Don’t Bring a Friend To Church…

Recently I have been reading the book by Thom S. Rainer called “The Unchurched Next Door”.  This is a book about a project that he led where they interviewed over 300 people who were “unchurched”,that is they did not go to church.  The interviews involved a number of questions and then an evaluation of the responses and looking at what we could learn from actually talking to people who did not go to church. 
 
There are a number of shocking things that you learn when you read this book and some that are fairly obvious.   One of the surprising and shocking things I learned is that 82% of people are “somewhat likely” to come to church if they are invited.  I don’t know if this surprised you or not, but it did me.  It turns out that the reason people are not trying church out, is very simple.  No one has invited them.   Rainer found out that only 21% of Christians invited anyone to church last year, and of the 21% only 2% of the people invited were unchurched.  That was shocking to me.
 
Why aren’t we inviting?  There were a number of reasons why Christians are not inviting people.  Ranging from Spiritual lethargy (we are lazy), to a growing sense of inclusiveness (all dogs go to heaven), we fear rejection, as well as we come from churches that don’t invite people to church.  But think there might be another reason.  We invite our friends.
 
I don’t know about you but my friend list that doesn’t come to church is not really long.   Most of my friends on facebook are relatives or people who already come to church.   So if I determine to invite a friend to church that is great, but it will probably end up being less than 10 invitations in a year.  And once  you exhaust that list all that is left is to keep bugging the same 4 people.  That won’t go well.  Maybe that is why Jesus never encouraged us to bring our friends to church. Because if that is our evangelism strategy, it will not get the Gospel very far!
 
  Ultimately we have to go way beyond that, into the land that is outside of our comfort zone.  
Don’t bring a friend to church bring a stranger! That is where the gospel leads.  That is the essence of our call to “go make disciples of all the nations” and to be his witness to all the ends of the earth.  
 
This week we will be talking about being an “Invitational” church and the reasons we should not just bring our friends but strangers as well.
 
See you at church.
 
Pastor Chris