Invite Someone To Church Quotes

As a Jew, keeping kosher was tantamount to Peter’s very faith and identity, but when following Jesus led him to the homes and tables of Gentiles, Peter had a vision in which God told him not to let rules—even biblical ones—keep him from loving his neighbor. So when Peter was invited to the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, he declared: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28). Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new.

A grin broke across Heath's hansome face. "The last time I saw such a collection of Boscastles in church was at Father's funeral. Who invited the mistresses?" "I think I did, "Grayson said, suppressing a yawn."God knows I've been sitting here so long my brain's gone stiff." "You invited them to a wedding?" "It's not my wedding thank God." "Well, it is your chapel." "Ergo I invite whom I please." "Someone might have thought to invite the groom.

A poll by researcher George Barna revealed that about 25 percent of the adults in the United States would go to church if a friend would just invite them. Barna

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once.

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

In some circles, using the word feminist is the equivalent of an f-bomb dropped in church—outrageous, offensive. It’s likely some people saw this book sitting on the shelf and figured they knew what sort of author was behind the words written here: a bitter man-hater arguing that men and women had no discernable differences, a ferocious and humorless woman, perhaps, and so it’s no wonder they reacted at the sight of Jesus alongside feminist like someone had raked long fingernails across a chalkboard. Who could blame them with the lines we’ve been fed about feminists for so long?

The compulsion to keep a pure, homogeneous table is an old one, reflective of ingrained social customs and taboos that surround communal eating. The English word companion is derived from the Latin com (“with”) and panis (“bread”).53 A companion, therefore, is someone with whom you share your bread. When we want to know about a person’s friends and associates, we look at the people with whom she eats, and when we want to measure someone’s social status against our own, we look at the sort of dinner parties to which he gets invited. Most of us prefer to eat with people who are like us, with shared background, values, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, beliefs, and tastes, or perhaps with people we want to be like, people who make us feel important and esteemed. Just as a bad ingredient may contaminate a meal, we often fear bad company may contaminate our reputation or our comfort. This is why Jesus’ critics repeatedly drew attention to the fact that he dined with tax collectors and sinners. By eating with the poor, the despised, the sick, the sinners, the outcasts, and the unclean, Jesus was saying, “These are my companions. These are my friends.” It was just the sort of behavior that got him killed. The

If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples. A gifted discipler is someone who invites people into a covenantal relationship with him or her, but challenges that person to live into his or her true identity in very direct yet graceful ways. Without both dynamics working together, you will not see people grow into the people God has created them to be. Challenge may be given from the pulpit or stage on Sunday mornings, but challenge is always given best in the context of personal relationships. No one accidentally creates disciples. Discipleship is an intentional pursuit. In life, when we want to learn how to do something, we find someone with real flesh and blood and have that person teach us how to do what they do. The truth of Scripture is meant to be worked out in us, not something that we hold as an abstract reality. If there’s anything any of us should become great at, it’s making disciples who can make disciples. Every disciple disciples. You can’t be a disciple if you aren’t willing to invest in and disciple others. That’s simply the call of the Great Commission. From the beginning, members know that one day they will start a group of their own. Leaders tell members from the beginning that the expectation is that in 6-12 months they will start one of their own. People often become stunted in their spiritual development if they assume it is only affecting them (though this is never really the case), but knowing that other people are depending on them changes the game in their minds and makes them take their own spiritual development more seriously. When the bar is raised, people either bow out or step up. Most of the time people step up. It is our experience that people want to grow but are unable to will themselves to transformation. They need relationships and structures that keep them accountable and moving toward Jesus. They also know the only way this can happen is with high commitment.

Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

Today was a day to face that very temptation. A family who had become dear friends had left the church with no warning or explanation. Not even good bye. When they were missing on that first Sunday, we didn’t realize that they had removed themselves from our church. We thought maybe someone was sick or an alarm clock didn’t go off or something simple. If it had been something serious, they would have called us, of course. We had done so much for them and with them. We rejoiced when they rejoiced, we cried when they cried, we prayed with them, we prayed for them, we loved them and felt as if they loved us in return. Of course, one Sunday turned to two, and then three. I mentioned to Michael that I had called and left a message. He told me that he had the same thought as well. He had left a message and sent a card. We felt sad as the realization sank in: they had left the church. People don’t know how to leave a church, and many pastors don’t take such a loss graciously. In all our determinations about pastoring, we had considered the possibility of losing members, but this family was the first. It was time for a lesson for all of us, and I felt the Lord tugging at my spirit. I was to take the first step. Sunday afternoon, Michael taking a nap, kids playing games in their room... Now was as good a time as any. I got into my car and headed toward their house. Suddenly nervous, I sat in the driveway for a minute at first. What was I doing here again? Pastor’s wives don’t do this. I had been around pastor’s wives all my life. Since sensing my call to full time ministry at eighteen, I had been paying close attention to them, and I had never seen one of them do this. I got my words together. I needed an eloquent prayer for such a moment as this one: “Lord, help” (okay, so it wasn’t eloquent). I remembered a verse in Jeremiah: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings” (17:10). The Lord knew my heart, and He understood. In this situation, I knew that I had opened myself up to Him. In this situation, I knew that my heart was pure before Him. All of a sudden, my courage returned. I opened the car door and willed myself toward the front porch. As I walked up the driveway, I also thought about Paul’s warning which I had read earlier that morning: “they failed to reach their goal... because their minds were fixed on what they achieved instead of what they believed” (Romans 9:31-32). This family was not my achievement; they were the Lord’s creation. What I believed was that I had been right in opening my heart to them. What I believed was that Michael and I had been faithful to the Lord and that we had helped this family while they were in our flock. I had not failed to reach my goal thus far, and I felt determined not to fail now. This front porch was not unfamiliar to me. I had been here before on many occasions, with my husband and children. Happy times: dinners, cook-outs, birthdays, engagement announcements, births.... Sad times as well: teenaged child rebelling, financial struggles, hospital stays or even death .... We had been invited to share heartache and joy alike. No, “invited” is the wrong word. We were needed. We were family, and family comes together at such times. This afternoon, however, was different. I was standing on this familiar front porch for a reason that had never brought me here before: I came to say good bye. On this front porch, I knocked on the door. This family had been with us for years, and we had been with them. Remembering how this family had helped and blessed our congregation, I quietly smiled. Remembering how they had enriched our personal lives with their friendship and encouragement, I could feel the tears burning behind my eyes. We would miss them. Remembering all that we had done for them, I wondered how they could leave with no word or even warning. Just stopped coming. Just

The following approaches are likely to fall flat, with less than 10 percent of the churchless reporting they might be attracted by such efforts: information about a church provided through the mail advertising for a church on TV, in a newspaper, or on the radio an unsolicited phone call from someone representing a church in the community to describe the church and offer an invitation to attend advertising for the church on a local billboard a website that describes the church and invites people to attend a sermon from the pastor on CD or podcast emphasizing that the church has multiple locations in the community providing entry to a “video church”—a ministry that has a real-time video feed of live teaching from the main location, with live music and leadership at the remote location a contemporary seeker service showing a Hollywood-quality movie at the church that deals with issues like marriage, faith, or parenting providing a book club that discusses books about faith and life offering an open-mic discussion group or online chat that focuses on questions related to faith and spirituality a celebrity guest speaker appearing at a church’s worship services

There’s one thing that 82 percent of all unchurched people can’t seem to resist. It cuts through their defenses and penetrates their barriers. According to surveys at LifeWay Research, 82 percent of them seem to have a single weakness: if a friend, or someone they know, invites them to church. Reread that: 82 percent of all unchurched people would come to church this weekend if they were invited by a friend.2

The fake commission accommodates a flexible man-made standard for evangelism and discipleship. The definition of the fake commission does not require the verbal preaching of the gospel. Many believe they have done all the evangelism they need to if they invite someone to church a couple of times a year. Easier yet, the fake commission allows one to change the definition of “preaching the gospel” to mean doing social work, yard work, or any other good work, even when you consciously do not use those opportunities as a springboard to tell people how to be saved through Jesus Christ.

