What if church were different? What if we evangelize instead of invite?

Admittedly, this is an old study, but in 1988 George Barna found that 

Despite the fact that churches and para-church organizations have spent billions of dollars on evangelism. More than 10,000 hours of evangelistic television programming have been broadcast, in excess of 5,000 new Christian books have been published, and more than 1,000 radio stations carry Christian programming. Yet despite such widespread opportunities for exposure to the Gospel, there has been no discernible growth in the size of the Christian body.[1] 

Could it be because invitation has replaced evangelism, and inviting people to the Christmas program has replaced dinner in our homes? The church was always supposed to incarnate the good news of Jesus and show the lived reality of His reign through Christian love. Francis Schaeffer went as far as to say that the love of Christians must be visible, for it is “the final apologetic.”[2] 

Perhaps we must take a different approach than the church growth experts have promoted for decades. Instead of watching the neighbor’s kids, who is a single mother and in need of a lot of help, we are exhausting ourselves in the nursery supporting the church service. What if we did the opposite?! What if we didn’t serve in nursery, and instead knew and helped our neighbors? The church was never meant to be for itself. It exists to love Jesus and love others like Jesus. 

The Bible tells us to “go and tell.” It doesn’t instruct us to “invite people to a building.” We are to be the church, not invite people to a building we’ve falsely labeled “church.”

“Letting our light shine” was never meant to become: “gather all the lights in the same building and keep them from the dark.” Too often, Christian life circles around propping up and keeping the institution of the church afloat. It becomes a vicious cycle. The church needs people at the “church” to keep the “church” going, all the while taking the church out of the world. 

People often ask me, “Why is the world such a dark place?” Could it be, in part, because the church—the light of the world—has left the world and gone into a building? Sadly, churches are notorious for taking people out of actual outreach to put them on an outreach committee. 

Further, we’ve hamstrung ourselves by encouraging and facilitating invitation over evangelism. Instead of the whole body being deployed in specific contexts where different people are specifically equipped to contextually share the good news of Jesus, we’ve allowed the onus to fall on professional clergy. Inviting someone to church is now the faithful thing to do. We’ve essentially taken an army off the frontlines where they are desperately needed and given a weapon to one person to wield from the stage. 

UPS delivers packages to us, typically Amazon packages. What if UPS went around town and told us we could go to the distribution center one day a week between 9 and 11 AM and pick up packages? First, that’d be bizarre. Second, it would be very unhelpful and UPS wouldn’t be in business very long. Third, it would be a lot like our “evangelism” in America. Yet, as Bill Hull has said, “There are no commands in Scripture for non-Christians to go to church, but there are plenty about Christians going to the world.”

Instead of being missionaries, we expect those who would be part of the church to become missionaries. The responsibility is on them to cross boundaries and learn a new vocabulary. Instead of crossing the thresholds into people’s homes and inviting them into ours, we’re inviting them to a sterile church building. We’re inviting them to a strange and foreign institution. Jesus and Paul sought out people where they were, they didn’t invite them to a church service. 

Jesus who is the good news, brought good news. He did not merely call us up to heaven. He came down from heaven—to walk, dine, and die for us—to bring us up. And Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (Jn. 20:21; 17:18). He has sent us not to merely invite people to a church building, but to compel people into the Kingdom.

Notes

[1] George Barna, Marketing the Church (Navpress, Colorado Springs, CO, 1990), 22. 

[2] Bryan A. Follis, Truth with love: the apologetics of Francis Schaeffer, 58.

[3] Luke 14:23 says, “Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled” but the context (note v. 15) informs us that the parable is about the Kingdom, and not any one church. It’s certainly not about a church building.