Invitation helps the Christian develop one of the fruits of the spirit, patience. When I started to develop Back to Church Sunday I was utterly stunned when church leaders turned down the opportunity of coming to a seminar to think about a Welcome Sunday. I just couldn’t get my ahead around it. But over eight years I have discovered something called the law of averages. That law says If you do something often enough a ratio appears. I discovered in the early days If you communicate with 10 church leaders to think about mobilising invitation one church leader might say yes to me. Now once the ratio started it tended to continue.
I invited ten church leaders and one church leader says yes. When I was new I made up in numbers what I lacked in skill so I would Invite 300 to get 30.
I found however that the law of averages can be increased by getting better. Communicate with ten get one, then I got better I communicated with ten and got two. Now I Invited 300 and got 60.
The Law of averages applies to football If you don’t score in in six matches out of ten matches in the English Premier League as a striker you get paid £10 million (Wayne Rooney). If you don’t score in eight matches out of ten in Premier League you get paid £2.5 million (Peter Crouch). You don’t have to score in every match. In the same way the law of averages applies to invitation in that not every invite has to be accepted in order to see fruit. Like Wayne Rooney who might go through a bad patch, you have to develop patience and keep on

It drives me around the bend. But it is a reasonable, rational question. What I am going on about?
I conducted over 200 Seminars in 2011, but before I was invited, the question of cost would be raised.
How do you answer such a question? In a straighforward manner with commercial rates, in a weak way
that says that you are just happy to serve, or some middle ground?

Wouldn’t a better question be what is the value of what you are offering rather than what is the cost?
Will it deliver more value than us keeping the money in the church bank account?

Or I could turn it around and say What is the cost of not doing this? How many people in your area won’t be invited
and subsequently miss out on a relationship with God as a result?

When we make money the determining factor as to whether we do anything are we not really saying
that we do not trust God to provide more? Is it not an indication that we lack faith in the provision of the one
who knows our every move

So is there a cost?

Lizzy Wolf who is an associate vicar at St Paul’s leamington Spa and helps the leader of Alpha in Russia.
Alpha Russia became interested in the 12 steps to becoming an inviting church and Lizzy took the teaching to Russia for a conference
Lizzy reports “The conference went very well
and it was encouraging to see how much the Russian team have developed in the past few years.
I’m told there were 181 delegates in total from 55 churches in 44 towns and 3 countries (Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus).
These were split into various streams and seminars. The seminar on how to be an inviting church was quite lively (not that you’d know from the photos!)
with quite a bit of participation and interaction.

Let the dead bury the dead. I come across so many people both in and out of the church that are trapped by their fears.
They fear loss, pain, failure, rejection, limitation, illness. One example may suffice. I have friends in jobs they put up with just to pay the mortgage
They have dreams, but these are put on hold because they fear the consequences of leaving the security of a monthly pay cheque.
The majority of heart attacks in the Western World are between 0500 and 0900 on a Monday Morning. Why? Because people are going to jobs they hate.
Many of us have been committing spiritual suicide. Because of these fears they are spiritually dead. They are the living dead.
Christ says that he came to bring life in all its abundance, without limitation.
Would Jesus say to you in your area of fear “let the dead bury the dead and come follow me to become who I designed you to be”

A paradigm is a way of framing one’s existence. Within Christianity today there are many, but I want to highlight one and contrast it with my own paradigm.

The paradigm is the belief system, that all we need to do is pray more, intercede for our cities and nation, gather together more, be more authentic and relevant in our Christian lives and that the signs of the times are showing that Christ is on the way.

My paradigm is that we are stopping God do what God wants to do. I have to quickly say that God of course is sovereign and God will do whatever God wants to do. But although God is sovereign, God allows us to choose whether we serve. Thus for the children of Israel God’s plan A was the Promised Land but the Israelites chose the Wilderness. They delayed God doing wanted God wanted to do for a generation.

What was the problem with the Israelites then, and the paradigm of, “all we need is to pray more, intercede for our cities and nation, gather together more”….In my opinion they both don’t diagnose the real problem. Prescription before diagnosis causes malpractice.