Evangelism is not a making of proselytes; it is not persuading people to make a decision; it is not proving that God exists, or making a good case for the truth of Christianity; it is not inviting someone to a meeting; it is not exposing the contemporary dilemma, or arousing interest in Christianity; it is not wearing a badge saying “Jesus Saves”! Some of these things are right and good in their place, but none of them should be confused with evangelism. To evangelize is to declare on the authority of God what he has done to save sinners, to warn men of their lost condition, to direct them to repent, and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Followers of Christ are the most widely persecuted religious group in the world.. the most fundamental freedom is the privilege of each person to explore truth about the divine and to live in light of his or her determinations..from the beginning God has given men and women the freedom to decide whether to worship him..God did not (and does not) remove human responsibility..the Bible indicates the importance of willful choice and personal invitation..the gospel message is fundamentally invitation, not coercion..no one can believe except willingly..faith must be free in order to be genuine..What our government calls this "right" is commonly known as the "freedom of worship," but this label can be somewhat misleading because the way it is often applied in our culture unnecessarily and unhelpfully limits the "free exercise" of religion to the private sphere..This is part of the "free exercise" of religion: the freedom of worship not just in episodic gatherings but in everyday life. And it is such "free exercise" that is subtly yet significantly being attacked in American culture today..you have a hard time conceiving how you can participate in a celebration of something that you are convinced God condemns..in your heart you can't avoid the conviction that such participation would dishonor God..while [she] is free to exalt he God in the church she attends, she is not free to express her beliefs in the business she owns..while we have certain obligations to our government, our ultimate obligation is to our God..Church history..contains other examples of shameful attempts to spread Christianity by force or military might..none of this was, or is, right..the search for religious truth is often supplanted by the idolization of supposed tolerance. The cardinal sin of our culture is to be found intolerant, yet what we mean by intolerant is ironically, well, intolerant..the very notion of tolerance necessitates disagreement..I don't tolerate you if you believe exactly what I believe..it would be wise and helpful for us to patiently consider where each of us is coming from and why we have arrived at our respective conclusions..we can then be free to contemplate how to treat one another with the greatest dignity in view of our differences..tolerance applies to people and beliefs in distinct ways..toleration of people requires that we treat one another with equal value, honoring each other's fundamental human freedom to express private faith in public forums..toleration of beliefs does not require that we accept every idea as equally valid, as if a belief is true, right or good simply because someone expresses it. In this way, tolerance of a person's value does not mean I must accept the person's views.."Hey, as long as someone believes something, that makes it right.." Either Jesus is or isn't the Son of God..I lament the many ways that Christians express differences in belief devoid of respect for the people with whom they speak. Likewise, I lament the many ways that Christians are labeled intolerant, narrow-minded, and outdated whenever they express biblical beliefs that have persisted throughout centuries..The more we become like Jesus in this world, the more we will experience what he experienced. Just as it was costly for him to counter culture, it will be costly for us to do the same..It's only when we stand up and counter the culture around them with the gospel of Jesus Christ that they will experience suffering..On the other hand, if they stay quiet, they can remain safe. But they know that in so doing, they will violate their consciences and disobey the commands Christ has given them to share grace and gospel truth with the people around them..in a country where even our own religious liberty is increasingly limited, our suffering brothers and sisters beckon us not to let the cost of following Christ in our culture silence our faith.

When we want to know about a person's friends and associates, we look at the people with whom she eats, and when we want to measure someone's social status against our own, we look at the sort of dinner parties to which he gets invited...Just as a bad ingredient may contaminate a meal, we often fear bad company may contaminate our reputation or our comfort.

In my seemingly endless months of sleeping on the streets, I knew of only one other person who had slept in a church by himself overnight, and that was only because he had had pneumonia and someone had taken pity on him. I was the only one who had been invited to occupy the half-million square feet of empty church space in town.

Driven into a corner, the humans had turned to desperate tactics. They attempted to sacrifice someone to appease their gods and gain their favor. A hundred little girls were invited into the church’s grand cathedral, where they were summarily slaughtered.

Inviting someone to church is like setting up one's soul on a date with the holy spirit. We all know the changes that often take place when our soul comes face to face with the spirit. Things are never the same again.

