God Space book

by Doug Pollock

‘God Space’ shows how simple it is to create space in our everyday exchanges so that spiritual conversations can happen naturally. Most Christians are struggling to figure out how to talk with others about spiritual things – and from lack of confidence and competence they often miss golden opportunities to nudge others closer to Jesus.

God Space emboldens God’s people to re-engage in these conversations in natural and winsome ways that require no scripting, sales techniques, or deliberate steering of the conversation towards a pre-determined outcome. In fact, the skills one learns through ‘God Space’ are good for all of life, not just evangelism!

"Doug Pollock is a gifted communicator and evangelist and his book ‘God Space’ is a breath of fresh air to everyone who is uncomfortable with canned approaches to evangelism. Doug teaches how to create safe places that can become ‘God Spaces’. It is evangelism that is natural, doable, and effective without being forced.  If the folk in our church were practising these principles our Alpha and Christianity Explored courses would also be full!” (Love Your Neighbour)

You can read the first two chapters for free on https://godsgps.com/products/

You can also find other useful articles on their website https://godsgps.com/resources/

Doug has also created a training series Activating God Space which you can purchase. (See below the book recommendation)

Book recommendation for the Evangelism Network by Julie Young (2013)

 

Book: God Space

Author: Doug Pollock

Available from places such as Book Depository  

Or from NZ: https://love-your-neighbour-nz.myshopify.com/

 

I really enjoyed reading this book and highly recommend it to every Christian. It was really easy to read. Doug Pollock shares heaps of good ideas. Here are some to whet your appetite to read it for yourself:

  • Create 'spaces' where spiritual conversations can happen in a natural way. 

  • Be sensitive but still have the courage to have the conversation. 

  • We should mostly be listening and then use questions to get people thinking and questioning what they believe. 

  • It’s important to find out how God is already at work in a person’s life and go from that base: "You've got to start where a person is at, not where you want them to be." 

  • We need to become good at watching body language, so we pick up cues of whether the person is 'saying' keep going, slow down or stop. 

  • We need to be careful that we don't focus so much on what we are going to say, that we miss the cues. 

  • Be like a fisherman reeling in, rather than a spear fisherman. 

  • Prepare and practise lots of snack sized pieces of your testimony so you can choose which bit is relevant to share, rather than give a quick overview of our whole testimony which might not help the person much. 

  • Be careful. Don’t ever cause someone to never want to have a spiritual conversation with you or someone else ever again. 

  • If we have a desire to 'win', we need to remember we are wanting to 'win' the person for the kingdom, not us just 'win' the conversation and the person shut the door to future conversations. 

  • We don't need to be defensive in conversations but seek to understand why they have their opinion, and if necessary, apologize for Christ followers who have contributed to their pain.

  • One more good saying of his: “You need to talk to God about the person before you talk to the person about God.” 

 

If you love the book, recommend it to others too (or lend them your copy).