Cafes have run for many years, in churches, universities and local homes. The idea behind the café is that it gives IS a place to come and make friends, learn about different cultures and have the opportunity to find out about the Christian faith. Most cafes have similar content eg games, food, maps of the world, music etc. The major differences are shown below.

Globe café option one

A cafe hosted on a university campus may mean that students have to be more sensitive about how they present the gospel, e.g. advertising Bible study groups off campus, rather than as part of the café, not having gospel talks in the café instead holding events outside the café in a local church eg Christmas meal and talk on the meaning of Christmas to Christians.

Globe café option two

Some cafes can be run evangelistically (with Bible studies/talks continued within) these cafes are usually run in a church rather than on University campus.

EuroCafé

EuroCafé is an example globe café set up by Cardiff christian union. Hannah (3rd year student at Cardiff University) explains more:

I am one a team of Cardiff CU members that is involved in running a Eurocafe specifically aimed at reaching European students with the gospel through friendship. Eurocafe was set up 18 months ago and has had an interesting path but has been thoroughly rewarding.

Why Eurocafe?

Europe is the only continent in the world where the church is declining; many countries in Europe are encased in traditions of the catholic and orthodox church and regard evangelicals as a cult. People across Europe are very closed to the message of grace that Christ proclaims.

When we talk about doing international student work, it usually means Asian students. We found that although Asian students were being reached in Cardiff, European students were largely being ignored.

What we do

We have a café every week in a local church’s coffee lounge. We get members of CU to bake a cake each week and replenish our tea and coffee and hot chocolate supplies!

We’ve found that having something to ‘do’ each week is a good idea; just chatting every week can get to be quite hard work. Things like quizzes, Pictionary, Risk and music nights go down quite well, as does anything involving food! We’ve also used specific events like firework night, Christmas, Pancake day, St David’s Day and Easter to theme the evening – these have all invariably involved food in some way (again supplied by CU members) and many offer the opportunity to share something of the gospel with students. We even had a highly amusing Eurovision song contest evening, where we all went to someone’s house to watch Eurovision – all supporting our own country!

We initially ran specific evangelistic events – but often no one would show up! We found that sharing our lives with European students has had a far greater impact – its hard work taking time to build up friendships, but if we’ve found that inviting Europeans along to a cinema trip with friends or to the park has been important to them – just being included in our lives speaks volumes.

In the last 6months we have started organising trips to local tourist ‘attractions’. These have been some of the most valuable times in building up friendships and having conversations with Europeans. They needn’t be complicated – use public transport, tell everyone a time to meet and just take the day as it comes! We’re planning a slightly more ambitious weekend tour of north Wales in a minibus for this term!

I’d like to encourage you to develop friendships with European students, its great fun and gives amazing opportunities to share the gospel with them and challenge them to think about Christ. It also means that you’ve got an excuse to go travelling round Europe to visit them