Surprised by GIGs

I began one of my first GIGs solely because five teens felt sorry for me. It began on a short-term summer missions trip in Ireland in the summer of my senior year in college. I had been asked by a Christian woman to speak at a local Catholic charismatic prayer meeting. I was in the town of Thurles, 99 percent Roman Catholic.

After I gave a short testimony and encouraged people to trust and follow Jesus, Sean exploded out of his seat and confronted me.

“Are you Catholic?” he shot out.

“I was baptized Catholic,” I replied, truthfully but maybe a little deceptively too.

Not satisfied, he continued to grill me. “Do you believe in the Virgin Mary?”

“I believe everything the Bible says about her,” I replied.

I thought I was being fairly clever. He didn’t seem to agree. He grew angrier and angrier, until he threatened me with words I will never forget: “I think I’m going to throw you out of this window!” We were on the second floor.

I had read the stories about the persecution of Paul in the book of Acts. Suddenly those stories were feeling a little more relevant. Sean (about 6'3" and quite stocky) proceeded to pick me up and carry me toward the window. Then he paused, confronted by five compassionate teens.

“Sean, put him down,” they urged. “You don’t want to kill the guy, do you? You don’t want to go to jail, do you?” When they mentioned the killing part, Sean ­didn’t respond, but the jail part seemed to get through. He dropped me flat on the floor and stalked out.

The five young people apologized. Then they offered to study the Bible with me. They knew that’s what I wanted. Before the incident with Sean, I think only one of them would have joined my GIG. Afterward, when they all felt sorry for me, all five joined, and we began to meet that next week.

We studied Peter’s encounter with Jesus in the book of Luke, chapter 5, when Peter fell down at Jesus’ feet begging for mercy after Jesus helped Peter and his friends and family catch a boatload of fish. I was asking how Jesus might be trusted in the different arenas of our own lives. Patrick, one of the young men, interrupted me mid-sentence, and began arguing with himself. “I want to trust and follow Jesus, but my parents will think I’ve become a Protestant and reject me . . . but I think Jesus is real, and I think I need him . . . but I will have to change my life . . . but I know Jesus will help me . . . but I am afraid of what it will mean . . .” Patrick went on in this back and forth way for about five minutes. Finally, he ended his argument with himself, concluding, “But I just need to do this.” Promptly, he got down on his knees and committed himself to Jesus as his forgiver and leader.

The group sat there stunned. The other three who had not yet made that commitment to Jesus (one was already a committed follower of Christ) knew their days were numbered. And indeed, within a couple of weeks, the other three had entered the kingdom.

To put it mildly, I was surprised by everything that happened in this GIG, from the near death experience, to the unorthodox way to recruit members, to the conversion of all of the people who didn’t know and follow Jesus yet. In some ways, this experience was unique. And yet, after leading GIGs for the past 25 years, I am still always challenged and changed by leading GIGs. In this article, I want to provoke you to action. That may sound strong, but I believe that everyone reading this article could lead an effective GIG. Your life would be changed. And your friends’ lives might also be changed, some of them for eternity. I long for you to be as surprised and encouraged by GIGs as I have been. And I long for your InterVarsity group to launch a movement of GIGs that will have a radical impact on your campus. It will bring life, energy and focus to your Christian group.

What’s a GIG?

A GIG, or Group Investigating God, is simply a spiritual discussion group for two or more people. Generally, GIGs look at Jesus’ encounters with people in need, and at the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. In GIGs, I have often found that Jesus wins people over and melts even the hardest hearts.

So what’s the goal of a GIG? Here’s where a lot of GIG leaders miss the point. Leaders sometimes get focused on the process and not the goal. The process involves having an ongoing spiritual discussion with a seeker or skeptic, in which the leader challenges people each time to take a next step toward Jesus. But the ultimate goal is to partner with God to make disciples and to call people to become Christ followers. A GIG has succeeded when the seekers and skeptics in the group have seen Jesus, understood his call to commit to him as forgiver and leader, and made a choice about Jesus, whether to reject him or follow him.

