Invitational Retraining
One church leader recently said to me that the reason congregations don’t invite is that “Our people are conditioned with a form of traditionalism”. The word conditioned means trained to exhibit a certain response. So conditioned implies at the least, training. So who has trained them not to invite? We need to condition our congregational members to respond to the prompting of God. Surely this is what Paul meant about taking captive any thought, and renewing our minds. The first step to retraining our congregations is to know there is a problem. This church leader has become aware of the problem. The church leader must fight the thinking behind traditionalism for it is a for it is a form of slavery and then the congregation might be freer to invite someone to take a closer look at Christ and his church.
