An Open Invitation

Why and how should we invite people to church?

In the Autumn of 1934 a travelling evangelist called Mordecai Ham was holding a series of revival meetings in Charlotte, South Carolina.  A local youth pastor took his church youth group to the meetings and invited a young farmer’s son along.  The farmer’s son wasn’t interested in going to the meetings, but he said he would drive the group.  Each night he would wait outside for the meetings to finish and eventually over the week he became intrigued and started to creep into the meetings and to listen to the talks.  By the end of the week that young farmer’s son had committed his life to Christ.  That young farmer’s son was Billy Graham.

This is just one example of what can happen when we invite people to church.  At first the story doesn’t seem particularly inspiring.  The young farmer’s son doesn’t want to come to the meetings, but he does like driving the truck!  And that, at least, gets him to the right place at the right time! Statistics show that nine out of every ten people in church today were invited by a close friend or relative.  Inviting people to church works better than any posters or advertising.  A personal invitation is the most effective way to get people to meet Jesus.

One of the main principles of inviting people to church seems to be the relationship you have with them.  With the first disciples we notice that the people they brought were their closest friends and family. John 1 v 41 “The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother, Simon, and tell him, “We have found the Messiah.”  Notice that Andrew didn’t hesitate, he went straight to the person he was closest to. I love the fact that Andrew did this.  He can be overlooked and is certainly overshadowed by his brother for most of the rest of the gospel stories, but if he hadn’t brought Simon to Jesus, the whole picture could have looked very different.

When we start inviting people to come and meet Jesus it isn’t always successful and quite often we are met with a fairly negative response.  We shouldn’t be surprised about this.  Let’s look at what happened with some of the earliest examples of those invited to meet Jesus.  John 1 v 45, “Philip went off to look for Nathaniel and told him, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about! His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.”  Nathaniel’s reaction isn’t particularly good.  In fact, he scoffs. “Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathaniel.  “Can anything good come from there?”  However, things change for Nathaniel when he meets Jesus. When Nathaniel approaches Jesus, He says, “Here comes an honest man – a true son of Israel.”  Nathaniel is astonished, “How do you know about me?”  We can be so sure that nobody knows or cares about our true selves, our inner fears.  But Jesus knows it all; he sees right through it and this is a good motivator to encourage us to try to bring people to Jesus – the fact that he can know them like nobody else.

We can also see Jesus ability to see right into our hearts in the story of the Woman at the Well in John 4.  After her conversation with Jesus we read in verses 29 and 30 that she went back to the village and ‘told everyone, “Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did!”’.  She must have been so excited after her encounter with The Messiah, that her enthusiasm infected the whole village who we read, “came streaming to see him.”  We know from her conversation with Jesus that the woman would be someone whom we might refer to today as ‘having issues’.  She hadn’t exactly had the best past and probably everyone in her village knew it.  But her excitement at finding complete forgiveness and acceptance obliterated her shame.

We can share the woman’s enthusiasm if we know what our friends and relatives will find the same acceptance when they too encounter Jesus.   We can see from both of these stories that Jesus treated the scoffing Nathaniel and the woman with the dodgy past with kindness.  He doesn’t tick Nathaniel off for scoffing at his home town, even though he must’ve known he’d said it and he doesn’t condemn the woman at the well for her past relationship failures.

Let’s create a culture of inviting in the church.  Let’s make it our mission to be like Andrew and invite our closest friends and relatives, or even the Woman at the Well who invited everyone she knew. We have as our example Jesus who was himself a great inviter.  “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”