Two church services I recently attended concluded with the familiar “every head bowed and every eye closed” invitation. The pastor pled with those in the congregation who didn’t know Jesus to raise their hand and repeat a simple prayer in order to be saved. I felt something inside of me cringe at this point in each service, and it took me a while to put my finger on what exactly I found disturbing. It certainly wasn’t the fact that the pastor was inviting people to become followers of Christ…so why my hesitation? 
After much pondering, I figured out what was troubling me. I see a danger in this routine. The danger is this: if we are only willing to admit that we need Christ when it is “safe” (a.k.a. when no one is looking) then what happens when it isn’t safe to be a follower of Christ? What happens when the whole world is watching?
My second hesitation is this: if we tell people that all they have to do is pray a “simple prayer”, we make following Christ sound easy and simple – something to be checked off of a to-do list. We rarely communicate to people the gravity of the decision they are making. I mean, sure, we give them all sorts of information about hell and why they should want to avoid it, but how much information do we give in a sermon or an invitation about what it means for someone to give their life to the Lord? How many times do we declare from the pulpit that “this is the most difficult thing you will ever choose to do?” Oh but that would scare people off and prevent us from getting people to make decisions that we can write into our church reports! Why would we want to tell people that? Seriously?
This is the danger. We are sending the message to people that Christianity is as easy as praying a prayer and moving on without anyone else seeing their hand go up on a Sunday morning. Jesus called His disciples with a simple “follow Me” and they dropped what they were doing and went with Him. Wait, did you catch that? They dropped everything…their jobs, their families, their homes…they laid it all down to pursue the One who called them to follow Him and their lives never looked the same.
I wonder if our invitation scenario stems from a wrong focus. I fear that we as the church focus too much on getting “decisions” rather than making “disciples.” Jesus commanded “go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say, “go get people to raise their hands in a service.” I’m not saying that a person’s heart won’t be changed because of a sermon brought from a pulpit. I’m not limiting God to say that He doesn’t change hearts in the course of a Sunday morning. Of course He does! What I am saying is that God is relational, and He created us as relational beings. He created us to pour into others and to be poured into by others. We are created for relationships and for community.
So, what if this was the scenario instead: what if the pastors, elders, mature families and couples in the church sat around the dining room tables and living room fireplaces of the people who sit beside them in the pews every Sunday and simply lived their lives as an example of what it means to follow Christ? What if instead of trying to win people over through rapid-firing scripture at them, we as the church simply lived the Word in our everyday lives? What if “decisions” to follow Christ flowed out of decisions made by believers to invest in, teach and disciple others? What if…?
I think that we are afraid of what that would actually look like. We are afraid to let people get so close to our personal lives that they will see the real us: the good and the bad. The parts of our lives that don’t line up with scripture. We know that it is far easier to preach at someone than to live a life of integrity before them.
