MyLife-Workshop: The Swiss Army Knife of Kingdom-Advancing Courses

Originally meant to help soldiers open cans and clean guns, the Swiss army knife has become the tool of choice for many of us. We love its versatility, compactness, multi-functional options – not to mention its shininess.

What Swiss soldiers needed in the late nineteenth century, 21st-century believers need in helping them winsomely communicate the gospel to secular people. MyLife-Workshop is the Swiss Army knife of kingdom-advancing courses designed to touch the heart of unbelievers with the gospel.

Research has shown that only five percent of Christians will ever lead a non-Christian to faith in Christ (Norton and Engel, What’s Gone Wrong with the Harvest?). The vast majority of the 95% of believers are fraught with low-level self-esteem and high-level anxiety, and even fear when confronted with sharing their faith. 

What we need is hope. 

We need an easy and enjoyable way of sharing Christ with our non-Christian friends. 

MyLife-Workshop is that hope. It is designed for those of us who do not have the gift of evangelism, but long for our friends to know Christ and His saving grace.

How MyLife-Workshop Works

MyLife-Workshop is a six-unit course, centered around six metaphors: coin, book, bridge, music, band-aid, treasure. It takes people on a journey of self-discovery that leads to discovering what God has done for them in Christ. 

Originally conceived in Germany, it has been conducted over 1,000 times in fifteen European countries with stunning results. 

Like a Swiss army knife, MyLife-Workshop is unique in many ways. Most if not all apologetic-type courses begin with doctrine; who is Jesus? Is the Bible true? Is there a heaven? 

However, MyLife-Workshop begins with the life of the participant, tapping into self-love and what some would say is narcissism. Non-Christians are much more interested in themselves than in doctrine. Thus, the course employs autobiographical learning. 

As people learn more about who they have become, this self-discovery bridges into the gospel.

Our Approach

MyLife-Workshop is a pain-based approach to evangelism. It keys into the emotion that leads to cognition that leads to faith. In many Christianity 101 courses what non-Christians pick up on immediately is that they are second class citizens. They sense that Christians are better than them and want to lift them up onto a higher plane.

With its pain-based approach, however, MyLife-Workshop eliminates a two-class system and connects people with one another heart-to-heart. 

The MyLife Map becomes the template for the entire workshop. Participants begin to plot their lives on their personal map and develop that map from unit to unit. They craft something very personal that documents their lives as well as the gospel emerging out of their lives. 

Postmoderns love this approach.

Why?

Because it is developmental and open-ended. What postmoderns will not tolerate is prepackaged material. “Don’t give me answers to questions that you have already predetermined!”

Benefits

MyLife-Workshop thrives in a community setting. Participants are seated around tables of four to five per table (One could have fifty people in attendance, but they are always broken down into groups of four or five). After some self-reflection, they will share with one another some of the things that they have been thinking about. Often people come back to the next unit because of the quality of sharing they had experienced around their table group.

And like a Swiss army knife, MyLife-Workshop is easy to use. If you can push PowerPoint, you can facilitate the course. This means you do not have to be a gifted presenter or theologian, or evangelist. As a facilitator, you help people to discover truths for themselves that lead them to understand and often embrace the gospel. 

And perhaps most importantly for church planters, MyLife-Workshop is a way in which conversion-based churches can be planted.

The biblical model (Lydia, Cornelius, etc.) was always conversion-based. Fresh followers of Jesus formed the genesis of new churches. But the way we plant churches in the Western world is organizational, not organic.

By conducting MyLife-Workshops we can experience people coming to put their faith in Christ and follow Him whereby they become the nucleus of new churches. 

MyLife-Workshop – a fresh and fun approach to making the gospel relevant to secular people.