The Church is known by many names. It is the Body of Christ, the People of God, a community of saints. These are rich and beautiful images. But beneath all of them lies a simple twofold calling: to be disciples of Jesus Christ, and to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Jesus addresses this theme up in Matthew 9.
Jesus is filled with compassion at the sight of many people who seem to him like “sheep without a shepherd.” He knows that they would benefit from becoming part of the Body of Christ. So he does something about it. First, he prays, and his prayer request is, “Pray that the Lord of the harvest will send forth labourers.” Fortunately, he doesn’t sit back and hope that God will miraculously convert these people to his cause. He does something; he acts.
First, he appoints people. Those are already around him. The twelve—the seventy in the equivalent passage in Luke—he commissions those who have already responded and then sends them out “like sheep among wolves.”
How daunted they must have felt. So many lost sheep, so few disciples.
It is easy in this day and age to feel that Church attendance is under threat. Make no mistake: church decline is real, and it is a severe threat to the future of many, many congregations, particularly in the Established churches. Our congregation is not immune from decline. Prophets of Doom and critics of the Church have been pointing to statistics showing declining Church attendance for decades. For some, this is a good thing. For them, the church is bad, so its decline is good and sensible people will join the exodus.
Let’s travel in time.
To see this in a proper context, I want to take you back in time. First, our time journey takes us back to 1834.
As Easter Day approaches, a talented and enthusiastic 24-year-old musician named Samuel Sebastian Wesley prepares for his first solo job as a Cathedral Organist. Wesley comes from a family of respected theologians and hymn writers, including his grandfather Charles, who founded the Methodist Church with his brother John. Wesley faces his first challenge at Hereford Cathedral, where the choir consists of only five people, and the congregation, in a cathedral, was scarcely any bigger. At Easter. He throws himself into improving the musical standards of the church, and his wonderful compositions become popular with singers. As a result, choir attendance grows, and so does the congregation, with the choristers’ families sitting in the nave.
However, church attendance is generally poor throughout the land. The Evangelical revivals of the 18th Century (including those fostered by the elder Wesleys) had run their course. Other revivals lay in the future, but these were limited and largely sectarian, affecting a relatively small geographical area and only really benefiting some of the secessionist churches. Even through times of crisis like the great wars of the 20th Century, Church attendance has never been a majority pastime.
As we travel back in time even further, we find that at the time of the Reformation in the 1500s, Church attendance was supposedly compulsory, but in fact, the peasantry of the land largely ignored the injunction, and even those who did come did not do so out of deep-rooted faith. Faith and worship have always been minority interests both here and globally.
In the early centuries of the Church in Britain, from the time of Augustine of Canterbury and St Ninian until the Reformation, there is a sense in the records that “Everyone went to church, or at least, anyone who was important did”, and we should just ignore the serfs. This philosophy would have appalled Jesus, who instigated the Church precisely for the serfs.
We have reached the late first century. The Church was still a small minority, mainly representing the underprivileged and outsiders, not the policymakers and influential. While Jesus and St. Paul welcomed significant people, their focus remained on the powerless. By the end of the first century, there were fewer than half a million Christians in an empire of 120 million. Half a million in an empire of 120 million is relatively tiny.
Christianity was not a religion for the influential and powerful; it was for the poor, the outcasts, the marginalised, for the sheep without a shepherd. How sad that many churches fail to understand this mission.
And so, in our journey through time, we return to Jesus. As Matthew tells us, he looks at the crowds and sees people “like sheep without a shepherd.” His response is not despair but compassion.
He prays.
And then he sends.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”
There were few then. There are few now. But my point through our time travel is that the apparent size of the task must not daunt us today. It is as it ever was.
The task before us.
We must become invitational people. It is not our job to persuade people; it is our job to invite. We must invite as many as possible to join us Sunday by Sunday, or occasionally. There will be folk out there who would enjoy our peculiar way of worshipping. But people will only join us if they are asked. There are many more who will not enjoy our worship.
But they will enjoy the worship at another Anglican church.
Or at the Methodist Church.
Or at one of the livelier Evangelical churches.
However, unless they are invited to try, they will never know. Almost no one wakes up and suddenly decides to go to church: they go (sometimes reluctantly) because they are asked by someone they know. And this is why you folk are the key to this, not just me. Because you know people. People attend a church because they’re invited.
Invitation leads to attendance.
And the attendees grow into people who belong.
And belonging leads to commitment.
And committed members grow into believers.
And believers grow into disciples.
People don’t start to attend church because they believe in God – that comes way down the line. People attend church because they are invited.
“So, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves.”
Jesus is not asking us to win arguments or convert the masses. He is asking us to invite people to walk with us. We need more disciples. But that comes much later. And it doesn’t come at all if we don’t start at the beginning. What we need are people who would like to go on a journey with us, starting with an invitation.
The harvest is still plentiful. There are people in our villages who would flourish in Anglican worship, or in the Methodist chapel, or in the evangelical church down the road — but they will never know unless someone invites them.
We are the Body of Christ: his hands, his feet, his eyes, and above all, his mouth.
If we do not speak the invitation, it will not be heard.
And the sheep will remain without a shepherd.