How can we remain faithful to our calling to share the good news of Jesus with others? How can we best draw them into the radical community which we call church? Ian Cripps is convinced that it is through building relationships. He outlines some simple steps he has taken in his own town:
If we are loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves we will form warm relationships. A warm relationship is when you and your friend know about each other’s circumstances, and so your friend knows you are a committed Christian. If you invite your friend to an interesting event, they will seriously think about attending. You have absolutely nothing to lose.
Working backwards from the outcome we desire gives us something which looks like this:
6. God invites everyone to enter into relationship with him.
5. One way of sharing God’s invitation is to provide an attractive Christian foundation course, followed by an invitation to an accessible church service.
4. One way of sharing God’s invitation is to provide an attractive Christian foundation course, followed by an invitation to an accessible church service.
3. The taster event is advertised through personal ‘warm’ invitations, through an announcement from your minister at your weekly online service and church website, and through neighbourhood media.
2. In preparation for this, ask for your minister’s support and email your church council or leadership team and church members outlining the planned outreach and its purpose. Invite some to serve as facilitators in the Zoom event and subsequent Zoom foundation course.
1. Find an experienced guest speaker and agree a topic.
I am a member of the Mathetes Trust’s Equip programme. So I shared my thoughts with Roger Morgan, and then took my proposal to our minister. She suggested I work with our curate as co-leader. Just five weeks later we held our taster event!
We ran the event twice, once during the early afternoon and once in the evening, and received 34 feedback forms. We had invited participants to rate the event on a scale from 0 (a waste of time) to 6 (excellent). We were encouraged to find the average score was 5.2. Thirty of those responding said they would welcome further similar events.
We then invited those who had attended the taster events to sign up for a foundation course. We decided to use the Mathetes Trust’s friendly and accessible Beyond Ourselves course, and again we held it on Zoom. 15 participants (congregational members and their friends) and 5 facilitators accepted our invitation to attend. We used breakout rooms to keep the discussion groups small, matching each facilitator with three participants who were at similar points on their journey and asking them to keep in touch by phone. We plan to follow the Beyond Ourselves course with the rest of the series in The God Who is There programme.
The Mathetes Trust 