Epiphany 5, Year C

To begin today’s sermon, we’re going to watch this two-minute video:

https://skitguys.com/videos/awkward-invites-goulash

I love this video.  It illustrates in such a funny and relatable way the way our fears about it being So Awkward to invite someone to church are really just figments of our imagination.  In reality, it can be as easy as inviting someone over for goulash.  And there are plenty of people who would go to church if someone invited them.

The British author and speaker Michael Harvey led a conference I went to in the Diocese of Virginia.  He pointed out that if each person in the congregation invites one friend to church, and they accept, our congregation would double in one week.  But his emphasis was on saying that success is one person inviting one person, whether or not the person accepts.  In fact, he said that inviting the person is our responsibility, and how the person responds is God’s responsibility.  All the heavy lifting here is God’s.

One of the things he did was put a big piece of newsprint on an easel and ask us to list reasons churchgoers don’t invite their friends to church.  We all called out answers and he wrote them down.  They turned out to be the same reasons as the ones other people have been giving him, which are listed in his book, Unlocking the Growth.  Then he said that in the end the reasons for not inviting friends to church all come down to the same thing: fear of rejection.  I looked over our list, and he was right.

A lot of his talks, and a lot of his book, are to help us through this fear of rejection.  It seemed like pretty sound advice.  I thought of plenty of times when I’ve gone right past an opportunity to invite someone to church.  But I have to admit that as I was listening to him I kept thinking, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what am I so afraid of?  If we invite someone to church and they decline, we will not be devastated forever.  Life goes on.  We can handle it.”  And I realized that this is the way fear usually works.  We are so afraid that it might go badly that the fear paralyzes us, but when we finally step out of our comfort zone, then we think, “Pff, that was no big deal.  What was I so worried about?”  So I got a renewed sense of “We can do this.”  Starting with myself, I can start inviting people to come to church more often, and if I feel a twinge of that old familiar fear of rejection I can remind myself to be a big girl and just get over it.  It’ll be fine.  And the people of St. John’s can do this too.  You are brave souls here.

Our fear of rejection is probably way out of proportion anyway, because normally people like being invited to things.  We’ve all gone to things we wouldn’t normally have attended because a friend invited us.  If my friend says she has two tickets to a concert of Mongolian folk songs and invites me to go to it with her, even though I hadn’t been thinking “I’d like to go hear Mongolian folk songs sometime” I’d probably go simply because my friend asked me, and discover that Mongolian folk songs are actually really nice.

When you invite your friends to church, you don’t have to buy any tickets, you don’t have to cook anything, and you don’t even have to clean your house!  It just keeps getting better!

Michael Harvey explained that some people have told him they don’t know how to go about asking someone to church, and so he gives training sessions.  He says, here’s what the training session is: you say, “Would…you…like…to….go…to…church…with…me?”  That’s it.  It is that simple.

Inviting people to church is also the easiest form of evangelism there is, because you don’t have to come up with a way to articulate your theology or your spiritual life all by yourself.  You invite someone to an environment in which we all do that together as a group, and we do it in a variety of different ways: through singing, through prayer, through sermons, through service to our neighbours, through sacraments, through confession and forgiveness, through generosity, through relationships of loving God and loving one another.

When we think of fishing, what sometimes comes to mind is the way people fish in Bowmanville creek, where a person has a fishing rod and a line with bait on it, which you hope a fish will bite.  That is not the kind of fishing we get in today’s gospel passage.  Luke shows us fishing as a group activity, in which people are together in a boat.  Together they let down their nets, and together they pull the nets up.  It is too much for anyone to do alone.  And not only that, the people in each boat also have partners in another boat who come to help them when they need help.  Jesus is talking to Simon when he says, “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching people.”  But Simon becomes part of the group of Jesus’ disciples, and in catching people he functions very much as a member of that group.  In inviting someone to church, we are, in effect, inviting them to become one of Jesus’ disciples along with us.  The rest of the congregation is part of the process of welcoming, supporting, and encouraging that discipleship, as the newcomer explores what form that might take.

I was talking a couple weeks ago to parishioner at St. John’s.  She said that when she gets up on a Sunday morning it is sometimes hard to motivate herself to get out of the house to get to church, but every time she gets to church she is glad she did.  She feels better than she did before.  I like the simplicity of that.  I could clearly see the authenticity of that, and I expect if she said it to someone else they could see the authenticity of it too.  It is also a reminder of why we invite people to church.  If St. John’s has a positive effect on you, it is likely to have a positive effect on others who attend.  If it strengthens and encourages you in your faith, it is likely to strengthen and encourage others in their faith.  If you hear things in sermons that stick with you and are meaningful in your life, it is likely others will too.  If you feel weighed down by the greed and hostility in the world, and are glad to have a place to lift your attention to the incredible self-giving love of Christ and his merciful care for each beloved child of God, it is likely others will too. If St. John’s helps you to know Christ more fully, it is likely to help others to know Christ more fully too.  If it inspires you to want to love your neighbours more and to love God more, it’s likely to inspire others too.  We are not perfect here, but there is so much good here, and it is good to be reminded not to take it for granted.  Each week we have a feast of things others are starving for.

The video we saw at the beginning of the sermon is one that I saw for the first time when a bunch of us from St. John’s went to Toronto for a workshop with Mary Foster Parmer on the program Invite, Welcome, Connect.  She also showed us another video, of a man in another workshop in which she’d showed the goulash video.  The man said that he’d been active in his church for years and really liked it.  But when he saw the video, it reminded him of a conversation he’d had with a friend the week before.  He was telling the friend about a special service of Lessons and Carols at his church, which his daughter was singing in.  He mentioned that his friend was interested and even asked a few questions.  And he said, with some embarrassment, “Did I invite him to come to the service?  No, I didn’t.”  I got the impression that it simply hadn’t occurred to him.

I expect that happens a lot.  I admired this guy’s courage in admitting it, and in giving Mary Foster Parmer permission to share the little video of him talking about it.  So today’s sermon is a reminder to learn from his mistakes, so that it will occur to you.  Even better than relying simply on your memory, when you pray, pray that God will guide you toward opportunities to invite someone to church.   It can easily turn out to be the best and most life-changing thing you do all week.  It can easily turn out to be God at work in the people around you and God at work in you.