From the 12^th to 19^th of September, a combined outreach was conducted by St. Peters Church Fish Hoek and Tokai Community Church. The outreach consisted of a series of events that addressed various questions on the topic of Forgiveness, such as “What is Forgiveness?”, “Why is forgiveness so hard?” and “How can God forgive me?”. The events took place at the respective churches, as well as a local golf club and café. Speakers included our own Murray Anderson, Geoff Gertzen from St. Stephens, and Tony Payne at the main Sunday events.

The theme of forgiveness was chosen because of its relevance in a personal context, as well being a natural way of explaining what Jesus achieved for us all on the cross.

The primary means of getting people to these events was always going to be word-of-mouth and personal invitations. However, we put a lot of effort into providing our people with tools to make this easier, including flyers, a web page and a Facebook link. We also printed a number of posters to put around the community, as a means of ‘legitimising’ the event in people’s minds – we found that it was just as important to promote the event to our own people as to anyone else, so as to give them confidence to invite others.

The two churches shared the cost of promotion, venues and catering, as well as the planning and administration of the events. Combining our resources was a great advantage as it allowed us to promote and run the event on a larger scale than we would have done individually, not to mention the natural advantage of having a bigger crowd which gave the event an added note of significance. Another advantage of sharing the load was, of course, that we could still carry on day-to-day ministry despite hosting a large outreach event.

As follow-ons from the events we offered two courses; one hosted by St. Peters exploring the topic of Forgiveness in more depth, with TCC hosting a Christianity explored course.

There were a significant number of visitors to the events, and in each one we provided the opportunity for people to meet and get to know each other. We pray that the relationships formed at these events, as well as the gospel seeds planted, would continue to grow and that it may all be to the glory of our Lord Jesus!