In This Issue:
Their Visit is a Gift
Theology Via Text
Their Visit is a Gift
It is a gift when someone visits your church for the first time. They have chosen to invest a portion of their time to come to church. They may have been involved in church for the last fifty years or perhaps they have not been inside a church for fifteen years. Either way they are taking some risks to visit – will I/we fit in, was the service time on the website correct, will they make us stand up and introduce ourselves, will we be treated as outsiders, will it be worth our time, etc.
As their visit is a gift, think about how we usually teach our kids to treat gifts:
- Remember to say thank you
- Be careful with the gift
- Recognize you did not receive it because you deserved it
- Be aware that how you treat the gift will be viewed as how you feel about the gift-giverThere is more to reaching new people than great hospitality but most of the rapidly growing churches have made this an area of emphasis.
Someone sent me a text this morning asking a fairly complex theological question. As we exchanged a few messages I began to think of what it meant that we were having this conversation via text. I had more characters to respond than if we were using Twitter but there is still a reasonable limit to the size of a text message one wants to compose (and read).
Theology books often go on and on, page after page, detailed argument after detailed argument. The words can be dense and the concepts abstract. There is a place for them and I am (usually) thankful for the ones I have had to read and have chosen to read. When many people ask questions today, however, they typically do not want to be directed to read 250 pages by a well-known theologian. Instead they want to hear a relatively brief answer which covers the basics. They can ask follow-up questions and re-engage the conversation many times in the context of a relationship.
It would be helpful if everyone in the church had a similar text-sized response to questions such as these:
- What kind of church are you?
- What does your church believe?
- What does it mean to be a Christian?
- Who is allowed to attend your church?
- What does it mean to be Methodist/Wesleyan/Pentecostal/etc. (fill in the blank for your church group)?
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