Peter’s was the kind of parish that someone would do well to join. Not for our sake, but for theirs. I wanted my church home to be a place where I could confidently invite one of my friends without any embarrassment, apology, or caveat. And so we spent a great deal of energy focusing our vision for parish life into a reasonable, healthy pattern into which we could all feel comfortable inviting a friend. That took a lot of work. It required asking many of the same questions that church planters ask. We can’t do everything, so what are we being called to do and be in our context? How are we going to do that, practically speaking? What plan of action will actually accomplish the goal of seeing this vision come to life? We answered those questions together, and the result was a vision that we could articulate to newcomers and be excited about inviting them to participate in. At the end of that season of self-examination and reprogramming, St. Peter’s was in a far healthier place, and some of my excuses for not thinking about church growth had diminished significantly. I had said all along that heathy things grow: if we focused on church health, we could expect growth to come naturally. But now that St. Peter’s was in a place of relative health (always relative! there is always room for even greater health) it seemed natural to ask how we might begin more deliberately to invite new people to join us. And so we developed the six-month initiative that I was invited to share about here. I was extremely hesitant to share at all, because what we did seems so simple. We have no special programs to offer and certainly no silver bullet for church growth. Rest assured, St. Peter’s has not tripled in size in the past six months! But we were able to connect with a number of new individuals and families with whom we likely would not have had contact were it not for the intentional decision to try something. We added nothing new to what we do as a parish. Which means that we stuck to doing the three things we do: upward
worship and Christian education on Sunday mornings; inward growth in the context of weekday small groups; and outward mission in the form of organized service projects. We simply turned these three things into deliberate opportunities for parishioners comfortably to invite their friends. We had a series of “Visitors’ Sundays” that were specifically tailored to be appropriate for newcomers. I shared a handout of practical pointers for parishioners nervous about inviting someone to church. And, as a huge blessing, we had a number of folks from Grace Anglican Church in Slippery Rock agree to join us at St. Peter’s on these Sundays. These ‘missionary’ visitors from Slippery Rock bolstered our attendance, making for an especially positive environment for visitors, and they also provided helpful feedback about what it is like to come to St. Peter’s as a visitor. One doesn’t often have the opportunity to survey visitors about their experience visiting a church. We also encouraged the children of our parish to make a special effort to invite their friends to join them for Sunday School at St. Peter’s on these visitors’ days.
“I truly did think it best for St. Peter’s to focus on church health before church growth.”
Rev. Andrew DeFusco
As we invited the whole parish to sign up for a weekday small group this year, we asked that everyone try to think of one other person from outside the parish to bring with them to small group. Sadly, many folks without a church home work regularly on Sundays and would never be able to attend a Visitors’ Sunday. But a Wednesday night small group with dinner and a simple time of Evening Prayer is sometimes far more doable. While small groups in some places tend to be intense times of Bible study or intimate prayer, we have deliberately tried to shape
our small groups into spaces open to new people, which has meant giving up a certain level of exclusive intimacy for the sake of inclusive hospitality. In addition to these lay-led small groups, I also led an 8-week Bible study covering the basics of the Christian gospel, requiring every member of St. Peter’s who signed up to bring one non-member along with them. The last thing we did as part of this initiative was to turn our service projects into deliberate invitation opportunities. We normally organize at least one outreach project each quarter, and we intentionally keep the projects eclectic. But for this season we settled on simply providing free meals for anyone hungry in the Butler community. On the last Sunday of each month we fed about 100 people and made contact with many folks we would otherwise never have met. In addition to the folks from the community who came for the meal, we also invited unchurched friends from outside the parish to help prepare and serve the meal. Many people who would never cross the threshold of a church door for worship will gladly cross that threshold for community service, so we used these outreach projects as occasions to introduce new people to the community of St. Peter’s outside the sometimes intimidating experience of a Sunday morning worship service or a weekday prayer group. Our efforts were not overly complex or drastic. Not everything we tried worked. And during this season we welcomed several newcomers who came to St. Peter’s through no effort of ours whatsoever. As we all know, the whole life of the church depends on the activity of the Holy Spirit, and thankfully that is not something any of us can control. I didn’t expect this initiative to have especially dramatic results. My real hope was that this season of explicitly focusing on church growth would begin to help us at St. Peter’s to reimagine our whole pattern of life together as a complex of opportunities to invite people to encounter the mercy of God in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. And I think I can say that by God’s grace that reimagining has begun. n
Pentecost 2015
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