Today on the Evangelist Podcast, Glenn speaks to Stephen Harper of Yes He Is.
SPEAKER_00The Evangelist Podcast from Revival. Find out what's new in telling people the good news about God, the world, and you with Andy Brinkley and Glenn Scrivener.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to the Evangelist Podcast. I'm Andy Brinkley, and with me is Glenn Scrivener. Glenn? Glenn? Glenn? Actually, I'm kidding. He's uh Glenn is up in uh Norwich. He's uh just been speaking at uh Norwich Cathedral at the University Christian Union Carol Service. He's actually doing a number of carol service uh around. I think he's doing the Reading Carol service tomorrow. He's also got the 321 book coming out soon. It's available for pre-order now. Um Little Birdie tells me that uh it's gonna be out a little bit sooner than uh the first of January. But uh if you go to the show notes you'll be able to see a link to the pre-order. Uh there's also a tract coming out, the 321 tract, and this is uh a very interesting um three-dimensional tract. It's it's sort of in a triangle and you fold it up into well, you you work your way you unfold it first, uh, the triangle, and then you make it into a pyramid at the end. Uh look out for that. Uh we're working on the Christmas video as well. We've been out filming in various uh uh locations, and we'll let you know when it's coming out. And so without much further ado, here's Stephen Harper from Yes He Is, talking to Glenn earlier this week.
SPEAKER_03I am with Stephen Harper of Yes He Is, and we are in the bells of uh all souls Langham Place in the heart of central London. Stephen, good to be with you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_03You usually live in uh Birmingham, is that right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I do. Um I grew up there, so um travelled a little bit in between, but most of my life's been in Birmingham.
SPEAKER_03Okay, I can kind of tell that, because I'm from Australia, but like I can kind of I can kind of pick up accents now, and uh you've got a bit of the brummy thing going on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I try my best to hide it, but it's um sometimes it comes out more than others. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_03It's so lilting and musical. Yeah, yeah. People don't usually say that, do they? No, they usually say dummy brummy. Yeah. Alright.
SPEAKER_02And do they do your accent as well, like I just tried to do? People try. People really try their best to do it, but um I was watching Peaky Blinders recently, and I've seen people professional actors seem to struggle a lot at doing Birmingham accent. Yes. They sound more like Scouses to me. Yes. Um, if they're paid and they can't do it, then it's usually the same with my friends who try to take the nick out of where I'm from.
SPEAKER_03But it it is the accent that people try to do, as well as actually Belfast. My wife's from Belfast, and so everyone else is I'm from Bahrain Ashton, you know, why nigh, Rhine Kai, like and she hasn't even got a sentence out, and people are still doing her.
SPEAKER_02She's so distinctive.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, I I prefer her accents, I think, myself as a bunny. It's a good proud of being from Birmingham, obviously.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely, why wouldn't you be? So you work for uh a great organization called Yes He Is, uh, which I'm sure many listeners are are aware of, or like many are probably they they've been on your website and uh they've used you perhaps even even without knowing about you. So so tell us a little bit about Yes He Is and what you guys are up to.
SPEAKER_02Okay, um as briefly as possible, Yes He is is um an expression of Christian vision as a charity. And Yes He is operate within the charity to reach people online with the gospel. And what we try to do is resource Christians with media content, specifically video, that any Christian can come onto our website, take a video, and share it with a non-Christian to help explain any topic that is on the website to their friends. So an example would be if you're struggling or you've got a friend who's struggling with something like depression, or maybe they've just broken up with a girlfriend or a boyfriend and they're struggling to deal with that, they can go on Yes Ears, find a video by typing it into the search engine, and just find something that talks about the subject. Um basically the premise is very simple. Not all Christians know everything about everything. I certainly don't. Um, and when I talk to my friends sometimes, there are times when I'm just speechless because I don't know the answer to the question they're asking. So places like Yessies exist um to resource us with the answers and to help us provide an answer so that we're not just stubbornly or ignorantly rejecting what they're asking or just ignoring what they're saying. It's just our way of trying to say to Christians, look, this is part of a relationship. Um, and if you love the people that you're talking to and sharing your faith with, um then it's you're holding yourself accountable to try and answer the questions for them. And even if that means doing a bit of research, finding an answer that you don't already know.
