What frustrates me the most in my travels around the world, is coming across large evangelical churches who love hearing the word of God. Now before you criticise me for clearly an unsound statement, hear me out. Good sound teaching is like having a wonderful meal and enjoying every taste. But what if you went to the same restaurant every week, ordered from the menu and then when it arrived you didn’t eat it. You appreciated how it looked, how it smelt, you even anticipated the taste, but you never tasted it for yourself. I come across churches just like that. They use words like exegesis. They have wonderful bible teachers, who can take you into the Greek, they tell great stories, they make you laugh, they make you uncomfortable at times, but in the end the congregation conclude, that the teaching would be great for others, but they themselves are okay and do not need to apply the teaching to their daily lives. But they will turn up next week because they love to sit and hear. They have fat bottoms and large ears. They will of course protest, the church does a lot of good works, because they pay their staff to do them, they donate a lot of money, because they have to big givers.

But the word of God says be doers of the word, not just hearers. To intellectually know something and not do, is not really to know.

One church leader thanked me for the Seminar on invitation, but particularly wanted to congratulate me on disarming their defensive shield. It seems to me that invitation is not done, because church leaders have been rejected by their congregations who have not invited their friends, that they protect themselves with an invisible shield controlling any further possibility of rejection. By not mentioning invitation they avoid being judged. To congregational member this might seem daft. But in the mind of the church leader everytime they have an invitation Sunday, it is almost like a visible referendum of the church leader’s ministry to the congregation. This is not a secret ballot, everyone will see the results. So they shield themselves.

Scripture talks about another shield which might in fact be much more useful to the church leader. It is called the shield of faith. That whatever the circumstances of our life God is with us. Perhaps once we have the right shield, more invitation will take place

Have you ever been uninvited? I have been just recently. The ironic thing is that I was invited to a Conference to speak about invitation. All was set, I imagined a significant breakthrough and lots of openings to spread the message of simple invitation and then I was uninvited. No real explanation, but looking at the invited speakers, I did feel rather think that I missed out because I wasn’t a known speaker with a Doctorate and author of plenty of books.

It is hard to be uninvited, I felt depressed and down for at least 48 hours, I am still not quite over it some ten days later. But it is a reminder to me that although God has invited those outside our congregations into a relationship and God uses us to do the inviting. Unfortunately it appears as if we have uninvited them. By not concentrating on the great commission of make disciples and concentrating on maintain what we already have, are we not uninviting the invited? Convoluted but I hope you get my drift!

One significant church leader wrote recently and said that I might be able to come back and speak to his clergy if what I had to present is a very different angle. Oh to have failed in the first place to get over the message of simple invitation! I now have to think up a very different angle. In one sense the leader is correct. Jesus found different ways of communicating. There is as saying “He is the best orator who can turn men’s ears into eyes”. So I will try.

The great thing about this journey around the world trying to get invitation into the DNA of the church is that I pick up great ideas wherever I go, so I am confident that I will be able to re-present the simple Christian discipline of invitation very differently.

But why do we always crave the new way, or the fresh initiative. Aren’t the simple timeless disciplines of Christianity still true today as they have been since Christ walked the earth? GK Chesterton said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been tried and found difficult, so not really tried.

How about a very different angle being, to look at our generation from God’s perspective and change our angle of thinking

Recently a church leader confessed to me that my Seminar had saved Back to Church Sunday in their Diocese. Most churches had not done it for 18 months. This shook me a little as Back to Church Sunday is focussed invitation to the gathered people of God. Another church leader on another occasion described me as the boy pushing the large boulder of invitation up a hill. It does I confess feel like that at times!

At the heart of the Christian faith is invitation. What is Grace if it is not God’s undeserved invitation to all of us? When Jesus said at the beginning of his ministry follow me, he was inviting us into the way.

I am trying to understand why don’t we do the very thing that God has commanded? My initial conclusion is “neglect”. We concentrate on the easier things to do in our Christian discipleship, like going to an act of worship, silent prayer, hymn singing etc.

The harder things such as invitation we try, and when they don’t work the first time, we quietly drop. Not doing the things we know we should do causes us to feel guilty and guilt leads to an erosion in self-confidence. As our self-confidence diminishes, so does our level of activity. As our activity diminishes, our results inevitably decline. And as our results suffer our attitude begins to weaken. And as our attitude begins the slow shift from positive to negative, our self-confidence diminishes even more….and on and on it goes. Failure to do the things we could and should do results in the creation of a negative spiral, which one started, is difficult to stop.

