitch it. But trying to make friends with people in your community and talk to them about Jesus shouldn’t be outside our wheelhouses either. We all have friends and should have some idea about how to engage with people.

Whilst there may be some forms of evangelism that are likely to be more or less effective to different people – and maybe we can give some simple pointers to that end – ultimately we are just looking to engage with people and talk about Jesus with them. So, you only need to ask yourself two fairly simple questions: (1) where do people go in my community so I can engage them? (2) what can I do in my community to engage people? Once you have figured that out, you just look at what people do and go and do it with them or look at what you can do to serve your community and invite people to it. In whichever things you do, you want to be friendly, engage with people and share the gospel. But there is nothing unique in these things when reaching particular people; we should be asking these things when we are reaching any people and, if our church is doing anything at all, we are probably already doing these things to reach some people already and therefore might be able to repurpose these things to reach a new set of people.

All of which is to say, I don’t think there is a magic bullet. I don’t think there is some clever insight to give. Your goal, whoever you are reaching, is to engage with people and point them to Jesus. You only need to think about where people go, go there, engage people and talk to them about Jesus. Otherwise, you need to create spaces where people can come – whether that is by providing for specific needs or offering something people want – so that you can engage people and then talk to them about Jesus. And when you talk about Jesus, there isn’t really a special way to do that. Just talk about him, let people ask their questions about him, answer their questions about Jesus.

Which may not be the particular help you are looking for, but most of this is just a matter of confidence. Once you have met a few people from the group you’re trying to reach, start talking to them about Jesus and realise it really isn’t all that different to effectively reaching anyone else, you’ll grow in confidence and find you just get on with it. And then you’ll see, you don’t need our help because you’ve got everything you need already.