SPEAKER_03Yes. And the answers are all videos? Yes. Pretty much.
SPEAKER_02We do have pictures that you can share, um, which are interesting. We get mixed feedback with pictures actually. Our videos are definitely more successful just because they're more popular, they're more well known in the world, that people share videos that are inspirational or communicate some sort of message of hope. Um, so the main one is is the video. We also train using our blogs. So for Yessies, we try to equip Christians as well as we resource them. Um, and we do that in a number of ways. So, in some cases, we go to churches and do training, sometimes we do talks at churches, we do talks at conferences, as you know. Um, so it really depends on what the church wants. All we know is that we're set up to serve the church, um, and however we can do that, then we'll try and make a way.
SPEAKER_03Brilliant. Well, I'll ask you in a second about how we can be better witnesses online and the sorts of things that you might say to churches to help them to be better witnesses online as well. But so just on the use of the site, um how so your your mate is struggling with the issue of depression. So, you as a Christian, you go onto yesse.com and you you search out a video and you find exactly the right one. What you send it to him on an email, or you put it on your Facebook wall, or what what is it, or you or you just give him the link and he clicks on.
SPEAKER_02So basically, you have options. When you go on the SES, you have multiple options of how you can share each piece of content. You can share it through email, but then it also gives you the options for all different social media platforms as well, so that you can share it through that. Um, the best and the most valuable reason for doing this is by sharing it through those links. It sends the non-Christian to a page which is uh a little bit more palatable for them. Yes, he is looks very Christian y, the language is very Christian-y, a Christian would understand it all, but maybe not a non-Christian if they were to read it. So we designed um a separate landing page. So when you share a video, it goes on to that landing page, which is then followed up with a video presentation of the gospel. At the moment, that is recorded by uh a youth pastor called Dave Niblock from Life Church in Bradford, and he just gives an illustration straight after so that if somebody watches this video on depression, they feel touched by it, um, or even at the point where they feel like they want to become a Christian, they then can watch the gospel presentation, which takes them through that process very shortly and relevantly as well. And then they have the option then to make a decision on that page, and which comes through to us as an organization. Um, they can email us questions if they have any, or if it's just a yes answer, we can then go and send them more resources and try to connect them with an offline church. Um so when we partner with churches with YesEs, it's really important to partner because that way we know what churches are relevant for the people that make decisions online. One thing I will say though, um we're not a be all and end all salvation website. We know full well, and it'd be very naive of us to expect people to just come to our site, watch a video, and want to get saved. It doesn't always happen like that. It's probably a rare case that it does, in all honesty. Um Yes Years is definitely a facilitator of relationship, it's there to help and to enhance the way that you talk with your friends, and when you're trying to be there and love them, it just helps to improve the vocabulary that you have in order to evangelize to them. It's I mean for me, I share videos from YesE is and I always expect them to come back to me. I always say to them, watch this video, then let me know what you think. Yeah. Because the conversation's already happening, and I know the context of why I'm sharing the video. If they get saved, they'll probably tell me anyway. But if they do make it, it's a just a bonus for me. But if they want to come and talk, I need to be open to them, and I think everybody needs to do that, regardless of what video you share.
SPEAKER_04Brilliant.
SPEAKER_03And as an organization, so you're in the business of uh hooking people up into churches and that sort of happening, happening on a regular basis?
