High Threshold

I'm sitting here on a snowy Sunday morning (At 9:00 I was thinking it was foolish to cancel church; watching the snow fall at 11:00 makes me wonder if I'll be able to go to work tomorrow.) and thinking about the TOTE meeting last Friday. I've taken several of those courses on how to do evangelism, and the one thing I remember is the extremely high level of discomfort on both sides—presenter and listener. There's an extremely high threshold that a newcomer has to climb to enter ANY church.

I was in one of those Praise Band churches for years, and I always thought that one reason for the format was to be more "user friendly" to visitors. The truth, is, though, that the culture of that sort of church is just as alien to the average non-attender as the culture of an Episcopal church. The music isn't what they would listen to at home; people say things and do things (like waving their arms in the praise band church or crossing themselves in our church) according to some memorized script; and the visitor feels like an absolute geek.

One reason Episcopalians fear the "E-Word" so much is that we've all been on the receiving end of the aggressive sales pitch (not much more subtle than Sally hitting the kid over the head with her lunch box). A knock comes at the door. We open and there's a pair of strangers with some literature, oily smiles on their faces, and an invitation to go to some strange place. Maybe they want to come in (even though the apartment is a mess and I just got out of the shower). An interesting fact (I think it was from the Gabe Lyons book, The New Christians.) is that aggressive, impersonal evangelism never works. The statistical effectiveness of door-knocking, tract-passing, revival-service outreach is close to zero.

What does work is the personal invitation. That way, the visitor comes with a friend who can help navigate through the intricacies of the Prayer Book, be there when everyone at Coffee Hour has someone else to talk with, etc.

One more bit
Those folk who knock on our doors do have one advantage over us: they know what they are talking about. Perhaps "The Four Spiritual Laws" is reductionist and legalistic, but at least the presenters know what they want to say. I suspect many folk (not just in our churches) are afraid to be questioned because they haven't a clue what to say to an outsider. Where to begin? Church history? Liturgy? Answering awkward questions? Maybe the Bible, but it has 66 books—where to begin? This might be material for a future TOTE meeting.