Stop Inviting People to Church...?

MissionThink a little while back pointed out this post on HouseChurchBlog

I have made a promise to myself. I will stop inviting people to my church.

Hear me out now.

I spent nearly a decade with my well paid job in the church trying to get people to come to church. We would develop strategies...... wowing them with worship experiences, video, dramas, amazing sermons, .... all designed with one aim. That when you would invite your friend, they would say yes and go to church with you. All you would have to do is invite them, they would respond to the engaging message and multi-sensory worship, become curious, eventually come to Christ, and eventually become a part of our church. The problem is, it didn't work very well.

...Allow me to be very honest. I see too many of us in the house church falling into the same trap and pattern of fruitlessness. And some are suffering unnecessarily from disillusionment. I hear the same words over and over, ... Old habits die very hard don't they.

It reminded me of a bit of Brueggeman who in The Prophetic Imagination. Fortress (1978) makes the comment that :

"The prophetic community might ponder what the preconditions of doxology are and what happens when doxologies that address this One are replaced by television jingles that find us singing consumerism ideology to ourselves and to each other. In that world there may be no prophet and surely no freedom. In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion". pp26

Until the church - whether it be inc. alt. or em. or even simply church! - works out what it is to demonstrate Jesus '...as the faithful embodiment of an alternative consciousness.' (Brueggeman 1978) and discovers that 'glitzy slick come to us mission' isn't that alternative? nor even that attractive, I think we'll be singing the tune - but slightly off key!