How To Write A Personal Invitation (Or Say One If Necessary)

-we need to do our best to give the right information and the right level of excitement. One without the other doesn’t do much. [LOUD, EXCITED] “Next week is our Back To School Bash, it’s fun.” Okay, what does “fun” mean? Where is it? When? [BLAH TONE] Next week at 6:00 our church is having a Back To School Bash, there will be all sorts of games and we’re raffling off prizes, you can win a new iPod and someone will get pied in the face. Soo much fun. Yay.”

-balance. Both. But after you’ve figured out the information, you have to actually give an invitation.

2. INVITATION

-I’m not sure if you noticed, but the examples I gave a second ago, at no point did I actually invite you to the Bash. I was excited about it, I gave the information about it, but at no point did I actually say, “Would you like to come with me?” There was no invitation.

-just because you say information near someone does not mean you have actually invited me. Last week after Sunday some people went to Steak & Shake. And they all stood here in this room right in front of me talking about going over to get food, and that was it. It wasn’t until they were about to leave Kristin looked at me and said, “Hey, you can come if you want.” then suddenly the others there were inviting me. See, at no point was I actually invited until they actually invited me.

-and churches, we suck at this. We like to give out information. Here’s a flyer with our service times on it. Or we might go the extra mile and actually print on the flyer, “You’re invited.” Tell me, honestly, if you were to get a flyer in the mail from a church you didn’t know, would you feel special and like they wanted you to be there because you read “You’re invited” on the flyer?

-nothing beats a real, genuine, personal invitation. You can send out all the flyers you want, nothing is as good as someone personally inviting you somewhere.

-there’s a group that did a study on this, some of you have heard me quote it, simply because they interviewed six million people (that’s 2% of the US) who do not go to church and asked them what it would take to get them to church. 2% said they would visit a church based on a flyer. 90%, 5.4 million people said they would go to church if someone personally invited them and would go with them.

-to put it another way, this study found 5.4 million people who are waiting for someone to invite them to church. So why aren’t we?

-or, how many times are we saying what we think is the right thing, telling them all the right information, but not actually inviting them?

-but notice there was a little bit more to the invitation for all these millions of people. They didn’t want to simply be invited to church, they wanted someone to go with them.

3. BE WITH THEM

-have you ever been somewhere you’ve never been before and the friend who invited you ditched you? Isn’t that the worst feeling in the world, you just feel stupid?