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Over the years of being a member of my church, the practice has usually been to “invite people to church”. Typically, we meet someone and extend an invitation to attend a Sunday service, or a Bible discussion group, or an event, in one location where people will congregate. Once they come, then the conversion process starts, usually a series of Bible studies.
Nothing wrong with that, really, but is that what Jesus did? We are followers of Christ, so shouldn’t we do things the way he did and imitate? The other thing is, how effective has our method been? Good question.
So let’s look at Jesus. Occasionally, people would come to Jesus. There were a few times in the gospels when a large crowd would gather, and it seems as if people were “invited” to hear him — the Sermon on the Mount (Mat 5-7), preaching by the seaside (Lk 5), etc. But for the vast majority of the time, Jesus met people in their homes (Lk 19), in their religious places (synagogues) (Lk 4), and in impromptu places.
The disciples went and traveled to preach. They went to where the people were, the marketplaces, the festivals, etc. They seized the opportunities as they presented themselves, in the footsteps of their master. They did not own a building, and they did not have a fixed place to meet.
Jesus and the disciples’ approach was to go to the people, and not expect the people to come to them. So, how are we doing with that? From what I have seen, we meet in our regular meeting places and hope that others will join us. But how many do? Technology makes it so that we send a text message (we don’t even talk to people on the phone anymore), invite them to a meeting, and wait hopefully for them to turn up.
How about instead if we take the gospel to people, go house to house, create faith discussions on the go, enter people’s spaces (respectfully), and share? Wouldn’t that be more Christlike, and maybe more effective? When we planted churches all over South Asia, we would invite ourselves to people’s homes (people were / are very hospitable), the neighbors and their relatives would join, and boom! Lo and behold, a few weeks later, there was a gathering of believers in the neighborhood! We also often shared our faith in groups, not individually (that is a topic for another post), as when you go to someone’s home, you don’t dictate who sits there. Again, way more biblical.
The church in the Bible did not have a building or an office. The church was wherever people gathered. Jesus and his followers were flexible. They adapted to the local timetable. There was no rigid schedule. And no one felt the need to dress up to go to a service!
We may need to consider a more organic way of sharing our faith, a more normal and natural way to reach out to our friends and neighbors, where we go into their space and give them more agency over the fellowship. Instead of them coming to us, we go to them, enter their space, and serve. It is a more reciprocal relationship than when we dictate the place of meeting, the time, the agenda, etc, and our friends are divested of choice, and they have no control over what happens.
