I recently attended a team training session for a mission trip I plan on taking this fall with the church. If you have not taken a mission trip with Church of the Resurrection, one of the assignments in preparation for a trip is to construct your personal faith story and then be prepared to tell it within a three to four minute time frame. This way each person is be prepared if someone asks him or her on the trip to offer a personal “testimony.” For experience has proven that these personal testimonies can have a profound impact on people and situations during a trip.
Now, as a pastor, it is not unusual that I am asked to give my testimony, but rarely am I limited to a three-minute timeframe. Although, I’m sure there are some who wished they had placed a time limit on my story! As I prepared my abbreviated story, I found this exercise to be very helpful. It forced me to organize my story, to subtract all the extraneous details and to really think about what was important in my commitment to Christ, so that I could tell it succinctly.
As 1 Peter 3:15 reminds us, we should always be ready to explain what we believe, not just when we’re planning a mission trip. The reality is we step into a mission field everyday when we leave our homes and, in most situations, we may only have a three-minute window to make a difference in another person’s life by offering our witness.
I want to encourage you to think about writing down your story so that the next time someone asks you at the water cooler why your faith or your church is so important to you, you have a 3-minute response all prepared. It may be the only opportunity you get.
Here are a couple of suggestions that the Mission team gave us to consider when writing our story:
- Central theme of life struggles
- Appropriate Scripture verse
- Attention-getting story or phrase
- Story outline:
My life before knowing Christ;
The way I came to Christ or fully committed to Him;
My life after receiving Christ
When you get your story worked out, I’d love to hear it sometime.
