Christian Persuaders is a national training venture that aims to identify, train and place 100 people as persuasive evangelistic speakers

Richard Cunningham and the Christian Persuader team run robust, biblical and practical workshops for evangelistic speakers, and the training genuinely equips those with adequate word gifts and spiritual maturity to cope with the rigors of speaking to a room full of unbelieving students.

The initial setting for the newly trained speakers will be University Christian Union lunchbars. University lunch bars are an increasingly exciting phenomenon. Large crowds of students will gather for lunch and an apologetic topical talk that seeks to defend and commend the truth and relevance of the Christian faith. A lively time of Q and A follows which can be as helpful to the students as it is challenging to the speaker.

“I am excited about Christian Persuaders because it recognises that apologetics is very important. Evangelism is not just sharing your heart with your friends; people have honest questions which need to be answered. Therefore, the idea of a generation of Christian Persuaders, who are trained to give answers to those questions in the heart of the academy, I really think is the need of the hour”.

Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian, author of The Reason for God

“In today’s world there are lots of opportunities for evangelism for those willing to engage with people’s questions. Christian Persuaders is a wonderful resource to equip people with a Biblical apologetic to do precisely that and therefore should be broadly and widely supported.”

Michael Ramsden, European Director of the RZIM Zacharias Trust, Joint Director of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics

“I warmly welcome the work of Christian Persuaders and believe it can play a key role in challenging the common false assumption that it is impossible to be both thoughtful and committed to traditional Christianity. We urgently need to equip a new generation of thinking Christians who can defend Christian truth and challenge the presuppositions of alternative world views."”

Vaughan Roberts, Rector of St. Ebbe’s Oxford, author and popular conference speaker.

“We should, I believe, be praying and working for a whole new generation of Christian thinkers and apologists who will dedicate their God-given minds to Christ, enter sympathetically into their contemporaries' dilemmas, unmask false ideologies, and present the gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that he is seen to offer what other religions systems cannot, because he and he alone can fulfill our deepest human aspirations"

John Stott, The Contemporary Christian, IVP 1992