“Would you like to come to church with me?”
By all accounts, we are in the season of fall. Though our weather continues to feel like summer, we have passed the Labor Day holiday, and we are heading into our first weekend of our program year schedule on Sunday morning with our choir rejoining our worship services, our formation programs begin, and the invitation to renew our commitment to this community of people who are seeking a closer relationship with God. I always look forward to this weekend in the year because it has so much energy in which people come back to church after summer vacations. It is a weekend in which we see familiar faces and greet one another with gladness and joy.
We are also coming to a Sunday in which it is natural to extend new invitations to friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family to come to church with us. For many of us, the idea of inviting people to church is intimidating. Perhaps, we are intimidated because we feel that we need to convince people to say yes to a simple invitation. Perhaps, we feel that we need to share everything The Episcopal Church says about the Gospel and what it means to be Christian. Or, perhaps, we simply have not practiced asking people to come to church with us and asking the question, “Would you like to go to church with me on Sunday?”
The temptation today is to write something that will hopefully convince you, dear reader, to extend an invitation to someone. I can quote all the statistics and studies that show that a church that grows is a church filled with people who are actively inviting new people to their church. I can provide links to websites with different programs or methodologies for becoming an inviting church (https://www.backtochurch.com/churches/) and for becoming a welcoming church (https://www.invitewelcomeconnect.com). Inviting and welcoming are, of course, flip sides of the same coin but involve different actions.
As I watch what happens on a Sunday morning at Epiphany, I would have to say that we have the welcome part of this equation down pretty good. A recent newcomer told me after worship how much they enjoyed Sunday morning and being greeted by many parishioners on the first Sunday this person visited Epiphany. It seems that many of us are seeing newcomers and making it a point to welcome them to our parish on a Sunday morning! This is really good news. If you are one of those people who goes out of your way to greet newcomers on a Sunday morning and you are not already serving as a greeter, I would like to invite you to become a greeter on Sunday morning! You get the opportunity meet and greet newcomers as they come in the door and help them get connected to other parishioners too.
The other part of the equation that we might need a little help with at Epiphany is the inviting side of the equation. Our intimidation with inviting new people to our church comes with some expectation that we can explain everything our church believes about God, and I actually think that if we are able to let go of that expectation then we might be able to be more effective at making invitation in the community. All we need to do to invite someone is to practice asking the question, “Would you like to come to church with me on Sunday?” If someone says no, it is okay! The more surprising thing is what your response is when someone says yes!
Perhaps, though, the place that many of us get hung up is in deciding who to invite to our church. The obvious answer is that we are called to invite anyone, but I do not find that particularly helpful. Walking around town and asking every person we meet if they would like to come to church on Sunday is not something any of us are going to do. It would be weird because we would not have a relationship with the people we are asking to join us for church. Thus, we need some way of identifying who to invite to church so we have some confidence in our invitation. Prayer is the way that we come to that answer.
Beginning today, I invite you to ask God who God wants you to invite to Epiphany. Hold this intention in your prayer life between the time you read this and Sunday morning. During the Prayers of the People on Sunday morning, I invite you to speak aloud the person that has come into your prayers and your heart that God is inviting you to invite to church.
And then, in the week that follows, I hope that all of us will seek to invite one person to come to church with us. I hope that each of us will find a way to say to someone we know and love, “Would you like to come to church with me on Sunday?” If all of us do this - pray for God to show us who to invite, to take the action of inviting, and then of helping new people meet our friends our church - we will begin to become a church that is an inviting a church. We will become a church that is defined by the spontaneous invitations we share with others in our community to come to church, and by inviting people to church, we are inviting them to discover a new relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
When is a time that you received invitation for which you were thankful? Who is God putting in your heart for you to invite to church?
In Christ,
Hunter+
