David Foster and Monday Morning Insight have been asking the question, “Why aren’t your people inviting other people to attend your church?” It’s a good question, perhaps one of the most important questions which can be asked in trying to understand the decline in Christianity in the west.
Most people care about what other people think of them, and when they decide whether to invite a friend to an event they subconsciously tend to balance their own enthusiasm for the event against their perceived likelihood of something embarrassing happening. It seems to me that enthusiasm increases when new things are happening, lives are being changed, significant growth is occurring, and the message being preached is consistent with the message being lived out in the congregation. On the other hand, the perceived risk of embarrassment rises when the message being preached is inconsistent with the apparent reality, services are boring and irrelevant, and freaky people are allowed to scare visitors away.
If what the New Testament says is true, and the good news of Jesus still applies today, then all churches should be of the enthusiasm-causing kind. The fact that most churches today in the west are of the embarrassment-causing kind shows just how far we have gone astray and become human-centred, rather than Jesus-centred.