Creating a Culture of Invitation in Your Church

Michael Harvey MBA

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780857216335
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

We like to think our church welcomes visitors. But how welcoming can we be, if we are not inviting? We are welcoming as long as people get themselves across the church threshold, but we fail to take our welcome outside. During the years Michael has been developing Back to Church Sunday, he has conducted an extensive study on the seemingly simple subject of 'invitation'. Over 650 times in 12 countries he has asked: 'Why don't we invite our friends to take a closer look at Christ?' The many answers form the impetus for this book. After considering why it seems so hard to invite friends to church, Michael looks at our concerns over acceptance and rejection, and suggests ideas gleaned from years of trying to establish a culture of invitation. 'When I have specifically encouraged Christians to issue an invitation, some people say yes and some no. God sent his son to invite us all into a relationship, and so to be like God is to be a person who invites!'

1

What’s Wrong?

One example will suffice to underline a paradigm running in Western Christianity today. I ring a church leader after an event where the congregation has been encouraged to invite people along, and ask, “How did it go?” Then follows a variation on the following theme:

Church Leader: Terrible.

Me: How do you mean, terrible?

Church Leader: We only had ten invited guests.

Me: That doesn’t sound terrible.

Church Leader: Yes, well, only one of them has stayed. So we’re not doing another one of these events next year!

Apparently we are not content with ones and twos, and we discount everything else in the process. I said in Unlocking the Growth⁵ that I believe success isn’t a percentage, a number, or a line on a graph; success is one person inviting one person. My findings show that whatever we say, we still really believe that success is one person inviting one person and that person saying yes.

To counter this success thinking, I want to remind you of what Jesus said in the parable of the talents: “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things” (Matthew 25:21). Faithfulness should be our main concern. Results are God’s concern.

I would say that it is hard enough for a congregation member to invite without the added pressure of having to get a yes. This pressure to succeed actually cuts off invitation, because the common defence in avoiding the possibility of failure is to stop trying. Lower your expectations until they’re already met, and you’ll never be disappointed.

The heavy pressure to be successful can be replaced by the lightness of faithfulness, even when that includes what looks like failure. I believe the greatest way to change another person’s behaviour is to change their paradigm – change the map of how they see themselves, their role, and their responsibility. So if you remember nothing else in this book, please remember this:

Success is one person inviting one person, leaving the yes and the no to God.

Even the great apostle Paul said:

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. (1 Corinthians 3:6)

Will someone say yes, or no? The fact is, you cannot plan the impact that you will have. In fact, you won’t even recognize it when it is happening. You certainly will make an impact, but you will probably never know what it is.

Research professor at the University of Houston, Brené Brown says:

We have lost our ability to be uncertain.⁶

It seems that these days, before we do anything, we need to remove all risk of uncertainty and failure. As a result we don’t actually use our faith. Faith which goes into uncertain situations has gone out of fashion, exchanged for certainty.

Now, that does not mean that we are going into mission as a completely disinterested party. We go into mission with hope. Hope contains both trust and distrust in tension. Hope is the confident expectation of something desired in the face of the possibility that it may not happen. But our Christian hope brings a belief that good will come even in the face of things that look bad. The difference between the two is crucial. Do we have hope that in every difficulty lies an opportunity?

By contrast many of us in the church measure our self-worth according to results rather than efforts. We then put in less effort – which produces less by way of results! As the saying goes:

If at first you don’t succeed… hide all evidence that you tried!

The success paradigm has developed in the church through distorted truth. We hear ourselves saying about an event, or an initiative, “Did it work? Did it produce fruit?” Of course we strive to be the best for God; we want to see people come to a relationship with Christ, for that is best for them. But when we don’t see people responding positively immediately, the feeling of failure creeps in. We don’t see that God might have another agenda. Perhaps he wants to use this to produce the fruit of the Spirit within us, the inviters; perhaps he wants to bring to the surface wounds that need healing.

What is driving the push for success? It is one of the most enslaving parts of church life and it is plaguing our generation. You may even be questioning my sanity as you read this, wondering why I would even suggest that success is wrong. But I am interested in this almost manic “push” for success. Alain Botton sees it as part of our loss of belief in a world beyond this one. In Status Anxiety⁷ he writes:

When a belief in the next world is interpreted as a childish and scientifically impossible opiate, the pressure to succeed and fulfil oneself will inevitably be inflamed by the awareness that there is only a single and frighteningly brief opportunity to do so. Earthly achievements can no longer be seen as an overture to what one may realize in another world, they are the sum total of all one will ever be.

So we have become a society where we mustn’t fail and there is only one right answer. As Glynn Harrison says in The Big Ego Trip:⁸

So trained by our culture we think in terms of being winners and losers.

It is a fear of getting things wrong. We only like the word “yes” and regret hearing the word “no”. But this is highly problematical in mission, because we are bound to hear people say the word “no” to us!

Fear of being wrong has another consequence for us: it closes us off to growth. A person who does not mind being wrong is continually detecting, processing, and correcting in any potentially negative situation. Things are allowed to develop. I think it is time for us to give up the desire to be perfect and concentrate on becoming who we are meant to be.

In my research I have been pointed towards attribution theory to help understand this pervading desire to succeed that stalks the church.

Attribution theory looks at how we attribute meaning to others’ behaviour, or our own. For example: we ask, is this person angry because they are bad-tempered, or because something bad has happened to them?

Let’s apply this to persistence in mission in the face of failure. Do we lack persistence because we are weak, or because of the difficulty of the task? Rather than use guilt as a stick to beat people with, I suggest we promote the difficulty of the task before us. This, then, gives scope to develop the character of the participants, as attribution is now shifted from internal to external factors – and we acknowledge that it is for God, not us, to give the results.

Paul picks up on this dynamic:

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3–4)

Paul found that inner healing hurts. In going from freedom to slavery, there is pain. He found it through a process of facing difficulty.

The example from the children of Israel:

Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. (Deuteronomy 8:2)

So, as we promote the difficulty of the task, I think our slogan could be:

Become an invitational church – not just for the yeses, but for what you become in the process.

Persistence is the field of proving. Jesus went to the wilderness to be tested, and in a similar way, so will you. Another slogan:

No test, no testimony.

Until we are tested, we don’t know what we are made of. It gives us a sense of who we are in Christ. Adversity is simply change that we haven’t yet embraced.

On the day the church was born, the day of Pentecost, some made fun of the disciples. You can just imagine some of the believers saying this “just isn’t working”. That’s when Peter stood up!

Peter and John were seized by the authorities and thrown into jail. You can imagine some believers saying this “just isn’t working”. But then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit and courage, told the officials by what authority they spoke.

Persecution followed. Good men were dragged off, and the authorities put them in prison as well. You can imagine some of the believers saying this “just isn’t working”. But they were scattered as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, taking the good news wherever they went.

They stood up when being mocked, they stood up when being jailed, and they stood up when being persecuted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. What’s Wrong?
• 2. Twelve Reasons for Not Inviting
• 3. Facing the Fear
• 4. Responding to Rejection
• 5. Addressing the Problem
• 6. Best Practice
• 7. The Ultimate Inviter
• Appendix
• Notes