Books & Culture reviews Susan Strempek Shea’s journey through America’s churches. Helpful to anyone wanting a fresh reminder of how Sunday morning worship is experienced by a visitor. Click here to read more.
Welcoming
Is your congregation an evangelizing community? An Evangelism Assessment for Churches
The quiz below is meant to help you assess your congregation, but also to show how the Institute can provide you with help. Make sure you click the submit button at the end to get suggestions on how the Institute can help in areas relevant to you.
How to Invite a Friend to Church
You’re thinking of inviting a friend to church? My first piece of advice: Don’t.
At least, don’t do it on an average Sunday. Unless, of course, your friend has said, “You know what? I would just love to see how an Anglican church operates on a typical Sunday when you’re not making special allowances for visitors. That would really be my idea of a good time.” That would be different.
In general, however, that is not the attitude of the Canadian non-church-going public. To the majority, the idea of going to church is not high on their checklist of goals to fulfill before they die. So there needs to be some reason why, if you were bold enough to invite them, they might be bold enough to say yes. What kind of reason might that be? Let me suggest two:
1. There is something special going on at church which they might be interested in:
• Carol Services are great for this. Everybody loves a carol service. The tunes are familiar—if only because we’ve been hearing them at Shopper’s since the day after Halloween.
• The Blessing of the Animals, liturgical challenge though it may be, is intriguing to someone who doesn’t normally come to church.
• In St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, Dean Kevin Martin does an annual service to thank workers in the food industry in the city. They come in their droves. They have never been thanked publicly like that—let alone by the church.
• A sermon series can be of interest to people. At the local street festival a year ago, my own church invited passers-by to write on a flip chart the questions they would most like to ask God, promising that the sermons in the following months would address those questions.
2. If our hope is that our friends will find something attractive about the expression of Christian faith they find at church—might there be other settings where they could experience that more easily than in the unfamiliar setting of a church service?
What about “half-way house” events, where the spiritually curious can encounter Christians and their spirituality outside the context of as Sunday service? Jenny Andison, in her helpful booklet, Doors into Faith: Inviting Friends the Join the Big Game (Wycliffe Booklet on Evangelism #4), has great suggestions. Here is a sampling of some possibilities churches have tried:
• What about forming a group of friends—Christians and others—who meet to watch movies with spiritual themes and discuss them?
• How about a nice dinner to which you invite a Christian speaker known in the community—an athlete, perhaps, or a local MP—to talk about their work and their faith?
• Many Canadians would like to make a difference to this country’s problems. I heard recently of a man who had first encountered followers of Jesus when he offered to help with the food bank at their church, and then gradually found his own way to faith.
Having said we need suitable events, of course, we want to be sure that if we take the risk of inviting someone, they will be well-received. To be honest, I’m simply not going to risk their feeling alienated and my being embarrassed unless the greeting system is warm, competent and genuine. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, and the horror stories are legion. (I have written more about the art of welcoming in the Wycliffe Booklet #6, From Visitor to Disciple: Eight Ways Your Church Can Help.)
Let’s assume then that (a) there is a suitable event that our neighbour might actually be interested in and that (b) as far as we can tell, it will be a positive experience. What then?
Here are three practical things I find helpful myself:
• I like to have an official invitation card or flyer about the event to give. Apart from anything else, it saves me explaining every single detail, and provides a reminder after the conversation is over.
• I want to be fairly sure there really is a natural connection between my friend and the event. My neighbour’s 10-year old bought a goldfish bowl from us during the local garage sale in the summer. In September his mother told me he had now bought a goldfish to live in the bowl. So I said, “I wonder if he’d like it to bring it to church for St. Francis’ Day when we bless people’s pets?” “Wow, that sounds neat!” she replied. Without the goldfish connection, the invitation would have sounded a little forced. With the goldfish, it was the most natural thing in the world.
• I always try to give people an out—“Of course, I know that’s a busy time of year” is a fairly safe one—which makes it easy for them say no. I might even say, “Personally, I hate pushy religious people, so I’m a bit nervous to suggest this . . .” Usually that reassures people, because you’ve shown consideration for their feelings—and clearly you’re not pushy!
Will it still be scary? Probably. Hey, I’m a Professor of Evangelism, and I certainly find my heart beats a bit faster when I’m inviting someone to a church event. But fear is not the worst thing that could happen. Some of the most rewarding things we ever do were scary once. I find I am encouraged by that book title which says, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It’s not bad advice.
(This article first appeared in The Anglican, newspaper of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, in February 2008.)
The Difficult Journey to Faith: How the Church can Provide Stepping Stones
Moving toward Christian faith is seldom easy. There are intellectual, ethical and relational issues to be worked through, to name but three. Churches which seek to practice evangelism will try to offer help at every step for those who wish it. There are many such “stepping stones” churches can offer: classical music is one of them.
