Glad You Asked was run as part of the Navigators ministry in Nottingham, UK.

1. Why did you decide to get a group started?

Broadly speaking, we got started because we’re motivated in evangelism. We believe God is the ultimate reality and people don’t know Him. We also think Glad You Asked is the best resource for students so this is why we use it. It is very relevant in terms of the questions that it covers. For students who do ask questions, these are the questions they are asking.

2. What do you think is the potential of using Glad You Asked within a student ministry setting that might not exist in other scenarios?

Student context is strategic in terms of influencing this life stage that defines who they grow into. There’s an opportunity at university that’s not there when they graduate. Student life is built around natural friendship groups through shared living, classes, etc. – they are relationships that you don’t get elsewhere. Optimal use of Glad You Asked is within these naturally existing groups, implementing a ‘come-to’ rather than a ‘go-to’ model.

3. When you first considered how to get started, what were your biggest unanswered questions?

Will we be able to do it? This stemmed from not having confidence in our own ability. Glad You Asked is a different and unique approach. It’s not just another thing on the shelf – it’s an entirely different animal.

Will this approach and this philosophy work? This question was answered in the Glad You Asked training we took our leaders through prior to starting the groups. Because it was such a paradigm shift, we still wondered how it would work if you didn’t tell people what to believe but allowed them to discover for themselves.

4. What were the challenges to getting started in your particular situation?

Meeting people. Once people came and appreciated the style and experience of it, it was easy to get them to stay. However, it was hard to explain things cold. For potential participants, you sound like every other thing on the market and people hear, ‘You will try to convert me.’

In student work, it can take a year or two before students will trust you enough to engage with these questions. Once you’ve built that trust, they move slowly through the questions, usually graduating and leaving before they make a decision. After they leave, it’s hard to keep those relationships going and you never find out if they make a decision to become a Christian.

The Alpha brand. The local Christian scene is very strong on Alpha and many people use it as their main vehicle for evangelism. While there are definitely students who are where Alpha starts, most relate more to the questions asked in Glad You Asked. However, because people have heard of Alpha, they feel more comfortable coming to what they know.

5. In the end, how did your group get started?

In our context, we did cold contact selling – connecting with people at the Freshers fair, handing out flyers, and meeting people through Alpha and then following up afterwards with Glad You Asked.

While we did cold contact invitations, I think that inviting in the context of relationships is more effective. We’ve been working to equip Christians who understand what Glad You Asked is aiming to acheive. The idea wouldn’t be about ‘inviting’ people to an event but would be more about taking it into where you are.

6. What was successful about your group?

Some people became Christians and everyone moved along on their journey, even if they didn’t become Christians.

A side success has been the impact of the Glad You Asked philosophy on our Christian group. What we’ve learned through training and experience now influences how we do other small groups and orientate our ministry.

7. If doing it again, what would you do differently?

Not much. We’d try to get the whole Christian community on board rather than just a few excited people. The participants would then have the opportunity to be influenced positively by the wider community, creating a more integrated approach to how we reach people.

8. What would you carry on from your experience that you’d do again?

The nature and pace of our group worked well. No one felt like they had to be an expert.

Recruit the right people to the group. We had good leaders, which made all the difference. Also, we had various approaches to inviting people to be a part.

9. For someone just starting to think about running Glad You Asked within a student ministry, what advice would you give them?

• It’s very good.
• Get the training. There’s a change in mindset because Glad You Asked has a different approach that you need to consider carefully and take on board. It’s different from Alpha – you can't just transfer from one to the other.
• Glad You Asked works best when there’s a shift in mindset from doing this with people you don’t know to taking it to people you know.