It’s ‘Back to Church Sunday’ on 26 September – an initiative that aims to get those of us who are regulars in Sunday services to invite a friend who has not been to ‘church’ for a while to return to the fold. On the face of it, it’s an excellent idea.

I was present at a congregation yesterday where one of the resources prepared for the initiative was handed out to the regulars and there is no doubting the genuine heart behind the scheme. I was also impressed by the particular resource that was distributed. It’s a small, well designed card, folded in two: one section has a prayer for the church regular to pray for their invitee and the second is the invitation itself. The prayer centres on God’s desire to invite all to come to him and to be accepted by him. That the whole thing is available in the Welsh language is also brilliant as this is essential to the many hundreds of small Welsh-speaking congregations up and down the country. So in many different ways this is an excellent plan.

I’m guessing you can hear the ‘but’ coming, though! Because I do have a couple of concerns about it, both of which if we truly tackled we may have less need for such an initiative in the first place.

The first is this idea – deeply entrenched in our Western European religious conscious – that we ‘go to church’ in contrast to the biblical view of us ‘being church’. We are the body of Jesus here on earth every single day of our life. Everything we do, we do as the body of Jesus. It is correct that a part of that being does involve us meeting other followers, more often than not on a Sunday morning, to worship, fellowship, and be taught – but that congregational aspect is still us being church rather than going there. This idea is one that desperately needs challenging and the BTCS initiative seems to do the opposite.

The second concern I have I am best able to express by asking a question. Why do we think that our non ‘church’ friends would be drawn to our services by reading a printed invitation card when they haven’t shown much interest after reading our Christ centred character? It may be an unpalatable truth, but truth it still is that in our lives we present all we meet with an invite card to consider Jesus and the Christian faith.

Such initiatives are not bad in themselves; indeed they can produce much good fruit. But we do need to be careful that they are not a poor substitute to living the life that Jesus calls us to live.

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