Coming to Christian faith is often a long and complex process involving many steps.
Take Dave, for instance. Though his parents never went to church, his grandmother had a reputation for being “religious” and told him stories of Jesus. At university, he had been intrigued to discover in a history of science course how many of the great scientists were also thoughtful and articulate Christians-Kepler, Newton, Boyle, and Maxwell, for example. When he got a job with an innovative high tech firm, he found that one of his colleagues was a person of quiet but firm Christian faith. They talked sometimes about the historic connection between science and faith, and Sam invited Dave to a lecture by a leading physicist on “Why I am a Christian.” Dave found it thought-provoking.
Dave and Sam hung out together sometimes on the weekends. Dave was impressed by Sam’s integrity and enjoyed his sense of humour. So after six months or so, when Sam invited him to a Sunday afternoon discussion group about the Bible for young singles who were figuring out their spirituality, Dave was interested to go. Then he checked out Sam’s church, to which some of the group also went, on a Sunday when they were doing a jazz mass, and, to his surprise, he liked it. A year later, he decided to be baptized.
Dave, as you may have guessed, is a composite of many people, but I have heard enough stories of this kind to know it is a pattern: a long-term friendship with someone who is genuine in their faith, plus a special event or two, plus plenty of time for reflection and asking questions, some experimentation with church, and then a thoughtful commitment.
This edition of good idea! looks at one place where churches often fail to help people who are taking that kind of step towards Christian faith: the special event. We often assume that if we make our churches friendly enough, and the liturgy contemporary enough, new people will flock in. Well, that may be true for some.
But there are many for whom a regular Sunday service is unlikely to be an accessible door through which they can move towards faith. For Dave, the lecture by the physicist was on a Thursday evening on a local university campus. The Bible study was on a Sunday afternoon, over a glass of wine in a young couple’s apartment. And his first Sunday service was a little out of the ordinary. Each event was a stepping stone on the way, and each was more user-friendly than a “regular” Sunday for a non-churchgoer like Dave.
There are many forms this kind of bridging event can take.
- I know one family who every summer invite their neighbours to watch a thought-provoking current movie on a wide-screen TV in their back yard. Significant conversation about big issues of life and death always follows over hot chocolate.
- Many churches in the past thirty years have invited hockey legend Paul Henderson to be an after-dinner speaker, to talk about his hockey, his life and his faith.
- I recently heard of two clergy in England who have begun running regular discussions about spiritual issues in their local pub: the program is called “Pints of View.”
- And Jenny Andison, in a recent Wycliffe Booklet on Evangelism, Doors into Faith: Inviting Friends to Join the Big Game, gives more examples to stimulate our creativity.
Future editions of good idea! may feature some of these events. This edition, however, examines two churches, one in Eastern Canada and one in the West, who have made classical music just such a stepping stone towards faith. As it happens, both have run their programs in the church and on a Sunday. But in neither case is it in the form of a regular Sunday service. St. John’s Shaughnessy, Vancouver, has experimented with performances of Bach Cantatas, which were originally composed to be performed in the context of a church service, with a sermon on the relevant texts. And Stone Church in Fredericton NB has offered evening concerts of sacred music entitled The Great Composers Tell a Great Story, highlighting the Christian narrative that underlies much classical music.
If evangelism is helping people take steps towards faith in Jesus, and if those steps can take several years, we need to be sensitised to how we can help. A lively and welcoming church is often a piece of the puzzle. A friendship with a Christian is usually a key part of the process. But between the friendship and the normal life of the church there is often a great gulf fixed. Probably the journey to faith will never be an easy one, but the church can at least remove some of the unnecessary difficulties. One way to do that is by creating the sort of stepping stones which special events provide along the way.
Sundays with Bach at St. John’s Anglican Church, Shaughnessy
How many lovers of Bach know that his Cantatas were written for singing in conjunction with a sermon on the same Biblical text? One church decided to introduce music lovers to the original Bach tradition of word and music.
Pauline Hale had an idea. As a choir member at St. John’s (Shaughnessy) in Vancouver and an avid concert attender, Pauline had experienced sacred music in church and at concerts. She began to consider how the church might use the wealth of sacred music to extend itself to those people on the outside who already love such music. She thought that we could do more than host concerts in church buildings, and hoped to find a way to invite her concert-going friends into her church community.
While previously in a choir directed by Dr. Mel Unger, Pauline had discovered that Bach’s cantatas were particularly well suited for use within church services. In his Handbook to Bach’s Sacred Cantata Texts, Unger wrote:
Bach’s cantatas were written for church services; thus each related to the theme of the given day within the liturgical year. The German church cantata was placed between the Gospel reading and the Sermon of the Lutheran liturgy and culminated a long tradition of sermon music that sought to teach and persuade the listener.