SPEAKER_02Well, we've just started setting up a couple of other resources, obviously, with YesEs. Um, when you're providing a resource that is for evangelism and trying to encourage people to share their faith, you have to start understanding the bigger picture that we're gonna get decisions made and those people are gonna need to be put and placed into a church. And so we've created um a discipleship tool. Uh, all of this is free. So um there's a discipleship tool called Yessias, there's um evangelism tool called Yessias, discipleship tool called Simple Truth, which is all about it's like a Bible study on all the basics of faith. Um, I say it's the foundations of faith. So it just helps people understand what is church, what's prayer, who's Jesus, how do these things link together, why are they important for me if I'm gonna make a decision to be a Christian? And it just explores those. Um, and you can do that through the app, it's a free app. Just download it and you scroll through it as a Bible study effectively. And then we also have a website called Church Connect, which was developed with the idea of the decision maker online. So when somebody makes a decision, how do we send them to a church? We're not a church as Christian Vision, we don't want to be. We're here to resource the church. And so when we do do get decisions that are yes, we need to be able to say, okay, we want to recommend you to a church that's right for you and local. So basically, uh the website works as a map, like Google Maps. You type in the area you're from when you go on the website, and then it brings up all the churches in your locality, and then from there you can go and look at different churches, and each one has a profile, very much like social media, like a Facebook page.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um the way it's laid out and all that.
SPEAKER_02It's very modern. We we've just tried to make sure that it's not um simply text, it needs to be image-based as well. We want pick we always encourage churches to put pictures of inside the church services, the different types of people who go to the church. Um, and so all these details on the website help that person to make the decision. Is this the church for me? Is this the one that I want to go to? And what we do is by partnering with churches, we get an email address from the church, and the non-Christian or the new Christian can then contact the church directly rather than go through us. Um, and that's the most important part of the process because it's about bridging the online realm to the offline church. So if people wanted to get their churches registered on Church Connect, what would they do? Um you go to churchconnect.io and then right on the front page in the top right corner, there's a little link that says add my church, and all you need to do is click on that, enter the details. If your church is already on there, because there's a chance it could be, um, we've got um an agreement with the Evangelical Alliance who gave us all of their database. So we've got over three and a half thousand churches already on there. Um if you're already on it, you can just send us an email, let us know what church you're from, and then I can just invite you to your own church admin then. And you can edit it, start going and editing everything you want.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. And all because you want to plug people into the local life of church, which is yeah, where the action kind of happens. Yeah. Um tell me, so we at Revival Media, we we sort of make some videos where we try to equip Christians so that here's a video about Christmas or about Remembrance Day or about whatever, so that they can put them on their Facebook walls, and you're equipping Christians in order to be the evangelists to their Facebook friends. What makes for a good video that would actually I'm I'm gonna sit and learn from you at this at this point. What makes for a good video that actually will reach unbelievers? Okay.
SPEAKER_02Um to start with, and this won't help, there's no one-boxed answer for this. Um I wish there was, but there's not. It really depends on the audience, and this is why evangelism is so important, because you need to make sure that any content you have is relational to the person that you're sharing with. Don't send an 80-year-old asking about Alzheimer's a video of a 20-year-old who's struggling with self-harm issues. It just doesn't match and it won't work. Um and for that reason, we find that I mean, we as an organization, we specifically target 20-somethings. That's the demographic we go for. Um, the reason we do that is because we find that has the highest hit rate in terms of people older than 20 tend to be okay with watching those videos. People under it are aspiring to be those 20-somethings, and so they tend to follow and watch those videos as well. So we hit a larger market, if you like, by creating videos for 20 somethings. We do have videos to cover all ages though, um, so don't just go on there expecting just young people content. There are there's content for a range of people, a range of circumstances. Um but when you're targeting a video, I mean, for us, a good video would be like, I don't know, no more than three and a half, four minutes usually. Yeah, I think five minutes is our very maximum. And our last video was about five minutes long. Um really, it depends on the issue. What we like is personal stories. I don't you can write scripts, you can have wonderful stories told, and they can be powerful. But I for me, there's nothing more powerful than sitting there watching somebody else on this planet who's gone through the same thing as you're going through right now and understanding okay, there's hope because this person got through it, and so can I. And what do I need to do to get out of this? Well, they follow Jesus. Maybe I should at least think about the idea of becoming a believer. Um, so for me, definitely, testimony is the most powerful. Um, but don't it's not just about having the guy sit in face to camera telling a story, it just doesn't work, yeah. Especially for the age group. We go after the attention span, they'll cut off after seven, eight seconds if they're not interested. Um, so we have to make sure that the first 10 seconds is almost the most captivating.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_02Um, because that needs to grab their attention to the point that they say, Okay, I'm now gonna give my time over to watch this video. I'm gonna sit here and watch this for however long it is. Um, it looks like it's gonna be interesting to me. Um, so I would definitely say that videos with something good happening in the first ten seconds, something an explosion. Yeah, a car chase in the first ten seconds. Whatever it is. I mean, yeah, we I I guess we're looking a lot more at um trailers for movies as inspiration because these are the biggest thing, the biggest way of communicating the message of a one and a half hour film is to have a I know a two-minute version of the film cut down into bite-sized chunks that demonstrates the story and gives you the general oversight of it, even if it doesn't fill out all the minute details. Um, and we've we're similar to that. We want to give people the message, we want to give people the overriding story of Jesus' love, but then we want to encourage them enough to want to be discipled, to want to find out more about Jesus after they've watched it. So we really focus on making movie trailers for the gospel trailer.
