I have mentioned to you before that we want to be focusing on coordinating our ministry as a congregation as we live out our profession of faith in our community. We don’t intend to bind anyone’s conscience in any of this, but we do want to urge you, as the Lord leads, to join together with us in certain activities. In short, we want to provide you with opportunities, and to let you know about them. One such opportunity is evangelism. We trust that you have non-believing friends, and we want to provide you with opportunities to invite them to hear the gospel.
The first is our monthly Threshold service, which is a church service for people who are thinking about Christianity. As it happens, that service is this evening. We usually sing a few simple hymns, listen to a testimony, and hear a presentation of the gospel. But in order to have its effect, non-believers need to be there. We invite you to invite them.
A second evangelistic opportunity can be found in the parish Bible studies we have started. There are many non-Christians who would be leery about coming to a church service Sunday morning, but who would accept an invitation to come to your home. Please feel free to invite friends and neighbors to share the community life that we enjoy. It will not be long before they notice the basis of it.
And third, starting today, we are providing child care on Sunday morning for visitors. This is not because we are backing away from our desire to have our covenant children participate in worship with us. It is simply the recognition that this can be a hard thing for outsiders to step into cold. We can’t do evangelism without bringing people along, and this is what this represents.
At the same time, we don’t want all this activity just for the sake of activity. A fisherman is gauged by the fish he catches, and not by all the fishing equipment he buys at Cabela’s. If we labor at this for some period of time, and there are no conversions and no baptisms, then we should save our breath for walking uphill. We will do something else—but that something else will be evangelism. A church aware of its own identity does not do mission. A church is mission.