Bob offers Beard as gift and challenge
Following our current round of Unbinding the Gospel meet-ings, a week ago Sunday I put forth a challenge to the FCC worshipping community. It was a challenge that contained both a gimmick and a gift. The gimmick is that if all of you together invite enough people to have 250 in worship on Christmas Sunday, December 20, I will shave off my beard of 31 years. That means that every person currently attend-ing will have to invite about 2.6 people (how you work out in-viting .6 of a person is your concern). The purpose of this proposal: it’s weird enough, perhaps, to be an encouragement for you to invite folks to church. The gift is that, as well, if we have 250 in worship on December 20, I will donate $300 to regional ministry.
Why am I doing this, you may ask? Martha Grace Reese, in her viewpoints on evangelism, says that the first people to whom a church needs to evan-gelize are those closest to us, family and friends. Tex Sam-ple, a leading Disciples scholar, in his book U.S. Lifestyles and Mainline Churches found in his demographic studies that fun-damentalist churches grow be-cause they hold on to their family base; as the families grow and add children, they tend to stay with their church community.He also found that with main
- Pastor Bob Brite.
line churches, the opposite is true: We don’t hold onto our families, and therefore, we are shrinking. If we can start by reclaiming our community base – the families and friends around us, then we have the opportunity to rebuild the community by adding new folk
s through a second worship service and other efforts.
I like my beard. And if you get 250 folks in church on Dec. 20, I’ll shave it off that morning, but it probably won’t stay off. Nevertheless, it’s a sacrifice for me to offer up my beard for the FCC cause. I’m encouraging you to sacrifice, to risk your-selves a bit, to help grow the body of Christ, and I’ve tried to give you an easy, somewhat wacky way to do so. How about it, folks?
I’d like to see YOU (and 2.6 or more of your family/friends) on any Sunday!
Bob
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