Café biblique

Gilles recently was invited to take part in a discussion program on France2. He took along a small group of us ‘young ones’ to be in the background too. It was a really great experience, not only seeing how a program is filmed (it was a recording rather than a live show) but also to hear the issues raised and discussed. The focus was Luke 23: 33-44 – the resurrection of Christ. The program is centralised around the idea of a café where you can sit down and discuss the Bible in an ‘informal setting.’ Around 20 people from the public are sat around tables, on sofas or on bar stools with shelves full of books in the background. Participating in the program were the presenter, Gilles, another (older) pastor and an atheist who had spent some time in prison in the past. The public had two occasions where they could ask questions, give their point of view or say what the passage meant for them. The discussion was very good and quite heated at times, especially between Gilles and the atheist. They talked about the significance of the resurrection and focussed quite a lot on forgiveness. The atheist was quite aggressive in his manner but didn’t really seem to come up with all that much of an argument really – basically that he’s an atheist and he doesn’t agree! As the discussion progressed you could see from his body language that he realised that his arguments didn’t have much of a foundation when confronted with what Gilles was saying and the Truth of the Gospel, he often just resorted to the ‘Gallic Shrug’! The discussion could have gone on and on covering several topics, but, as the presenter said, the program’s only 29 minutes long and you’d need a whole series of other programs to cover all the issues! I hope and pray that the atheist went away with things to seriously think about and that the Lord will start to work in him. Also, that people watching the program on April 1st learnt from the discussion and can realise the awesome significance of Christ’s death and resurrection for us.