[this is part of the series “A.P.E. in the Movies” read the other post here]
This is a post by Luke Cawley
Kevin Costner. It turns out he lied to me.
I’d come to trust him as he busted Al Capone in The Untouchables, exposed the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy in JFK, and wooed Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. So it was natural for me to keep trusting him when I watched Field of Dreams. I was just a teenager when I first saw it. And I must have watched it over a dozen times.
If you’ve never seen the movie, Kevin Costner hears a voice whispering in his ear that “if you build it, they will come”. He takes this to mean that he must build a baseball field on his farm and that people will come and visit as a result. He obeys the voice, adventures ensue, he reconnects with the ghost of his father. Normal everyday stuff. The film ends with streams of cars driving towards his baseball field. He built it and they are coming.
Don’t Listen to Kevin When Building a Church
A lovely movie which, when applied to church, is extremely unhelpful.
Many people seem to want to create churches on the “if you build it, they will come” principle. The assumption is there that if we can get ‘the event’ just right then the people will just stream in to enjoy it.
Many churches which call themselves ‘missional’ work at perfecting ‘the community’ rather than ‘the event’. But they are doing the same basic thing: They are building so that others will come.
This, though, is a spectacularly messed-up perception of what drives church growth. My recent experience bears this out.
Launching a New Missional Community
For the past few months I’ve been part of a team launching a new missional community in central Oxford. We meet each week in the upstairs rooms of a popular cafe for a relaxed interaction with one another, scripture and God.
We’ve seen a slow trickle of people come along who don’t know Jesus.
At our last gathering, though, we had a big leap in the number of outsiders joining us. Half of the people present were newcomers.
What was our secret?
Well, it wasn’t that we have it down in terms of deep community or quality of our Sunday event. Both of those are still quite raw. The amazing thing which brought people in was this: We invited people.
We went out on the streets of Oxford and some of us sang Christmas carols while others chatted with people and gave out some leaflets.
I’d love to pretend we were more radical than that, but I’d be misleading you. It wasn’t ‘building it’ which cause people to come – it was invitations.
A mentor of mine said to me recently that many Christians seem too busy reinventing church to actually do any outreach. I think he’s right. There’s a real danger that we focus on the quality of our community and our events to exclusion of the rather essential business of actually asking people to come and be a part of that community and those events. We do need to get our own house in order, for sure, but we also need to invite guests into that house.
So don’t listen to Kevin Costner. If you invite them they will come.
What would an effective invitation look like in your context?
[this is part of the series “A.P.E. in the Movies” read the other post here]
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