Friday, June 12, 2009

Revolutionize our Sacrament Meetings

I just read about an incredible idea on how we may revolutionize our weekly Sacrament meetings. The idea was presented here by Sixteen Small Stones, and is followed by a fantastic analysis on how it could work and its potential ramifications.

In short, the idea involves issuing a few invitations to each sacrament meeting speaker which may be passed out to the speaker's non-member friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. In essence, it is a less-intrusive way to introduce your acquaintances to the Church. As the article states:
"Real or imagined, inviting someone to church feels awkward. It often doesn’t feel socially comfortable or even appropriate to invite someone to church without an antecedent that indicates some kind of existing interest or disposition. So we wait around forever for the topic to come up and the right opportunity to make the leap.

"But inviting people to come to hear you speak in church is different. It’s about you, not just the church. It’s like inviting people to come hear your band play, or attend a baby shower or your daughter’s dance recital, or to come to a barbecue at your house. There is no reason to wait for conversational queues that might indicate interest or disposition. If they can’t make it or aren’t interested that’s fine."

In my opinion, this is a great way to increase the member-missionary efforts throughout the Church. I, for one, am going to pitch this idea to our Bishopric.

5 comments:

Kevin Barney said...

Good idea!

Coffinberry said...

I can see the idea's appeal, except it sounds to me like a recipe for performance anxiety on steroids. Ugh.

Bookslinger said...

This thought has occurred to me too. Thanks for putting it into words.

Santos said...

I can envision this working for me and others. Actually we tried it about a month ago when I had to give a talk as a "stake leader" at a ward of my previous stake. This made it easy for my wife to invited a person she does business with that lived in that ward area.

Levite said...

Thank you, I will endevour to see how our Bishopric feels about it