We can be so consumed with concern about how people will respond to us. Sure, we need boldness. And we want to be free from the fear of rejection. Rest easy. I have found that people who worry about offending others usually don’t. It’s the people who never worry about offending others that I worry about! We can hang onto the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:40: “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me.” We don’t have to take the response of other people to Jesus so personally.

Centerpiece of outreach

Why do we choose to make GIGs so central? In InterVarsity, we have chosen to make launching and leading GIGs the centerpiece of our evangelism efforts. That choice didn’t come from senior leaders of the organization. It came from InterVarsity staff and from students like you.

We looked at I-V chapters around the country that were seeing the most students coming to Christ. We discovered that all of those groups were using some form of investigative Bible study as their primary strategy for outreach. As the study went forward, we concluded that GIGs could become an effective means for evangelism throughout the InterVarsity movement. Out of that discussion came the suggestion for a big goal: InterVarsity students and staff would launch and lead as many GIGs on every campus as we have small groups on those campuses. On commuter campuses, where small groups may not exist, we would aim for even more GIGs than small groups! Our senior leaders agreed. We adopted this goal nationally and then began developing strategies, resources and training to help students launch and lead GIGs on their campuses. This article comes out of a desire and commitment to serve you.

What’s so great about gigs?

We’ve committed ourselves as a whole movement to GIGs for the following reasons:

Almost anyone can lead a GIG. You don’t have to be extraverted or gregarious. You don’t have to know all the answers or have a master’s degree in the Bible. You just need a friend and a willingness to ask questions and open the Scriptures with your friend.

Any Christian group can launch and lead GIGs and see God work. You don’t need a hot worship band. You don’t need a Steven Spielberg to step forward to direct great drama. You don’t need some amazing evangelistic speaker to come in and do it all. If you have one or more Christians in your group, and you can get hold of a few Bibles, your group can launch and lead GIGs as your central outreach strategy and see God work.

GIGs are great for your postmodern friends. GIGs let people belong before they have to believe. Evangelism in today’s culture is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. GIGs can provide that place.

God can use GIGs to change people’s hearts and lives. The focus of a GIG is discussing a biblical passage, often about Jesus. Even when seekers and skeptics don’t believe in the Bible, God still uses his Word powerfully in their lives (see Isaiah 55:11).

GIGs work well cross-culturally. They are a natural for international students, and they can also be adapted well for a variety of ethnicities.

GIGs can also be adapted to fit your friends, wherever they are along the spiritual spectrum. Skeptics can ask hard questions. Seekers can fall in love with Jesus. And those who are ready can be called to trust and follow Jesus.

Does this mean that GIGs are the only strategy we use to reach out on campus? No! We need efforts and events that lead into GIGs. These efforts help us to build friendships with our lost friends. We can pray for them, ask probing questions to find out where they are at spiritually, have good initial spiritual conversations, and then invite them to join our GIG.

We also often need efforts and events that challenge people in GIGs to commit to Jesus, and help them begin to know how to follow Jesus. We are finding that students often commit to Jesus as their forgiver and leader at large-group seeker meetings, or on chapter or area retreats, where they can experience Christian community and God’s presence. The GIG itself doesn’t quite give them enough to go on. But we are also finding that groups hosting GIGs as their strategic focus more naturally do those other things too. For instance, to start GIGs, you have to have friends to invite. As you start to invite people to join your GIG, you will pray as never before. And to help your GIG members commit to become Christ followers, you often need more than just the GIG. You will need a seeker meeting or a retreat opportunity to call people to commitment.

Gotta think gig

So what does it mean to make GIGs our central evangelism strategy? It’s quite simple. Think about everything you do as a group in light of how you can best launch, lead and support GIGs. Let me give you some examples.

• During New Student Outreach, always have a box people can check if they want to be in a group that investigates faith and that looks at tough questions about God.