SPEAKER_03Well, exactly. I mean, those movie trailers are just trying to grab people in so they'll buy a ticket, you know. We're actually offering Christ to people. Yeah, like so how much more should we work hard at actually trying to grab people? Uh I think that's really important. Tell me about um being an online witness. How do we go about being good witnesses for Jesus online?
SPEAKER_02Personally, I use my profile as a way of saying I'm a Christian. Yeah. Um like I make it very clear that I'm not perfect, but I'm just trying to be more like Christ. And that's enough for me. I think because I know that anybody who comes to my feed, anybody who comes to my profile, whatever social media platform I'm on, they're always going to look at my one line about me. Everybody does. I read it on other people's, I'm always looking at who writes clever, quirky phrases and stuff like that. You always naturally read what comes after the person's name. And I always like to use that for God, and I'm just like, that's the bit where I want to give God the glory and show that I'm a Christian because the Christian is there, it's actually relevant to who you are. Like mine is I'm still trying to perfect a Christian. Now, that's it, that's good enough for me. Everything I say and do, I'm held accountable for to God. So if I say something, I'm always accountable to God for it. It doesn't matter whether I use Christian language or not. What I say and do is holding me accountable so that when I go up to heaven eventually and I stand in front of God, he's gonna say to me, Well, why didn't you do this? Why did you say this? Why did you treat people badly? The important part that Jesus wants to know is that you're actually demonstrating his love, not that you're using the words that are in the Bible because they just don't match up.
SPEAKER_03Which I which I suppose has all sorts of implications for you know not gossiping and you know being a person of integrity and not laying into the latest celebrity and and you know shooting your mouth off about you know, and it's very difficult, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's so difficult. I mean, when I it's a big learning process. I went on Twitter back in 2006, 7 when it started, um, and I I remember just straight away I wanted to get involved with atheist arguments. And what I noticed was that, and I learned it over time. As much I would send a message out to an atheist and I would counter their argument or whatever it was, and I'd find that I'd get maybe 20 or 30 notifications each night. I'd wake up the next morning and find out that the whole world had been seeing these conversations and posting. And I think I just learned over time that the way that I was expressing my faith was just not right, it wasn't genuine, like I was arguing with people, and it felt I would read it back and I would say to myself, at the time I posted it, I really genuinely thought I was saying something lovingly, but reading it back, it looks more argumentative than loving. And so I came to the point where I just said, you know what? For me, that's not the right place for conversation. It doesn't even matter if I have the knowledge in that area, if I can't express the love of Jesus in what I'm saying, then it doesn't matter how much knowledge I've got in an area, I shouldn't be talking about it because I'm not demonstrating his love. Even if I'm demonstrating I have knowledge, I'm not demonstrating God's love. And so I changed my mind and I said to myself, whatever I get involved with, it needs to be a demonstration of God's love. And if I can demonstrate his love, then that's where the Holy Spirit works, not in my knowledge. So I just started getting involved with different conversations. My language now is completely different to how it was when I first went on Twitter. I don't even engage with atheist arguments and stuff like that now, and what I've found is that I do get more responses and more questions about God. Um, even on my Instagram account, and I shared this at the premier conference. Um, there was a post, I didn't know what it was at the time, but I found out it was a post of a fence of a gate. Okay, there was nothing Christian about this gate, it was just a metal gate. Okay, it was blue and it had a bit of white paint on it, okay, and I just thought it looked like a nice picture. Okay. So I put it on Instagram, and I had um a young 12-year-old or very young teen child comment about it, and he said something like, Um, if you know God is real, how do I know God is real? That was his question. Out of the blue, yeah. I hadn't said anything biblical, I hadn't said, you know, the glory of God is in this Jesus is the door. Yeah, yeah. There was no Christian message. The only Christian thing on my wall was my was my little one-line tag that just said I'm still trying to perfect being a Christian. Yeah. And this