King’s Lynn pastor Andy Moyle has launched his first book, ‘Friends, Food and the Gospel’, based on his experience of building community and sharing the Gospel through pizza parties, and exploring how small teams can use their strengths to simply fulfil the Great Commission.
Andy Moyle, Pastor of The Gateway Church in King’s Lynn asks: what if everyone in your church or small group was mobilised to work as a team reaching out to friends, family and neighbours in a simple way that makes disciples?
For the past twenty years, Andy has been planting churches that seek to do just that. This week he launched his first book ‘Friends, Food and the Gospel’.
Andy said: “Looking back over the last nearly two decades of church planting, my wife Janet and I have learnt lots of lessons on how to make disciples through friendship and food.”
Andy confesses not being good at knocking on doors and usually cringing at street drama and handing out tracts. “I’m just not wired that way”, he said, “some are and bear great fruit. What I have found is that my wife and I love meeting people, making new friends and connecting them with our Christian friends over good food.”
They have found that relaxing over a simple meal, a pizza, jacket potatoes and fillings or a theme night, leads to deep friendship and a sense of family. And that often leads to new disciples made.
Friends, Food and the Gospel details the art of team fishing, so that everyone in a church small group gets to use their strengths working together, having fun and getting the Great Commission done.
Andy enthused: “We do a lot of pizza parties, filling our garden with friends, cooking lots of pizza in a wood fired oven and then laughing and chatting in front of a fire pit to the sounds of jamming musicians. Those evenings have been the start of a journey for dear friends, often originally from distant nations, who have ended up becoming part of God’s family and our family.”
Angela Kemm, prophetic evangelist within the Relational Mission family of churches gave this endorsement: “Every now and again I pick up a book and find it quite excellent. This is one of those books! Andy has written a different kind of book on evangelism in which he makes it easy and reachable for the ‘ordinary’ person to relate to people over food, friendship and fun. I recommend this book most highly.”
Friends, Food and the Gospel is available from Lulu.com for £5.99 at https://goo.gl/lXnh4y
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