Monday, January 4, 2021

Church thoughts ~

My wife invited our neighbor who is been going through a lot to church. He is a guy who suffers from depression and had medications but decided to go off of those medications and use marijuana instead. This culminated in an intervention with his wife, his son, several of his sons very large and muscular friends, a police officer, and an ambulance and fire truck on standby at the entrance to our neighborhood. His wife left him and moved back to her mother's house. And the kids don't come by anymore.

My wife told me that he admitted that there was a problem and that he had let his truck become too much of a problem. He was always washing it and taking care of it and polishing and doing all sorts of things to it. Same thing with his boat. And apparently the drugs and the focus on the wrong things caused him to get into trouble.

He declined her invitation saying that he didn't really want to go.

When she told me about this I had a thought. One of the things that churches have been doing is changing their model and approach. We now have churches that talk about their online campus and do live streams of their services whenever their services are. We have churches who are building libraries of messages in both audio and video format. We have all sorts of online learning that people have at their fingertips.

So why do we have to invite people to church anymore? Why don't we take the church to them? As a small groups coach and small group leader I found it very interesting to bring the church to the people where they're at. Our online group has about 20 people in it that we keep in touch with and do things with. And it's turned out very nice.

But I keep thinking about how we need to take the church to the people. Eventually they'll come in and want to know more and get to know more people and hopefully get involved. But I really think that since the church is ice and the building is just a place where we can gather that as we have more cocooning and staying at home to focus on family and that sort of thing we should probably adapt and instead of inviting them to church invite them to watch something. And go in and stream it with them. And then answer questions and say we'd love for you to watch more and even come and get involved if and when you're ready. Because God has a plan for your life.

I need to bounce this off of some people and see what they think.