The real problem in my paradigm is that God’s people had and have allowed unbelief with its symptoms of fear and worry to become socially acceptable. In other words God says to the children of Israel go into the promised land and they said the people are giants, God says today go and make disciples, we say we are afraid that they might reject us, or that what we have to offer is not authentic enough. We cannot see our own ubelief/sin and so we are locked in a shame fear control cycle.

At it is heart, shame is abandoning God and we become afraid that people might find out, so we control the situation by keeping busy. The children of Israel walked in circles and we today walk in initiative after prophecy, after intercession, after festival after major prayer meeting. This is not a criticism of any of those activities merely to say it is ….

The sin of unbelief, which keeps God’s people from finding their true identity in my paradigm is the problem. This is delaying God. We have put the cart before the horse. By emphasising the activities of Christianity, prayer, intercession, prophecy, unity and evangelism we miss the point. We need to search out everything that is blocking our relationship with God, sins of commission and sins of omission, confess and turn in the opposite direction. That’s the paradigm I believe God has led me to at the moment. I don’t say it is perfect, but I have seen once you tackle unbelief ordinary miracles start to occur.

Passive Hope
Snow White sings Someday my Prince will come in the classic Disney song in the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Hope is an important ingredient in the Christian Church. The verse in Romans that springs to mind is that And we know that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
But there is another hope that I detect in the church today.
That is Passive hope. Some would argue that hope is indeed passive.
I prefer to think that Hope is the emotion of Vision. Is Vision ever passive?….Hope and Vision inspire us.
To inspire is to have the spirit move within us. Hope is an inner movement,
a means of flowing from one emotional state to another, from a state of fear and despair to one of the possibility of desirable change. But I sense today that Passive hope has taken hold
There is an inactivity which is supported by the thought that God will do what God wants to do, so it doesn’t really need me
In its worst form it is apathy. Hope should spur us on, not keep us seated waiting on God.
As the bible says in Proverbs 13:12 Hope long delayed makes the heart sick. Passive hope is an illness that needs to be diagnosed within all of us and a prescription of active hope taken several times a day

I have flown 16 times in the last month and perhaps I have memorised the security instructions given at the beginning of a flight. “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping someone else” has discipleship implications for the leader of the church. I haven’t met many church leaders who don’t want to see their churches grow numerically and spiritually. Leaders are often however struggling to understand how to unlock numerical and spiritual growth. Within the safety instructions given on a flight holds a key. “You have to access the oxygen first before helping others. In other words, we have to attend to our own spiritual development before we can help others. I am sorry to say that our congregations are often a spiritual reflection of where we are in our relationship with God. How much change are you as a leader prepared to embrace in your own walk with God. Work on your own relationship with God and you will start to see ordinary miracles in your congregation

I have been staying with a wonderful couple in Papakura It is situated strategically 32km south of Auckland city The council promote the place in this way “Papakura is in the unique position of being bordered on its north side by the greater Auckland suburbs, and on the south by some of the most striking countryside within New Zealand.” Just been to church in Papakura. I have the privilege of visiting church communities around the world and invariably the church community itself does not know how good it is.
We often feel we have nothing to offer. But we have fellowship leading to community, an act of worship which helps us praise our Creator and be thankful, in some churches we have the opportunity to be discipled, which leads to people discovering who they are in Chirst, and we have mission leading to working with all God’s people, whether they are with us yet or not. We need to promote what God is doing among us as well as a local Council promotes its area

I didn’t want to say no for them, came from a young woman who had invited her friends to a church event. I have found in the Seminars that I conduct around the world, that we often do the deciding for our friends as to whether we will invite them. We think, will my friend want to be invited to church and we conclude no. So we save them the bother of say no to a question we don’t really want to ask them. Who is God asking you to invite?

Are you not getting the desired results in your life/job/ministry? Do you tend to blame others for our current state of affairs? I used to blame others, in fact I sometimes still do, but I found that it didn’t really do me any good. It kept me from the reality that I am often the cause of my circumstances. This is hard for us to take that we are responsible, it is much easier to blame others. But the great news is that for the Christian we have something called confession and repentance. An opportunity to say the things we have done wrong and then turn in the opposite direction and change. For things to change we must change. To become more than we are we must work more on ourselves than on our job/ministry and then our results will change!