• At every large group in September and then again in January, have a way for people to sign up for GIGs. Plan a couple of outreach events at those times when new people visit your group, and make the whole purpose of those outreach events to get people into GIGs.

• Focus prayer meetings on GIGs.

• Encourage every small group to send out one or two members to start a GIG, and then pray for that GIG.

• Host a “harvest” meeting where you will invite people to commit to Christ, and design it for all the people in GIGs.

• Hold a seeker and skeptic track at your fall retreat or winter training event, and focus recruitment efforts on your GIGs.

• Train people in how to develop genuine friendships with seekers and skeptics, and then how to start a GIG out of those friendships.

Everything you do as a group can help feed and follow up your GIGs.

Starting at the beginning

So where do we begin? What are the best first steps to take? Begin by agreeing as a leadership team on your campus that you will make GIGs the centerpiece of your outreach efforts as a group. One way you can make that decision is to read through this article together and then talk and pray about it. Let God lead your decision.

Next, set the pace yourself and begin the efforts to launch and lead GIGs. Your InterVarsity group members will never catch the passion or take the risks if you don’t. As you begin, you only need a few leaders to agree to launch GIGs. Get everyone else praying, and start telling stories of what God is doing. You will quickly see the interest and passion spread.

For your first GIGs, I would strongly encourage you to use a GIG Bible study guide that has been prepared and field tested. The GIG Bible study series published by IVP® and the Willow Creek Association® has been used on many campuses with wonderful results. There are four guides—Sex, Spirituality, Finding God and Following God. Choose the guide that would most fit where your friends are at in the spiritual spectrum. The guides give you plenty of help to know how to begin, what to study, how to respond to specific questions people might have in each discussion, and how to follow up your GIG. You can get the guides through your staff person, or online at www.ivpress.com.

After a few months of leading a GIG, and once you have a couple of encouraging stories to tell, you can offer training for others. If you begin just a few GIGs in the fall, January is a great time to offer training for many more. Especially consider challenging freshmen in your fellowship to lead GIGs. Freshmen often have many seeking or skeptical friends. What’s more, they aren’t leading small groups yet, and their experience leading a GIG could be far and away the most significant growth step they could take. If you need some guidance for training others to lead GIGs, you can use the GIG Training Guide. Order it online from the InterVarsity store at www.intervarsity.org/store/.

Speed bumps

What barriers will we encounter along the way? There are four main barriers to launching a movement of GIGs on your campus. The GIG Training Guide gives you some excellent help on each of these barriers. I will just make a few additional comments here. I’ve put the barriers in the form of questions that you will need to answer in order to launch a movement of GIGs on your campus.

Barrier 1: How will you motivate and equip the students in your group to invite their friends to a GIG? The members of your group may really struggle with the idea of inviting their friends to a spiritual discussion group. They won’t want to offend their friends, and they won’t want their friends thinking that the Christian students just want to convert them. This challenge is a difficult one because we do want to see our lost friends come to know Jesus. We need to be honest about our intentions by using relational language, such as saying, “I do want you to know God better.” But we will also want to build trust by communicating that we will be there to learn as well, and that we are committed to the friendship however our friends respond.

You’ll also need to help your chapter members know how to invite friends based on the interests that those friends express. If friends are mostly concerned about relationships, invite them to a GIG that will focus on relationships, sex or other related topic. If friends are interested in spiritual things but not necessarily in Jesus, invite them to a discussion or use a guide that starts with their interest area. If they have a Catholic background, invite them to a GIG that helps people know how to experience the reality of the love, presence and grace of God. If your friends think they are already Christian, don’t try to convince them otherwise. Tell them that since they’re already Christian, they certainly won’t want to miss your GIG on what practical difference God can make in our lives. Find a need they have expressed or that you think they may feel, and connect your invitation to that need. The series from IVP and the Willow Creek Association is aimed at helping you connect with those different needs. There are also suggested movie clip introductions in each study in the GIG series to give you another help for inviting people and connecting to what they may already be interested in.

