{"id":197,"date":"2009-12-16T06:30:15","date_gmt":"2009-12-16T14:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.deserthillspc.org\/?p=197"},"modified":"2009-12-16T06:30:15","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T14:30:15","slug":"how-to-invite-people-to-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/16\/how-to-invite-people-to-church\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Invite People to Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jon Acuff hits the nail on the head again, with this post about <a href=\"http:\/\/stuffchristianslike.net\/2009\/12\/inviting-people-to-church\/\">how to invite people to church<\/a>. &#8220;It&#8217;s funny because it&#8217;s true.&#8221; (Acuff&#8217;s Stuff Christians Like is worth bookmarking. I&#8217;ve been reading it for about two years, which is almost in dog or internet years. Once, I even quoted from &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/stuffchristianslike.net\/2008\/08\/373-the-prayer-ninja\/\">The Prayer Ninja<\/a>&#8221; in a sermon.)<\/p>\n<p>Why is it we have so much difficulty inviting other people to church? I can think of two reasons. The first is that we really don&#8217;t care all that much ourselves. People don&#8217;t usually have much trouble expressing their opinions about things they care about, whether they&#8217;re books or TV shows or movies or restaurants or politics. Is our problem that we don&#8217;t really <em>care<\/em> anymore?<\/p>\n<p>Look at Timothy. Either <a href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=127971918\">he lost his passion<\/a>, or Paul was concerned he might. It wasn&#8217;t a question of faith &#8212; Paul wasn&#8217;t worried about that. What concerned Paul was <em>passion<\/em>: &#8220;rekindle the gift of God that is within you &#8230; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice.&#8221; For another example, look at what Jesus said <a href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=127972117\">to the church in Ephesus<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that might make us hesitate to invite someone is how our church treats visitors. I&#8217;ll talk about that in my next post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jon Acuff hits the nail on the head again, with this post about how to invite people to church. &#8220;It&#8217;s funny because it&#8217;s true.&#8221; (Acuff&#8217;s Stuff Christians Like is worth bookmarking. I&#8217;ve been reading it for about two years, which is almost in dog or internet years. Once, I even quoted from &#8220;The Prayer Ninja&#8221; &hellip; <span class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/16\/how-to-invite-people-to-church\/\">Continue reading &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[5,8,21,24,34],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living","tag-apologetics","tag-bible","tag-evangelism","tag-funny","tag-mission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}