The nonsensical ponderings of Eric Frisch...

I went to church this morning.  It wasn't easy.  Seeing as how this was my first Sunday to really go to church wherever I wanted, I decided to go back to my roots and seek out a good, classic Presbyterian service.  This turned out to be a much larger ordeal than I expected.  There is a Presbyterian church about 100 feet from my house, but I was already pretty sure I didn't want to go there (just a very small place with not much happening), so I decided to walk to a different Presbyterian church about 10 minutes away.  I was about a third of the way there when it started pouring down rain.  Realizing that I wasn't going to make it to the service in anything other than "wet-dog" form, I turned around and sprinted home, but by the time I got home, it was too late to drive and still get there on time, so... enter Presbyterian church #3... 10 minute drive from home with a later service.  I made it on time, and the place was cool.  The people were friendly, the pastor was great, and there were three little babies baptized today (always a pick-me-up on Sunday morning ).

There's a point to this story: there were several points this morning when I seriously considered just giving up and staying home (starting with the moment the alarm clock went off).  As I sat at home pondering it all this afternoon, it came into my head that there are really two basic evangelism strategies churches use.  The first is actually going out and inviting people, individually and personally, to come to church.  The other is by trying to create something so "cool" or good or attractive that people will naturally gravitate to it.  My general experience has been that the second one doesn't normally work very well... unless of course your church's goal is to steal your members from other churches (if you can't tell, I'm not a big fan of that plan).  My experiences this morning, though, cause me to put even more weight on the first idea than I already did.  I mean think about it... I'm 21 years old and have been in the church my entire life, to the point where churches have been the only real employers I've had thus far in life; and yet even I got nervous and considered not going when I had to find someplace new.  How many times must this be magnified for those who have never been to any church.  Unfortunately, fancy signs and sermon titles aren't going to attract most of those people.  It's time for the rest of us to start doing our legwork.