You’ll also want to create a way for Christians to be supported as they ask their friends. One InterVarsity group has prayer parties for making invitations. Students gather together, pray for their friends, leave the prayer meeting to go invite their friends, and then come back to report, get more prayer for people who were unsure or said no, and celebrate for people who said yes.

Barrier 2: How will you help GIG leaders persevere when the members of their GIG don’t show up, or when they just aren’t seeing people respond to Jesus the way they’d hoped? The reality is that the GIG is probably much more important to the leader than to the GIG members. When a test or campus event comes up, or even a Monday night football game, the GIG member may not show up for the GIG. The GIG leader needs encouragement to keep going.

Even though most of my stories about GIGs are “success” stories to encourage you with the potential of GIGs, I’ve also had some very difficult GIGs. I remember a GIG I led as a senior in college. I was intending to show a freshman how to lead a great GIG, and one of the seekers and skeptics was out for my blood. He was mad at Christians, and took delight in asking me impossible and tangential questions. I should have asked him to meet me one on one, and faced the bloodbath alone. Then I could have led the GIG for people who really had an interest. Instead, I let this guy take my model GIG down. In the midst of that experience, I needed support, encouragement and prayer!

You will want to give that kind of support to your GIG leaders too. They will need it to keep going. So have a leaders’ group to encourage, nurture, train, motivate and problem-solve with your GIG leaders. You may want to designate a student leadership team person who has led a GIG and who will focus solely on helping and nurturing other leaders. Or you may want to ask your staff worker to run the leaders’ meeting. Try to gather at least once a month, although every other week is even better.

Barrier 3: How will you help students leading GIGs to “pop the question” and call for a choice about Jesus? Coming to Christ is a little like going through dating and marriage. A person may not say yes to marriage if you ask, but nobody ever gets married until somebody pops the question. We can build friendships forever, never experiencing the joy of inviting someone to faith in Christ and seeing that person respond. Most of us would love to see a friend actually come to faith while we’re in the vicinity!

A couple of ideas can help. First, train the GIG leaders at one of the GIG leaders’ meetings to pop the question using a simple gospel outline. You can get help from the GIG Training Guide and also from the Becoming a Contagious Christian—University Edition training curriculum. Both are available from the InterVarsity store at www.intervarsity.org/store/.

Second, declare a “pop the question party” night for all of your GIG leaders. During a designated week, have every GIG leader share the bridge diagram or the Circles of Belonging graphic with their group and invite people to commit to Jesus as their forgiver and leader. When I was a young staff person, my supervisor challenged me to declare a “pop the question party” week. I didn’t want to do it, because I didn’t think the two students in my GIG were ready to respond. To my total shock, they did respond that night to commit to Jesus. Many in our other GIGs on campus did as well. You never know how God might be at work in the people in your GIG. Even if they don’t commit to Jesus, you will have planted an important seed in their lives.

One other help toward popping the question is for GIG leaders to sponsor a large-group or retreat gathering to challenge their members to come to faith in Christ.

Barrier 4: How will you adapt GIGs in order to reach out across cultural or ethnic differences? A Imentioned above, GIGs work well with international students. An international student study Bible, called Passport to the Bible, again at www.ivpress.com, gives you many studies for use with international students.

Students from minority cultures present a different challenge. Latino, African-American and Korean students tend to expect an authoritative leader to preach and teach the Scriptures. The church background of many ethnic minority students is strong. You will need to ask a lot of questions about their church background in order to help them take the next steps toward Jesus. And you may need to share more often and more passionately during the discussion. You can use guides like the ones mentioned above, but you will need to take an extra step: choose two or three times during each discussion to “bring it on home.” These students often want to be challenged much more directly than majority-culture students are used to.

Tips and Tricks

There are a few additional things about GIGs that I’ve found to be crucial—tricks of the trade, you might say.

