Here is an email/newsletter I received from Mike Lyons:
I have made a promise to myself. I will stop inviting people to my church.
Hear me out now.
I spent nearly a decade with my well paid job in the church trying to get people to come to church. We would develop strategies, advertising through TV, radio, print, internet, marketing plans… wowing them with worship experiences, video, dramas, amazing sermons, direct mail strategies.. on and on..whew. all designed with one aim. That when you would invite your friend, they would say yes and go to church with you. All you would have to do is invite them, they would respond to the engaging message and multi-sensory worship, become curious, eventually come to Christ, and eventually become a part of our church. The problem is, it didn’t work very well.
Sure some came, just enough to make us think we were being effective. But still as the Barna Institutes research shows " The unbelieving world remains unconvinced.", and each year the Church continues to loose ground and a credibility voice in our communities.
(Disclaimer Note: I still love, support and honor any church that is doing all it can to reach out to others. God will still work through imperfect people as well as strategies.)
Allow me to be very honest. I see too many of us in the house church falling into the same trap and pattern of fruitlessness. And some are suffering unnecessarily from disillusionment. I hear the same words over and over, "If only we could get more people to come to our house church." Sound familiar? The benefits we offer are different, but the hope is the same. Please come to my church.if we could get them there they will be so captured by our Jesus through our community, intimacy, casualness, or great food… that they will accept Him and become a part of our church. Old habits die very hard don’t they.
We can no longer afford to be "come here" people, we must be a "go there" kind of people.
I can honestly say that I have never invited someone to join me for coffee, lunch or breakfast and had them say no. Not ever, not once.
I’m slow but I’m learning.
Here’s to forsaking old habits.
May His presence dwell in you richly,
Mike Lyons
Mike administrates a website called Organic Connection and works with Neil Cole who will be speaking at the California House Church Conference in May.
Comments
7 responses to “Stop Inviting People to Church”
A few thoughts:
I have long felt we Christians made a mistake when we decided to use our meetings as evangelistic outreaches. The result was that nothing was left for believers. Visit any “seeker sensitive” church today and you’ll see how church can become “lowest common denominator.”
But a bulletin insert I saw from the American Bible Society about a decade ago asked people about the way in which they came to know Christ. In that, 29% responded that it was because someone invited them to church. (I think that 23% said it was through reading the Bible.)
That insert has always bothered my theory about how we should do things. If 29% of people become Christians because the whole process started when someone invited them to church, that’s too big a number to ignore. While this does not mean that we can’t do better through going out to them rather than bringing them in, we need to be careful so as to not ruin it for the 29% who are finding Christ by that means.
We recently had a bit of a problem with this in our house church. The problem being that we have started to change house church into the traditional church we’ve all grown up with. We know that the Christian life consists in prayer, evangelism, teaching, preaching, worship, etc. Traditional church services try to give people a sampling of each of these things. The house church model, we have found, can just as easily fall into the trap of trying to offer those things. What we found however, is that our meetings together ought not to try to perform all those Christian functions in the space of a few hours, but it should be a time where we teach each other how to make those things a lifestyle the rest of the week. Rather than the house church meeting being evangelism, we want to focus on learning together what it means to lead an evangelistic lifestyle.
Yes, I think it extremely important to address evangelism. The problem is, the evangelism we have come to know through traditional churches is not working very well. Nearly everyone in America already knows the Christ story, knows about heaven and hell, the garden, creation, etc. But the Good News? many have already rejected it because they just don’t get it. They see a self-righteous church or maybe have been hurt. House church is about going back to close, intimate relationships in which personal sharing (experience) brings the Good News into a new, more real and more honest paradigm that those same disgruntled people will respond to on equal terms. There is no sales quality to it, only honest testimony and discussion.People can take it or leave it freely. It helps me also to be better at explaining.(I have to wrestle with scripture, true meaning and with God also.) I have to know how to put my beliefs into my own words that make sense instead of simply monkeying scripture. Anyone can do that. It’s like a trained salesman…
Oh, I so agree with Mike Lyons; I, too, have stopped inviting people to our house church (unless they specifically say they’d like come check it out). When we first started house church a little over a year ago, I was so excited, like I had just been saved, and so I told everyone about our church and tried to “talk people into” coming to check it out. Most of these people were Christians tired of traditional church–some had stopped going to church altogether. Most did come out, maybe once or twice, and some just didn’t show…it was a little disheartening.
I have come to realize that they had their own reasons for deciding against becoming a part of and those reasons had nothing to do with us, the group, etc. They were simply not ready for the “closeness” and, in fact, most went back to traditional church–which is a good thing I guess.
These days I am more interested in getting to know people through coffee, walking, lunch, or just plain hanging out. They need to know I really care about them–the conversation ALWAYS goes to God (or “spirituality” as they like to call it). I am planting seeds and praying for the harvest. And while, I’d love for them to come to our awesome house church, that they find Jesus as their Savior is what I am truly praying for.
I used to think that I had finish everything that I started, but as I have gotten older, I have learned that I am only a piece of the big puzzle. God is the One putting the pieces together.
As a person meanders through the supermarket of their life, he/she is affected by people in produce, meats, dairy, and the candy aisle. They take a little something along the way and put it in their cart. But when it is that they finally determine that they are ready to make the big purchase, only God knows.
Inviting someone to church often has the opposite affect of what we want. It belies that we have a hidden agenda, and no one likes that feeling. People want to be cared for, listened to, and loved. We can do all of those things anywhere and we can bring Christ into it in many different ways.
I am stuck in re-learning this! I need to get out there and talk to people more. Did Jesus or Paul wait for the people to come to them? Did they put out a flyer and say meet us at Solomen’s Colinade? NO!
I can echo many of the thoughts already posted. I will not invite anyone to our home church but will tell them about it and let the Holy Spirit move them or not. Like Teresa, I also need to get out there and talk to people more. Remember that Christ has given us everything we need to tell people about the Good News. Just let the Spirit flow.