Any Given Sunday
ANY GIVEN SUNDAY!
WHAT IS THE BEST EVANGELISTIC EVENT TO BRING PEOPLE TO?
What if the best, most effective, evangelistic event we could come up with is actually right under our noses?! As it turns out, the best, most effective, evangelistic event is one that we are currently running 104 times a year. We do it twice, every week. It’s our Sunday services.
We have seen, as a church, a number of people coming along to Sunday services with very little Christian background, or none at all, and they have come back and kept coming. Several have since come to faith and become members of the church.
According to recent survey in the UK, most people who come to faith as adults do so through reading the Bible or coming to church (about 25% for each). A similar survey in Australia discovered that for over 60% of adults who became Christians, the first contact they had with Christianity was a normal Sunday service. This ought to encourage us and it ought not to surprise us!
Be encouraged!
We don’t need to wait for the next Life Course to come around if we have a friend who has expressed interest in Jesus. The next event we can bring them along to is only ever a few days away and we know exactly what we’re bringing them to. We may not think of a normal Sunday church service as an evangelistic event, but it is! Both in terms of what is said and what is observed, a Sunday service is a powerful witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. We know that the Bible will be central to all that happens and we know that when His word is preached the Lord IS at work.
Not only will our friends hear the gospel message they will also see the implications of the gospel lived out. When our friends come into a service they will see people from age 0 to 90+. They will see people from all sorts of backgrounds and nationalities. What they are seeing is an imperfect and incomplete foretaste of the eternal people of God. How can that not be striking?!
Don’t be surprised!
Our understanding of church and what is really going on as we gather is perhaps not as sharp as it could be. We get into routines, it becomes normalised and so we don’t really think about what it is we are actually doing as we gather on a Sunday. But when we pause to consider again what the Bible teaches us about what happens when we gather, then we should’t be surprised to (re)discover that it (a normal Sunday service) really is the best place to bring people if we want them to come to know Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
As the Bible is read and as it is preached in a Sunday service, Christ really is in the midst. He really is proclaiming the truth and pressing it home in the hearts of men and women who are there. When we gather together, it is not merely a ‘horizontal’ encounter where we sing to each other and hear another human preaching to us. It is far more than that! We really do encounter the living God. There really is a ‘vertical’ element to the gathering. We are singing to Him and we are praying to Him. When the preacher is preaching, it really is Christ who is speaking. John Calvin wrote that ‘one of the most remarkable [gifts] God has given is that he deigns to consecrate the mouths and tongues of men to His service, making his own voice to be heard in them.’ When God’s word is being proclaimed, Christ is in the midst speaking. It is his voice that is heard and not just a preacher speaking about Christ.
This is the point the apostle Paul makes in Ephesians 2:14-17 “for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one… he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father”. Whilst it was Paul who preached to them, the deeper reality was that it was Jesus himself who was present in their gatherings and who was speaking to them.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Question 89) says that “the Sprit of God makes the reading, but especially the preaching, of the word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation.” Preaching is a supernatural moment where we can expect God to raise spiritually dead people from the grave and into everlasting life. We should not, therefore, be surprised that a normal Sunday service is the best place to bring people if we want them to come to know Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
“The church is the only institution in this world that will never die out and which will last into eternity. Our weekly gatherings are therefore utterly unique and to be treasured.”
How can we make the most of this?
First, we should cultivate a positive attitude towards the regular Sunday service. We can, over time, take it for granted but a normal Sunday service is a wonderful, powerful gathering. The church is the only institution in this world that will never die out and which will last into eternity. Our weekly gatherings are therefore utterly unique and to be treasured. We can find ourselves imagining the sort of objections and issues that not-yet Christian visitors may have with a Sunday service. But in my experience visitors are almost always overwhelmingly positive when they speak about their own experience of church.
If we don’t have a right understanding of the extraordinary gathering of God’s people on a normal Sunday then we’ll not be especially excited or eager to bring others along to come and see for themselves. We must, therefore, cultivate a positive attitude towards our weekly Sunday gatherings and we can do that by purposeful thanksgiving for our regular services. Second, given a right understanding of what is really happening on any given Sunday, we’ll invite people to come along with us. One way we could seek to bring that about is to talk positively about Sunday and church.
Glen Scrivener has a set of four conversation starters which can help you get on to deeper discussions about faith and Jesus. This is one of them: you could begin a conversation with the words “what I love about my church is…”.
Speaking warmly and positively about church will give our friends something to think about and hopefully will intrigue them to want to find out more and come along to see for themselves! What I love about my church is hearing the Bible preached and applied to life. What I love about my church is the warmth and friendship I enjoy with others. What I love about my church is seeing my children interacting with people seven decades their senior. What I love about my church is seeing people weeping together through sorrows and laughing together in joy.
So, speak warmly about church and issue an invite! Let’s not assume how people will respond and the worst they can say is “no thank you”.
Does this mean we aim to be seeker sensitive?
It depends what is meant by the phrase ‘seeker sensitive’! If what is meant is the following then we absolutely should be seeker sensitive: if we are aware that not-yet Christians will be present in our services and that we should be welcoming to them and doing what we can to help them feel at home then we are being, in the right sense, seeker sensitive.
We should seek to speak in such a way as to be understandable to the not-yet Christian visitor, but we’re not aiming at the not-yet Christian. Church is meant to be making disciples of Jesus Christ and so that is to be our goal on a Sunday. As part of that we should always be calling folk to repentance and faith in the expectation that there will be not-yet Christians present.
The wrong sort of seeker sensitive Sunday service aims everything at the not-yet Christian and therefore neglects to build up the Christians. The wrong sort of seeker sensitive would remove anything that might possibly be considered controversial or offensive for the imagined seeker. This sort of seeker sensitive service belies a distrust in the Lord and in his means of grace. So we are not to be seeker sensitive in that sense.
Rather we trust that the seemingly unimpressive and simple gathering of God’s people is the main way in which the Lord draws people to himself. We do it every single week of the year. Any given Sunday. This is our best evangelistic event to which we could ever bring our friends and family along to. Jesus really is in the midst on a Sunday service. People really can hear his voice and find him there. Is it not thrilling to think that salvation can be found on any given Sunday in a normal Sunday service?
Written by Paul Brennan, April 2023
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