“Seek the welfare of the city… and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” God says to Jeremiah.

Surprisingly, God seems to care deeply about our neighbourhoods and cities where we live. Here’s why we, too, should seek their welfare.

Today, I’ll be arguing that invitation really matters. Developing an invitational church culture is key to effective local mission. It matters for discipleship reasons; developing an invitational habit is a central part of being a ‘fruitful’ follower of Jesus. And invitation matters for hospitality-related reasons. How we invite people and what exactly we invite them to often determines how effective our invitations will be.

Invitation can be a powerful force, but that doesn’t make its implementation a straightforward exercise. As a young youth pastor, I learned, through a lot of trial and error, that harnessing the power of invitation requires several interrelated factors.

These are: a basic missional theology, the understanding that an event or program has been developed for the express purpose of invitation, trust that the said event would be ‘cringe-free,’ and power of accountability.

Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Reading about the lifecycle can be pretty depressing. It’s fine if your church is in the first few stages. But discovering you’re leading a church that’s in the latter years of its organisational life is about as fun as swallowing cod liver oil.

My topic today is “What do we do about it?” My argument will be that leaders can turn their churches around if they acknowledge that there’s a problem, look deeper at their church’s particular stage in the lifecycle, and get some help.

My last post explored the first four stages of the church life cycle: The Dream, Birth, Adolescence, and Adulthood.

My post this week is a little more sombre. No human organisation lives forever, and churches are no exception. The Church (capital C), as Jesus promised, will last, but its local, contextual iterations will not. The second half of the lifecycle includes (becoming an) Institution, Decline, and finally, Death.