kid had posted, How do I know God is real to me? Now, I am still baffled by that conversation because I don't understand how he picked me, like, why me? Why wouldn't you pick somebody who is saying all these Christian things? And I guess I came down to the fact that I I just think maybe I just looked like a real person, um, maybe I just looked like a genuine person, and maybe you just thought that this guy seems like just a normal guy, yeah, who's not pushing God in in his Language all the time, but he's showing love in what he does. And that conversation just was fantastic. We had a great conversation about God. Um, it moved on from there, and my whole comment feed ended up getting filled with me and this this kid just talking back and forth. And the great thing is as well, it was all public. So there was no for me, there was no kind of sometimes you can feel I used to be a youth leader, and you can feel quite restricted because of conflicts with younger people talking online publicly and how it can be construed by parents. But the great thing about Instagram in particular is it's a public space, people can see the conversation that's happening. And I would certainly say, you know, for me, I was happy to keep it public because of his age. And for that, it also demonstrates God as well. Yeah, absolutely. Um there's transparency there. Sometimes we have to talk to each other internally and we do it privately. But I think when we're sharing our faith, it should always be public as much as we can. Um even if we feel like we don't know the answer, something and we're scared that it's gonna look silly publicly or whatever, it should always be public. Because even if we don't know the answer, we can at least acknowledge that we don't know the answer publicly. Yeah. And people can look at because people will look at it. If this kid saw my profile, um if he saw my post, my random post of a gay, there must have been a load of other people who saw that post as well. And if they saw all the comments and this conversation between me and him, then it's gonna do a lot more for them in their journey, and the spirit can work with them without using me to speak directly to them, and he can use me indirectly. So I think you have to be public because it has that outreach, it has that evangelism, the Holy Spirit works within that.
SPEAKER_03Reminds me very much of um the the uh Christian Union. I think I forget which Christian Union came up with this as their sort of strap line for all that they do. Do what you love and take Jesus with you. Which it sounds very much like what you're talking about. Look, there's your bio, you're a Christian, everyone knows you're a Christian, and you and you're just doing what you love, and you're being yourself and you're being out there, yeah, and therefore you're available to people more broadly, and they can ask you about your faith. Let me just uh close by asking you about Christmas, because there's some very uh exciting stuff happening with Christmas. Obviously, I mean the Sainsbury's ad has gotten so much uh publicity about the truce 1914 and actually all over the country. Is this right? All over the country, there are uh football stadiums that have asked for for these kind of carol services to go on where we sort of celebrate and and uh and talk about Christmas.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we've had we had about a hundred, over a hundred football clubs across all the leagues, so from the Premiership all the way down to the amateur leagues, who are asking us and telling us that they really wanted to put on a cow service in their stadium. For some, that means that they'll have it in a room in the stadium, because a lot of them have big function rooms. For others, it means actually hosting within the stadium itself, like the event that I'm running locally in Birmingham. We've got that, the actual stadium itself. Birmingham City's stadium football club, yeah. So that's about 30, it's 30,000 seats, 30,009 seats. Yeah, okay. Um so other club it depends on the clubs, but there's over a hundred who had the interest. And we were then we had the the test and the challenge of going to the church and saying, okay, it's now down to you guys. We've got the venue for you. We'll provide all the resources you need to run the event, but it's now up to the church to go out and actually facilitate it. And so we've seen um, I think there's approximately 25 churches and events running across the country at football stadiums. Um that ranges from the Premier League again to the amateur leagues. Um, to name a few, we've we've got Manchester City, there's Stoke City, uh, Crystal Palace, I think they're the main Premier League clubs involved. Um, then there's Birmingham City in the Championship, Bournemouth are doing one, um, Swansea City, sorry, are in the Premier League, they're running one as well. Um, and so