Bach’s intention in writing his cantatas was to serve the message of the sermon, and his intended audience was the worshipping community. Pauline recognized that early cantatas, most of which are currently performed at concerts, offered the church a unique opportunity to return this musical form to its intended context, the church service. At the same time, they could reach an interested audience of concert-goers, while allowing the church to be authentically and boldly Christian.
In the fall of 2003, St. John’s launched its first Sunday with Bach with the performance of one of Bach’s cantatas within its Sunday morning church services. Since the content of the cantata was based on a particular Scripture reading, the liturgy, readings, and the sermon were focused on that Scripture reading. The preacher had the rare opportunity to use an explanation of Bach’s artistic expression to illustrate the truth of passage.
Parishioners invited friends, family and coworkers to these services. Many found that it was very easy to extend this invitation, particularly if the recipient liked this kind of music. It attracted a different group of people than other events, and for many was the first time they came to anything so explicitly Christian. Those who invited their friends found that the morning spent together led to dynamic conversations about faith and religion over lunch.
Outreach events rarely function within a church service. This means that we must provide transitions from the experience of the outreach event to normal ongoing parish life. With the exception of Christmas and Easter, most of us would rarely invite a friend or coworker along to a regular church service. Bringing cantatas into the church service, however, provides a unique opportunity for parishioners to extend a compelling invitation to a relatively normal church service. Should their guest come back the next week, the music would be different, but much of the experience would remain the same.
St. John’s has continued to offer Sundays with Bach twice-yearly, once in the fall and once in the spring. Over the years, it has become evident that this sort of event brings together a few different dynamics which work together in a uniquely fruitful way. First, people who don’t normally attend church enjoy this kind of music and are willing to pay money to see it performed (not that we charge, of course!). So they are already quite interested. Secondly, music is by nature generally accessible and non-threatening, while at the same time being thought-provoking. Thirdly, early cantata music is faithful to and focused on the Scriptures.
It is worth noting that these strengths are not confined to this genre of music. The current popularity of spirituals, bluegrass, and folk gospel present us with similar opportunities to extend ourselves through music within a church service. Perhaps one of those is our next challenge.
What Ed Offers – Greeting, Welcoming and Integrating Newcomers
 |
This Article is originally from the Fall 2005 edition of good idea!, also available here in a fully formatted PDF file. The version below was updated January 3, 2009 |
Many people in our society would say they are “exploring their spirituality.” Some of them at one time or another will check out the church, to see if we have anything to offer them in their explorations. What will their experience of our church be like? Will it be welcoming? Will their encounter with Christians be such that they want to repeat it the next week-and the next-or will it be such that they never want to come again?
Often parishes will identify themselves as welcoming, nurturing communities, when in reality there are numerous barriers that make it difficult for newcomers to enter into the life of our congregations.
Ed Dallow has adopted and adapted principles from Andrew Weeks’ book Welcome! (The Alban Institute, 1992) to create a highly effective program of welcoming and integrating newcomers at Christ Church-so effective that a couple of years ago they erected a new building to accommodate the enlarged congregation. He has also developed a very helpful workshop in response to those who have asked about the practices which have been so fruitful in Cataraqui.
Ed’s presentations are therefore designed to provide ideas, tools and techniques to help congregations with skills of Greeting, Welcoming and Integrating Newcomers into the Body of Christ. Our goal should be that someone visiting us for the first time will discover something exciting and God-inspired in our worship services and in our community, and be drawn to return and learn more.
In the workshop we examine such things as:
- Evangelism and stewardship as they relate to our culture
- the ‘real-life’ situations of the churches represented at the workshop
- the pros and cons of ‘marketing techniques’
- responding to those who come wanting ‘Rites of Passage’
• providing opportunities for ‘seekers’ to become involved in the life of the congregation.
A key part of these workshops is looking at case studies provided by those attending, with a view to discovering workable solutions.
From Visitor to Disciple: Eight Ways Your Church Can Help
 Most churches identify themselves as friendly communities. Yet the experience of a first-time visitor is often one of confusion, embarrassment and even alienation. John Bowen helps us think through the steps by which we can make that first visit a positive one, so that a visitor will feel confidence to return, to explore the reality of faith, and to move towards discipleship.
For the full text of this booklet in PDF format, click here.
|
Doors into Faith: Inviting Friends to Join the Big Game
 Those who have been in church a long time cannot imagine how intimidating the first encounter with church can be for those who have never tried it before. Using the analogy of a sports fan who invites an inexperienced friend to their first game, Jenny Andison suggests a range of user-friendly activities a church can offer to enable friends to begin to love towards personal faith.
For the full text of this booklet in PDF format, click here. |