Adoration given to God is always given back to us. As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of us. The biblical letters do not call the earliest Christ followers “Christians”; they had another title: “saints.” Today, we tend to reserve that title for the most pious spiritual elite. But in the early church, it was commonplace, the everyday name for the everyday Jesus follower. That’s because the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace. To call someone a saint is not to necessarily call them good; it is only to name them as someone who has experienced the goodness of God.11 We recover our sainthood simply through adoration. When we remember who God is, when we experience his goodness, we recover our own identity as well. I

The invitation came from Studio Morra in Naples: Come and perform whatever you want. It was early 1975. With the scandalized reactions of the Belgrade press fresh in my mind, I planned a piece in which the audience would provide the action. I would merely be the object, the receptacle. My plan was to go to the gallery and just stand there, in black trousers and a black T-shirt, behind a table containing seventy-two objects: A hammer. A saw. A feather. A fork. A bottle of perfume. A bowler hat. An ax. A rose. A bell. Scissors. Needles. A pen. Honey. A lamb bone. A carving knife. A mirror. A newspaper. A shawl. Pins. Lipstick. Sugar. A Polaroid camera. Various other things. And a pistol, and one bullet lying next to it. When a big crowd had gathered at eight P.M., they found these instructions on the table: There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8pm - 2am) Slowly at first and then quickly, things began to happen. It was very interesting: for the most part, the women in the gallery would tell the men what to do to me, rather than do it themselves (although later on, when someone stuck a pin into me, one woman wiped the tears from my eyes). For the most part, these were just normal members of the Italian art establishment and their wives. Ultimately I think the reason I wasn’t raped was that the wives were there. As evening turned into late night, a certain air of sexuality arose in the room. This came not from me but from the audience. We were in southern Italy, where the Catholic Church was so powerful, and there was this strong Madonna/whore dichotomy in attitudes toward women. After three hours, one man cut my shirt apart with the scissors and took it off. People manipulated me into various poses. If they turned my head down, I kept it down; if they turned it up, I kept it that way. I was a puppet—entirely passive. Bare-breasted, I stood there, and someone put the bowler hat on my head. With the lipstick, someone else wrote IO SONO LIBERO—“I am free”—on the mirror and stuck it in my hand. Someone else took the lipstick and wrote END across my forehead. A guy took Polaroids of me and stuck them in my hand, like playing cards. Things got more intense. A couple of people picked me up and carried me around. They put me on the table, spread my legs, stuck the knife in the table close to my crotch. Someone stuck pins into me. Someone else slowly poured a glass of water over my head. Someone cut my neck with the knife and sucked the blood. I still have the scar. There was one man—a very small man—who just stood very close to me, breathing heavily. This man scared me. Nobody else, nothing else, did. But he did. After a while, he put the bullet in the pistol and put the pistol in my right hand. He moved the pistol toward my neck and touched the trigger. There was a murmur in the crowd, and someone grabbed him. A scuffle broke out. Some of the audience obviously wanted to protect me; others wanted the performance to continue. This being southern Italy, voices were raised; tempers flared. The little man was hustled out of the gallery and the piece continued. In fact, the audience became more and more active, as if in a trance. And then, at two A.M., the gallerist came and told me the six hours were up. I stopped staring and looked directly at the audience. “The performance is over,” the gallerist said. “Thank you.” I looked like hell. I was half naked and bleeding; my hair was wet. And a strange thing happened: at this moment, the people who were still there suddenly became afraid of me. As I walked toward them, they ran out of the gallery.

Now, it is important to understand that 82% of all unchurched people would attend your church if they were invited to do so.17 The sad part of this is that only 2% of the church members have invited someone to attend in this last year.

Now, it is important to understand that 82% of all unchurched people would attend your church if they were invited to do so.17 The sad part of this is that only 2% of the church members have invited someone to attend in this last year.18

Evangelism, on the other hand, is the actual proclamation—either oral or written, but certainly verbal—of the gospel. It is declaring the message of the person and work of Christ, who He is and what He has done on behalf of sinners like you and me. That means there are several things that evangelism is not. It is not living your life as an example. It is not building relationships with people. It is not giving one’s personal testimony. And it is not inviting someone to church. These things may be good and helpful, but they are not evangelism. They may lay the groundwork for evangelism. They may allow others to relate to us, or they may cause someone to be curious about why we live the way we do. But they are not evangelism, because they don’t proclaim the gospel.