there's loads of others that I won't even remember. Burton Albion are doing one, which is near to my home. How do you? Um and so we we're just seeing this incredible move of God. I mean, these carol services and the expression and the time that we're in, I mean, a hundred years since the centenary of World War I, and it's just the right time. And it's really opened the doors to for the church into into something like football, which is a very public, very popular sphere. And um it's really bridging a load of gaps really well. I mean, you've got the community element that the the football club loves, the fact that it shows them trying to build a local community, but it's also the church being central to that community. Um you've then got the expression of the war, which everybody has some feelings on, whether they're negative or positive. And so everybody feels like they want to get behind that, especially when it's the first world war, um, something so significant to our history as a country, and where we wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for those people who suffered and sacrificed their lives for us, which is again a gospel thing. Um we've obviously got um just the fact that we've got football clubs involved with the church, a secular body of people who I see very much as their own church, like football is easily comparable to any church, you know. Um their own worship songs and they do, they stole from the church, but they've got them. You know, they're so religious, they're but you've got religious people, yeah. And so there's a connection there. And I'm I always say to people, like, if they can be religious about a football club, then why can't they be faithful about God? Um it just doesn't make sense to me. So I want us to take those people back. Most of these football clubs started from church teams. Birmingham City started from a church team. Is that right? Um the two clubs in Birmingham started from church teams. Really, Villa as well. Yeah, both of them were church cricket clubs, and they didn't have anything to do in the winter, so they started to play football, but that got more popular than the cricket, and then they became a football club. I always said football was a poor man's cricket. Yeah, okay. Well, I think my point there's so many. Um Manchester United started as a church team. Really? Um there are just so many that people don't realise, and I only know that because I studied about it. So um, but it's so interesting seeing that God was at the centre of all of this with the football in particular, and he's just interwoven into everything. And this is about uniting cities and towns. This is about, in fact, if anything, what this event can demonstrate is that people don't need to be against each other with football, um, and that means that they're against each other in life. It's actually the other way around. We're together in life, even if we are against each other in a rivalry in football.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And the church should be central to that unity. Yeah. I've always believed that the church should be the ones that instigate the unity within a city or town.
SPEAKER_03Well, the centenary of the truce just proclaims that so boldly that there who else can stop the fighting in 1914 but Jesus. Yeah. How do we know how people can get along to these uh uh Carols uh services in the in the various places? Is is there a list of of where they're happening? Um there is.
SPEAKER_02Uh it's on the Hope website. So you'd have to go to Hope um and have a look under the Silent Night Christmas Carol section.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Um it's all on the home page anyway, and that links directly to the page that tells you all the information about the events.
SPEAKER_03Brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Um and if you sign up, they'll send you emails, let you know about what's going on. For example, last week there was an email about all the events running. They'll be emailing that out weekly to make sure that everybody can get to an event near them.
SPEAKER_03Great, we'll put that on the show notes as well so that people uh can find the closest Carol service to them. But um, Stephen Harper, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01That was Stephen Harper talking to Glenn earlier on. If you'd like to go to the web address for this episode where you can uh get the links to Glenn's book, etc., get on the mailing list for the podcast. Just go to revivalmedia.org slash TEP78. And if you could maybe just even perhaps as a Christmas gift leave us a rating and review, we'll be super happy. And we will even read it on a future podcast episode. So if you're listening to this before Christmas, uh may you have a really happy one. We should be back next time with with something. But until then, have a great advent. See you next time.