A Season of Invitation

This Sunday is “Back to Church Sunday.” It’s the Sunday that we’ve identified as the
day to invite someone to come back to church. It is your chance to speak to someone
about church. It might be your neighbour, or your milkman, or someone you remember
who, pre-COVID used to sit in the church in front of you. And you call them on the
telephone and say, “Hey, I’m going to church this Sunday at 10 and it’s Back to Church
Sunday and I thought of you. Can I meet you there? Or could I pick you up?”

Or you could go to your next door neighbour and say, “Hello there. It’s Back to Church
Sunday and I wanted to invite you to come to the church I go to. The service is this
Sunday and it starts at 10.” Don’t be surprised if they respond by saying, “Because its
you and you are my favourite neighbour, I will!”

Statistics show that 90% of people don’t go to church because they have never been
invited. You know Jesus invited people to become “Fishers of People” and that means
we are all called to invite people to come to church with us.

Don’t worry about their response. Don’t think, “What if they say ‘no.’ ” How they answer
is not your responsibility. Your job is to invite someone to come to church; to be
invitational. During this Season of Invitation you have lots of different services to invite
people to.

This week it’s ‘Back to Church Sunday’, next week (September 25) it's “The
Blessing of the Animals” as we bring our pets to church to receive God’s blessing. The
next Sunday October 2nd you could invite them to celebrate St Michael's Day. Michael
is the greatest of all the Archangels. The Angels are God’s messengers and to many
people they seem less frightening than God. And the following weekend it’s the ever
popular Harvest Thankgiving long weekend. We are celebrating all the ways we who live here are blessed by God’s bounty. 

God is love. And we could all use a bit more love in our lives. There are a lot of
opportunities to invite a friend to church during this season of invitation and ‘Back to
Church Sunday is one of them. Perhaps it is even more relevant this year as so many
people have been away because of COVID. This could be the invitation they have been
waiting for.

I will be praying for you.

Howard