Tom's take on camp speaking 3

Speaker extraordinaire Tom and I continue our chat about speaking at camps (you can read part one here and the second instalment here). Give Tom some love and check out his blog here. 

Ideally, the audio would be inserted here, but my phone and my laptop can't get on the same wavelength.

So you'll have to do the hard work of reading to be impressed by Tom's wisdom and my woeful interviewing skills. Our chat went for 12 minutes so here is the final thrilling instalment. Enjoy.

G: Important question... Do you have an official gospel spiel which you present which you keep in your back pocket which you use all the time?

T: No. When I present the gospel I will always make sure that Jesus is Lord; that He died and rose again; that you need to come to Him in repentance; you need to put your faith in Him and ask for forgiveness for your sin, beginning your life living for Him as Lord. I don't always use those particular words. Depending on what audience you've got, you want to make sure you're culturally appropriate. I don't have this one spiel that I use.

It depends what you're doing. Often I'll be guided by the passage which I'm speaking from and that will change how I present the gospel. But they are are basic things I'll put in.

G: Do you gather have one gospel-camp-fire-talk to present the gospel or do you rather weave it through all the talks?

T: The ideal for me is that every talk I make comes back to Jesus. I'm a bit of a stickler for that. So I'll try and make sure whatever we are talking about points to Jesus and how He essentially died and rose again for us. So while that always happens but I don't always give people a chance to become Christians. Normally I'll try and do it twice.

Say I am doing a Monday-to-Friday camp, I might do it Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday is good because by then people are awake at camp and once you do it, you can say that if you didn't do it then, there will be another opportunity later in the week (Unless Jesus comes back on Wednesday). I feel that if you do it once then people don't have the opportunity to respond a second time if they kept it to themselves.

G: So do you have a preferred heads-down-shut-your-eyes-hands-up method?

T: No, I keep experimenting. My ideal is that somebody comes and talks to you in some form or another. If people just put up their hands then they tend to disappear. So what I've been doing lately is say-a-prayer/put-up-your-hands/with-your-eyes-closed but then say after that I would really like for you to come and talk with me, I'll be hanging around after, or another leader. I try and not be manipulative. You want to make it easy for people to respond, but you also want them to stick at it beyond the camp high.

Tomorrow I'll share the pearls of wisdom which I learnt from this chat.