Christ Church Winchester spent Freshers Week this academic year creatively reaching the students in the city. Here is what they got up to...
"Last year, in the build up to Freshers Week, we realised that the thing that we have, as well as hope in Jesus, is knowledge about how to live well as a student in the city we’re in. Rather than giving out fliers destined for the recycling bin, we designed maps of Winchester full of top tips for navigating the city, advice on where to take their nan on a daytrip and, ultimately, an invite to try church. We found those conversations whilst handing out maps fruitful, but the interaction ended there. This year, we wanted to do something similar, but with an invite to something irresistible to follow it up well.
We ended up writing and printing an eight page newspaper full of testimonies, recommendations and information about our events this term. One page was dedicated to advertising our 'FRESHERS FARMPARK' - we’d realised that the thing that students couldn’t really say no to in Freshers Week is an invite to cuddle a piglet or take a selfie with a donkey!
Our encouragement whilst giving out our newspapers was threefold. Firstly, we had so many good conversations with students, giving advice, pointing out things in the newspaper and even praying for students on campus. Secondly, we saw so much engagement with the newspapers. As we walked through freshers fayre, so many people were reading papers sat on benches, reading about the hope that Jesus has given to our current students. Some students even asked if this was going to be a weekly newspaper because they loved the first one so much!
Thirdly, the excitement about Freshers Farmpark was huge. We had students
screaming from the top of their accommodation block about the fact that goats were coming. We had students walk past us twenty minutes after receiving a newspaper to tell us that they’d invited their whole seminar groups. We weren’t just relying on our current students to be the evangelists with this one, because the event itself was worth sharing on its own.
Freshers Farmpark itself was hilarious fun. Using funding from JustSow, we hired a mobile farm and a farmyard themed inflatable. We think that about half of the students at the event weren’t regular church-goers and about 15% of them came from newspaper invites alone. One student that we gave a newspaper to had shared that it was her birthday and we were prepared with a birthday cake just in case she came! She felt so blessed and surprised that we’d remember her name, let alone buy her a cake.
At Freshers Farmpark we found that students who had never been to a church before were overwhelmed by the love that they received – they came expecting cute goats but found so much more inside the building too. The event itself didn’t have a “short talk” or a “gospel message” apart from the fact that students were welcomed into our building.
We’ve seen, over the years, that establishing trust and consistency with our students is really important when it comes to events they can invite their friends to. They want to know what they are advertising and want their friends to have a good experience. Because of this, we have a fringe of our students’ friends who come to so many of our events – and lots of them are trying church because of it.
Taking a student group to Playzone or holding a big Christmas Dinner isn’t the end goal of our ministry, it’s the stepping stone that tentative students (who think they may be zapped when coming through the threshold – no, seriously, some of them held hands recently whilst walking through our doors…) step onto to check that we are safe people. To check that we are fun people. To almost test their hypotheses about Christians and are proven wrong. Jesus loved a party. Jesus meets people where they’re at. We’ve loved doing the same and have seen people try church and come to faith because of it."
