Why should I invite my friends to church? Because they need it and so do you.

We have been answering questions regarding the church, lately.  And so we are reminded that our friends should be invited to come to church with us.  But you may wonder why you should bother to invite them.  Well, here are some very good reasons.

Jesus left us here for the purpose of bringing others to Christ.  If he did not want us to have an influence on others for the sake of bringing them to Christ, he would have taken us out of the world as soon as we had gotten saved.  Yet we are here doing his work, while he is bodily seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven [Jn 17:15, 18, 20-21; Phil 2:15; 1 Cor 5:9-10].

Inviting your friends to church keeps the church from turning in on itself and forming so many cliques.  There is a propensity in any social group for the members to become so closely linked that they begin to act like they don’t want anyone else to join.  That may not be the way you feel about your friendships in the church but that is the way you act.  When you are at church you greet your friends and often don’t notice a visitor.

Inviting your friends to church is one of the best ways for them to come to Christ.  The Holy Spirit works very powerfully when the gospel is preached in church.  People are praying, the pastor is well prepared, the Spirit has liberty and the visitor senses the responsiveness of others to the message.  Your friend is in a place where there are few, if any, distractions during the preaching so that the Spirit has his undivided attention.

A healthy church is a reproducing church.  When you see the church in the Acts of the Apostles, it is multiplying and increasing [Acts 2:42, 4:4, 5:14, etc.].  Today, unless you are part of the mega church movement, you don’t see growth like that.  The reason is simple; people are not out telling others about Christ.  They are preoccupied with the world.  A friend of ours challenged his fellow church members to get up a crowd in their Sunday evening service by inviting their friends and neighbors to church.  They scoffed him.  Nevertheless, he spent his entire week telling others to come to his church on the following Sunday evening.  He had over 100 visitors by himself!

When your friends get saved, they are going to be already connected to a body of believers.  I believe in personal evangelism.  But one of the drawbacks is that when a person gets saved in his home, he is more inclined to believe that’s all the Lord expects of him.  And so he can be rather hard to get to church.  And, of course, if he doesn’t come to church he is not going to grow much as a Christian.  He needs to learn to pray for others, to give to the Lord’s work, to study the Bible, and to tell others about Jesus.  He’s not going to do that sitting at home.

When your friends get saved and start coming to church with you, you are more likely to center your activities around the church rather than in the world.  This will help to keep you from having one foot in the world and one in the church.  Christians are often plagued by living two lives.  They live one around the church where they learn to act pious and they live the other among their friends in the world where they are worldly.  Thus they live the life of a hypocrite.  There is not a more miserable life as a Christian and living like this will undoubtedly draw you right out of the church at some point in time.

Inviting your friends to church will be an encouragement to them.  Your friends will have friends that they can invite, as well.  And so you and your friends will be responsible for bringing souls to Christ and new members to the church.  After all, it is from the new members that your pastor will be able to expand the work of your church’s ministry.  Who knows, one of your friends may ultimately become a pastor or a missionary one of these days!!

Hope this helps,

Pastor Bevans Welder

 

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