It’s a wedding year for my family, and the invitations are about to be sent out. My daughter has agonised over the guest list for her reception, and we’ve proofread the invitations down to the last classy squiggle. It’s like I’m living inside a parable.
There are embarrassing mistakes we’ve all seen or made with invitations – forgetting to include the location, or directing RSVPs to a stranger with an almost-identical email address. Awkward!
When it comes to sharing Jesus, it’s important to get the details right and know what the gospel invitation actually is. But what if we get the invitation perfect and forget to send it out? Here are three ways I think the Bridegroom is challenging us about our whole approach to invitation:
- Inviting only one
When we ask ourselves, ‘Who will I invite?’ to Alpha, church, youth group or whatever, the ‘who’ seems automatically to be singular. We scan our mental list of all the people we know to come up with one name. What a strange phenomenon! The servants in the Parable of the Wedding Feast are sent to invite many people, indeed more and more – and more! The master wants his banquet full! But when you obsess over a single Moby Dick and ignore all the other fish in the sea, the result is an empty trawler.
- Inviting only those who are close
We can easily fall into another trap: Only inviting those who are likely to say ‘yes’. Our minds go to the most Christian-adjacent, open-hearted seeker that we know and focus our invitation on them. Don’t get me wrong, they should be invited. We should pick all the low-hanging fruit and welcome in all those currently queueing at the church door.But doesn’t Jesus’ teaching and ministry demonstrate that so often it is rank outsiders and unlikelies who jump the whole queue and enter the kingdom ahead of the A-listers? Wasn’t Saul just about the least likely candidate, and yet Christ called him?
What if we stopped saying ‘No’ for people? What if we invited not on the basis of how much a person is inclined to Jesus, but on the basis of how inclined Jesus is toward them?
- Inviting only our friends
Personal invitation is a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be neglected. But what about impersonal invitation? A church of 100 people might know 1,000 people in its neighbourhood. But what about the other 10,000?If your church is well over-represented by a particular demographic (middle class, or older generations, or Party XYZ voters etc), it’s probably because your church has subtly and gradually become ‘reserved’ for people like you and people you like – those in your social set. If others don’t get a look-in, it doesn’t play well with Jesus.
If we can’t cross social lines and build personal connections with those different from us, we can at least advertise sincerely that all are welcome, and make sure to love every odd fish that the net brings up.
Just imagine what might happen to our movement, and to our gospel fruitfulness, if we fixed those faux pas and invited all whom Jesus is inviting?
*Andrew Turner is Director of Crossover for Australian Baptist Ministries.
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Photo by Lisandro Garcia on Unsplash
