"I used to think…"

Everything from here on is untraining, and untraining has a rule. It is delivered as confession, never as accusation. So this chapter starts where it has to start.

I used to believe my job was to get my friends to church. I invited for years. I was sincere about it. And I never once opened a Bible with any of them — because nobody ever told me I could.

If some version of that is true of you, you are in very good company, and you were not being disobedient. You were being obedient to what you were taught.

The trained default

The model most of us absorbed goes like this: build a relationship, invite them to a service, and let the professional up front do the reaching. Invite and watch.

It is not wicked. It is what our parents and church leaders handed us, in good faith, because it is what they were handed.

But now go looking for it in the New Testament. Find the passage where an unbeliever is invited to a worship gathering so that they can be saved.

Look at Acts 8 — Philip gets in the chariot and opens the Scripture with the man on the road he is already traveling. John 4 — Jesus meets a woman at a well in the middle of her day. Acts 10 — Peter goes to a house full of people who would never have come to him. Acts 16 — a riverside, then a jail cell, then a kitchen table at midnight.

Every one of them is the Word opened with a person, in the place that person already was. Not one of them is an invitation to a service.

The sharpest way to say it

An invitation is not a witness.

Inviting someone to church is not wrong. It is simply not the same act as telling someone about Jesus, and the reflex quietly substitutes proximity to the gathering for the thing itself. We feel like we have done something, because we have — just not the thing that was asked of us.

What replaces it

Not door-knocking. Not confrontation. The alternative is smaller and far more ordinary than either: open the Bible with people, in their world, on their schedule.

The invitation changes accordingly. Not “come to my church,” but “come and see.” Invite them to Jesus and an open Bible.

And attendance? Attendance is fruit, not the door. If a seeker asks to come with you on a Sunday, never prohibit it — go with them, sit with them. Just stop making it the strategy.

Recite this

Go and make. Not invite and watch.

Try it this week

Finish the sentence for yourself, out loud, to one person: “I used to think…” Name one habit you now see differently. Do not defend it, and do not let anyone else defend it for you.

I will say my “I used to think…” sentence to ________________, on ________________.