Where Does Our Confidence Come From?
As we've started building MakeKnown, we've found ourselves looking back. Not because we're trying to relive the past, but because the convictions shaping this next chapter were formed long before the name MakeKnown existed.
Nearly twenty years ago, we started doing something very simple. We opened John's Gospel with people and read it together, with simple notes alongside. Sometimes it happened over coffee. Sometimes during a lunch break at work. There was no grand strategy. Just an invitation to explore who Jesus is by reading the Bible itself.
Looking back, one thing stands out more than anything else. God has been doing far more than we realised.
Put simply, we have had the privilege of watching God reveal Himself through His Word.
Again and again, we hear stories of people stopping at verses a friend never expected them to notice. They ask questions no one prepared for. Sometimes they see things about Jesus before anyone has the chance to point them out. We may have a plan for the conversation, but God arrives with His Spirit.
We've seen many lives transformed. We’ve watched people who had little interest in Christianity become deeply curious about Jesus. We've seen scepticism soften into openness and then grow into living faith. We've seen Christians who felt completely unqualified discover that they didn't need to have every answer. They simply needed to open the Bible with someone and trust God to work.
If we're honest, that isn’t always easy to believe.
For all of us, it’s easy to look for confidence in the wrong places. Perhaps experience, preparation, training, or knowing what to say next. Those things have value, but they can never give the confidence we aresearching for.
The longer we've done this, the more we've realised that confidence grows when we remember whose work this is. God has already made Himself known in Jesus. His Spirit is already at work in people's lives. His Word is already living and active. The pressure was never meant to rest on our shoulders. That conviction sits underneath everything we're building today.
As we develop the next chapter of The Word One to One, we're not trying to move away from what we've learnt over the last twenty years. If anything, we're trying to make it easier for more people to experience the same thing.
Not a programme. Not a technique. Not a formula.
Simply the experience of opening the Bible and discovering that God is already there and speaking. The technology and tools may be new. But the hope behind them remains unchanged. We believe the Bible is still our best resource for helping people encounter Jesus; for our everyday evangelism. We believe relationships remain the best context for those conversations. And we believe God's Spirit is still doing what he has always done: opening eyes to see Christ.
As we begin this next chapter, that's what gives us confidence.
Not what we've built. Not what we know. But what we've seen God do, time and time again, through His Word.