First, many of our GIGs in InterVarsity are one on one. There is an art to leading a one on one GIG. You’ll want to ask the discussion questions, and then (at the same time) be a participant along with the other person. Here it really helps to have a guide. You can ask a question the guide raises, and then both of you can respond. That way you are not seen as an expert, but rather as a learner along with the other person. Share your own struggles, questions and fears, and not just answers. Your example will stimulate the same humility and open-heartedness in your fellow GIG member.

Second, GIG discussion questions for seekers and skeptics are often phrased differently from small-group discussion questions for believers. Small-group Bible studies for believers include a fair amount of observation questions: what’s going on, who does what, where is it happening, why is that important, and so on. Seekers and skeptics who are studying the Scriptures for the first time feel very intimidated and don’t want to betray their ignorance or feel foolish. So GIG questions should be about what they think, not about what they notice. You as the leader can make an observation, and then ask for their response to what you have led them to see in the passage.

Third, prayer is best left for later GIGs meetings, perhaps the fourth or fifth time you’ve met. In the first couple of sessions, you’ll want to maximize the comfort level for the first-time seeker or skeptic. When you do pray in later meetings, pray briefly and in ways your members would feel comfortable imitating.

Getting started

How much do you need to know to get started? Not much! Here’s my first experience:*

As a sophomore in college, I rededicated my life to God. I began to pray for my friends. God laid Scott on my heart. I looked for opportunities to be with Scott. He liked to ski. So did I. Unfortunately, I had Christian activities when the ski club went skiing. So out went a few Christian activities! To spend time with our seeking and skeptical friends, we often need to cut out some of our endless Christian activities!

On the slopes with Scott, I totally blew starting a spiritual conversation—twice! I felt humiliated and vowed never to try again. But we did have some great time for talking.

On the last run down, after I had given up all hope of conversation about spiritual things, Scott skied up to me and asked if I was involved in that fellowship group on campus, and did we do anything with the Bible. I admitted we did. He then shared how he had been thinking about things, and wondered if the Bible could help him in his life right now. But he had never read it. He had no idea where to start. Could I help him? “Sure,” I responded. That was the whole contribution I made to start my first GIG.

We met that next week, in Scott’s room, because I figured that he would have to show up if it was in his room. We studied in Genesis, about God as Creator. At the end, he piped up, “This is great, Rick, but how do I do it?”

“How do you do what?” I wanted to know.

“How do I get God in my life?”

“Well,” I reflected, “you just get God in your life.”

“But how?”

“Just do it!” I exclaimed.

“That’s not helping, Rick.”

Finally, in exasperation I turned to him. “That’s study number six. We’re on study number one. Can’t you wait?”

At that point, I turned to my partner. I had asked him to come along in the GIG to give me moral and prayer support “Any ideas?” I asked. He couldn’t tell Scott how to become a Christian any better than I could. But he did know enough to hand him a little booklet by John Stott on becoming a Christian. Today, I might still use that booklet, or another called Circles of Belonging from IVP® that explains the gospel in light of our need for identity and community.

The next day Scott called. “Rick, I did it.”

“Fabulous, Scott. That’s just great. I’m so happy for you. Uhh, by the way, what did you do?” Scott went on to explain how he had come into a relationship with Jesus. He taught me how to become a Christian!

Well, that was my contribution to getting my first “convert” to come to Jesus. Can anybody say it was my cleverness and not God’s power? No way!

Yet, I did take the risk to relate, to build the friendship, to share a verbal witness, to recruit a teammate. But God’s power showed up in my weakness. To this day, it encourages my faith to think about how God worked, mostly in spite of me.

GIGs, like the one I led, are being used by God today in an exploding movement across the country to reach seekers and skeptics. If you only take one step forward in reaching lost people, start a GIG. If your group does only one thing really well to reach out to your campus, make it GIGs. Nothing could be more strategic and life-changing for you and your friends. Maybe you will be as surprised by GIGs as I was!