But once we start to go in the opposite direction and start inviting, overcoming the fear and guilt, a positive spiral begins and confidence returns. People receive invitations and for some of the invited it’s the best day of their lives

Travelling around the world I have found the thought of invitation driven by fear, stress, anxiety doubt and unbelief. I want to challenge that present culture and replant a thought of invitation driven by courage and faith.

If you think you are beaten you are
If you think you dare not you don’t

If you like to win and think you can’t

it’s almost certain you won’t

If you think you’ll lose your lost

for out of the world we find

success begins with a person’s will

it’s all in the state of mind

If you think your outclassed you are

you’ve got to think high to rise

you’ve got to be sure of yourself

before you can ever win the prize

Life’s battles don’t always go

to the stronger or faster man

But sooner or later the man who wins

is the man who thinks he can!

Faith removes limitation. One with God is the majority. Nothing is impossible with God. He can moves the mountains of fear in our lives

Before an Invitational Sunday the forces of skepticism gather. Preparations can be made in the midst of a fair (fear) level of skepticism. This is a good sign that we are in the midst of a battle. It could be said that Christianity is a battle of the mind. The Scriptures tell us “As a man thinketh so he is”. In other words your inner mind is revealed through your words and actions. This is valuable information for the church leader who needs to know the areas in person’s life in which to minister.
In Luke 10 Jesus set out the reality of invitational mission “I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves” and later “whenever you enter a town that does not receive you shake the dust from your feet”. Jesus is signalling that there will be opposition. The Skeptic is partially right in expecting invitational failure, but Jesus says “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” Despite the rejection of our invitation that we might receive Jesus urges us on to the plentiful harvest. In modern parlance you may have to kiss alot of frogs till you find your Prince!

“Resilience” is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. The negative response to the last invitation may have been taken as a personal rejection and has stopped us from trying again.

Contrast this ‘giving up’ attitude with the life of Jesus and the early church where there appears to be a remarkable resilience to rejection and persecution. Many early Christians were beaten, imprisoned, tortured and put in stressful situations, yet still Christianity spread. What made the early church so resilient when the church today seems to become paralysed with fear after even mild disappointments? It is almost as if  rejection and persecution led them to an even stronger faith.

I have heard many Christians say that what we need is a bit of persecution to sort out the church. This comes from the belief that testing makes faith stronger.
In fact Matthew 5 it says “Blessed are those that are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
We could exchange the word blessed for happy. Happy are those who are persecuted and rejected. Could we say that about the church of today?

We need the resilience of the Sower who kept on sowing despite knowing that some of the seed failed to reach the good soil.

You take a little seed, plant it, water it, and fertilise it for a whole year, and nothing happens

The second year you water it and fertilise it, and nothing happens

The third year you water it and fertilise it, and nothing happens. How discouraging this becomes!

The fourth year you water it and fertilise it, and nothing happens. This is very frustating

The fifth year you continue to water and fertilise the seed and then…take note. Sometime during the fifth year, the Chinese bamboo tree spouts and grows NINETY FEET IN SIX WEEK

So did the bamboo tree grow 90 feet tall in 6 weeks or five years? It grows 90 feet tall in five years, because if at anytime had the person stopped watering, fertilising and nurturing the dream of a tree, the tree would have died in the ground.

Invitation is much akin to the growing process of the Chinese bamboo tree.

It is often discouraging. We invite people and get turned down several times, and nothing happens

But for those who continue to invite and are not discouraged and are persistent, things will eventually happen.

At the heart of the Christian faith is the action of metanoia, which means to repent and change our minds. But metanoia should also manifest itself in what we do, the way we act. We should start to see a difference as well as think it.

On launching Back to Church Sunday in Canada I was asked whether I wanted to stay in a convent or a hotel. When put in that way by the church, I assumed that they wanted me to stay in a convent because of cost. When I actually arrived at the Convent I was greeted by the Mother Superior who showed me to my “cell” and then told me that this was a “silent” convent. I was told however that there was one meal during the week at which there is speaking. What agony for the next two days as each meal passed by without words. On the third day there was the sound of noise in the dining room and rejoicing in my mind as I walked into a dining room of the sound of conversation. I was seated next to two nuns, who asked me what I was doing in the country. I told them about my desire to challenge the church to invite. After this explanation one of the nun’s turned to the other and said “sister, how many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? The other nun looked at her in horror, then said, “change my great grandfather donated the light bulb to the church”

JK Galbraith an economist said “Faced with changing one’s mind, or proving that there is no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.”

But if we can persuade our congregations to move from not inviting to becoming invitational One word of an open-handed invitation from a Christian can totally change the course of a person’s life.