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New Program Continues to be Friend Friendly
CHICAGO, IL (May 11, 2000) - Two evangelistic programs started by a Covenant pastor and bolstered by the Great Lakes Conference (GLC) have given congregations an innovative tool for bringing friends to church, producing some amazing results for several churches.
Friend to Friend Sunday and Come Celebrate Jesus programs were created by Pastor Patrick White of Christ Community Church in Allegan, Michigan, to provide churches structured materials to aid their friendship evangelism efforts. Great Lakes Conference Supt. David Dahlberg, thought so much of the programs that he sent materials to others in the conference and encouraged all congregations to try them. Other conferences are also experimenting with the programs, and for good reason.
At the Central Conference annual meeting May 4-6 in Moline, Illinois, the Friend to Friend Sunday materials were presented to conference delegates. By then, however, the materials had already proven useful to at least one Central Conference congregation.
At the Evangelical Covenant Church of Paxton, Illinois, pastor Randy Surey said the Friend to Friend Sunday materials were extremely beneficial to his congregation of 75. He credits his
congregation with their passion to bring neighbors and the quality of the materials for the success, although Surey said the project was a consistent focus of various prayer groups.
"I had the materials last fall and went to the Midwinter workshop (last February) that Patrick White put on," Surey said. "We followed the timeline very carefully. We used a multitude of ways to communicate to people, including a community mailer that went out to 1,800 homes and another 100 (posted) signs that had the Friend to Friend information on it," he continued.
"We did three church drama presentations to help people see how important it was to invite people, and I did a children's sermon (that's part of the manual materials) about fishing, and we passed out fishing licenses to the congregation," he said. "We tried to blanket the community with the idea as much as possible and the congregation really tried to invite people."
Paxton Covenant Church had a three-week Friend to Friend Sunday emphasis beginning April 9. On the first Sunday, Surey estimated there were more than 100 new visitors, most of them people who did not attend another local church.
Both Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services had a similar result. Since then, newcomers have been sent hand-written thank you cards and cookies, along with a thank you letter from Surey.
"People were energized by the fact that the people they invited came," Surey said. "It's hard to pinpoint what brought some people because they may have been invited multiple times. But, we know it was helpful to the community because in my (local) ministerium association, other church pastors reported that their churches had significant attendance increases as well."
Surey isn't sure what the future holds for his budding congregation. "I don't know what the long-term effect will be," Surey said. "We don't know what the needs of these people are and we may not have programs that may meet the needs of the families."
Nonetheless, the efforts of the church and the positive effects of Friend to Friend Sunday have encouraged Surey to organize another event in the fall. "It was a good boost for the congregation to see they could make a difference, and it got some people back in church who were inactive," Surey said. "Some of those people have been in church ever since."
When White implemented Friend to Friend Sundays at Christ Community he also saw sizable attendance increases during the special Sundays - many visitors are now members. He said that last year 48 of 52 new members originally came to the church through a Friend to Friend Sunday.
"It goes back to John 1, when John brought Peter," said White of the concept. "It seems like folks are real bashful about extending an invitation to their friends, like it's the pastor's job. But, shepherds don't beget sheep - sheep beget sheep. And what's really important is that people begin inviting their friends, not whether they come or not."
White cautions against making a Friend to Friend Sunday something totally different than a regular Sunday service. "We used to do a lot of different things with music, but what we learned is that if you get too far afield from what you did on Friend to Friend Sunday, people get
disillusioned," he said. "We just try to spruce up our own act now."
He believes it is important to prepare a church for the next step once a Friend to Friend Sunday has taken place. That realization spawned the Come Celebrate Jesus program, which took advantage of the fact that many people had grown up attending a Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday service of some sort.
For more information on the Friend to Friend or Come Celebrate Jesus materials, contact White by telephone at 616-673-2329 or by e-mail at ccc@accn.org. Printed materials are also available for purchase through Covenant Resource Center by telephone at 800-338-4332, or by e-mail at CovResCtr@aol.com.
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