Weekly Theme July 27 through August 2

Extend an Invitation

 “For where two or three gather in my name,

there am I with them.”

Matthew  18:20

             

This idea of invitation when it comes to the church is very interesting.  Did you know that a study was done in the United Methodist Church and it was discovered that people in our

denomination extend an invitation to someone to come to worship, on average, once every thirty-eight years.  Really!  I’m not kidding.  No wonder we have lost several million members over the past fifty years.  We aren’t inviting anybody to come and experience the grace and love of Jesus Christ through the ministry of our churches.

Maybe you can relate to this. Some of you are just afraid to extend an invitation to someone else to come and experience a worship service.  One of the reasons we are scared to extend an invitation is because we might get a response from the one we have invited that goes something like this: “Thank you for inviting me to come to worship.  But WHY should I come with you to worship?  Why do you go to worship?”  We then fumble and stumble around and we realize we have no answer. If we regularly share our faith in our small groups then it provides us the competence and confidence to share our faith and to answer other people’s questions honestly.  If someone practices sharing their faith in a small group, that person is much more likely to invite someone to come to worship with them.

Part of the reason we would struggle to answer this is we do not often think, “Why do I worship?” So this week, we will look at scriptures that  help us begin to think about why we

worship and what worship means to each of us.