A Culture Of Invitation
Shared at Small Group Leader’s Training & Nurture evening of 8th January 2024
Our sense of mission is to make disciples of as many of the 1 million people who live in driving distance of CV as we can:
We see discipleship as drawing people down into the place where they are actually learning to follow Jesus, to be in community with others and to worship him. For us, therefore, the core is those people who are in small groups and we don't believe people can really be disciples unless they are in these discipleship groups
Some people - in fact many in our church - have moved from the community through into the crowd, into the congregation and then into discipleship groups because they wanted to. They self-served through finding our website, and then they wanted to come to a service so they did and they wanted to join a small group so they contacted a small group leader and said can I come and there they were.
This is a great part of us making disciples and we can make that happen more often through two things; through praying that God would send us more people who want to join our groups and two through us being obvious - for it being really easy for people to find our groups and for them to look attractive and easy for them to join.
So in 10 days of contending for awakening, you should pray that God will send more people to your group; that more people will want to come and will ask you if they can come
And you should also have a check of how your group looks on the website and make it look nice. People like to come to things that look nice.
But there is another way that people come into small groups which isn't just because they asked to come - it is because we invited them. Our sense is that as a church we maybe haven't been as strong on simply inviting people in the community into the crowd and people in the crowd into the congregation and people in the congregation into our discipleship groups. Our guess is that there might be 500 people who have been to a Sunday service at CV in the last 6 months and probably about 300 of them have not been personally and warmly invited by someone into a small group.
Now the great thing about inviting is, it is quite easy to do when you think of it. Nobody dies if you do it badly and the worst thing that can happen is that the person says "no thank you" and then you feel a bit awkward for a second and then talk about something else.
And so we want to encourage all of us to think about simply giving people more invites into things, particularly as leaders into our small groups.