If you’re a church, you often have opportunities to have stalls at community festivals, or you choose to set up a stall at a shopping centre or near a train station. If you are a campus ministry then there a several times a year when you want to be have some kind of expo stall, and you aren’t selling beer and you don’t want to spend all the time and money on cooking sausages…
We have a few tried and true activities:
- Write on our huge blackboard your answer to this question (last time we did ‘What Makes You, YOU?’)
- Complete this brief multiple choice quiz on our iPads
But I’m always on the lookout for new things. I asked on a few campus ministry staff Facebook Pages:
Any recommendations for fun websites/apps activities that communicate some aspect of the gospel?
And I got a few recommendations:
Most of them seem to be props to help people in personal evangelism conversations. They’re not really much of a self-contained app at all, they’re really just a few slides on your screen. Which I understand: if you are going to invest in an app, you want to invest in something that helps you do one of the main things you are committed to, and any thoughtful campus ministry or church will be super interested in equipping their members to get gospel conversations happening.
BUT this means that these apps aren’t so helpful for the expo stall context. They are not FUN enough, they are too obviously a prop for an agenda — a gospel conversation. They rely too much on the Christian leading the interaction with the app.
So can someone please create some more gimmicky apps that are good for expo stalls?
I want something that gets people thinking about meaning, faith, religion, Christianity.. and something that maybe even teaches a few things… but I want something that’s not primary and evangelism tool, but a pre-evangelism tool. Something that is:
- fun and interesting
- visually appealing and easy to use
- able to be used without being facilitated by a Christian
The Perspective Cards is definitely almost entirely what I’m after (top points for the gorgeous visual aesthetic!)… and the Two Ways to Live app is definitely the worst on the list… so I reckon we’ll probably run with Perspective Cards in Semester 2… but it’d be great to have some more options, or a version of something similar to this which doesn’t rely upon a Christian leading the conversation.
Please someone out internet, please make more of these kinds of things! By the by, I reckon if you sold it for under $5 you’d sell a fair few hundred (or even thousand?) units, from all the campus ministries and the churches who might like to use it.
