I’ve been reflecting on the Parish profile that I read on the Internet back in May 2008.  Reflecting on the truths, the things that weren’t quite as true as you probably wanted them to be,  and the things that never quite made it on to the profile at all and I’ve enlarged a rather important page of that profile and stuck it over my desk.  Partly because it helps remind me what you wanted in a vicar (and why I applied as I felt my gifts were a good match!) and it has a set of Parish Objectives.  I think you may hear some of these a bit more often this next year!

Today I am going to start by talking to you about Objectives number 2 + 3. That is this:
‘to empower each person in St John’s to use their talents and time to serve both in the church and in our community’
‘’to take to the community the unconditional love of God, making new disciples of all ages.’’
Well, this week you have an opportunity to demonstrate that you are working on these objectives!  This week each of you is going home with an invitation to pass on to a friend or neighbor inviting them to come back to church at the end of this month.
But first, I sat and asked myself the question – What are we inviting people to?
Clearly coming to church is about more than what happens on a Sunday BUT we are inviting people back to church specifically for a Sunday service.  So what are we inviting them back to?  Why do you come?
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I hope that for all of us in some way the answer is that we come because we are followers of Jesus. There may be other things as well – maybe you like to sing, maybe your friends are here, maybe you don’t know what else you’d do on a Sunday morning – but as well as all that it’s because of Jesus, because we follow him. That sense of being a follower of Jesus is a common thread that takes us all the way back to those first men and women who left everything to follow him as he travelled around healing, teaching, and preaching the good news. It puts us in the same shoes as the disciples in our reading today. By being here, we are making a statement: Jesus is important to us. But that’s not enough. Just as he did with his followers then, Jesus wants to ask us why. Why do we follow him? Who do we say that he is? In our reading it is Peter who gives the answer to that question: Jesus is the Christ, our ruler and our saviour. It’s the textbook answer, he goes to the top of the class. But then, moments later, in some of the harshest language he uses anywhere, Jesus rebukes him as if he were the devil himself. And it’s because Peter can’t accept that his saviour and Lord will be leading them, not to a triumphant endless party where all their troubles disappear, but on the way of the cross – through opposition, hardship, and suffering to defeat and death. Because only then could he really save them.
Peter knows who Jesus is, he has already chosen to follow him, but what he hasn’t grasped is what that really means. He doesn’t really want to accept that Jesus is going to die, and that he is leading his followers on to suffering and death. It’s a common fault. Many of us find it hard to really accept that following Jesus doesn’t entitle us to victory over all our problems. Surely God can sort everything out. Realising that following Jesus doesn’t make us immune to life’s ups and downs can be difficult. But this is the way of the cross, this is what it means to follow Jesus.
Knowing who Jesus is is supposed to help us figure out who we are and how we should live. If Jesus is the ruler who serves us all, the saviour who suffers for us, that tells us, as his followers, who we are. We are not the favoured few who are immune to the hard things in life. We are called to lives that will probably involve suffering  – lives of self-sacrifice. And lives where we will need to support each other. That is the truth that Peter had to face up to. Perhaps it’s easy to understand why he didn’t want to accept it. It may not sound like a great advert: “Follow Jesus, and you too can enjoy hardship and suffering in the company of those who are committed to helping you face up to the toughest things in your life. Follow Jesus and be forced to confront your deepest fears.”
So where does that leave us in asking others to consider coming back to church? It’s always tempting to try and ‘sell’ church as something it’s not, to try and present following Jesus as something other than what it is. But that’s the very thing Jesus condemns Peter for doing, trying to live in a dream. We are to invite others to follow Jesus (or at least to resume their friendship with him), but not by pretending everything will be wonderful. We are to invite others to follow because of what we know to be true: what Jesus has done for us, and what he means to us. Asking others to come to church is tough because if we are to do it effectively it means being honest and vulnerable with people, saying something to others about who we think he is.
But it’s vital that we do it. The church will only go on existing if we ask others to join us – it’s one of our objectives.  It’s what Jesus commanded his followers to do, and it’s what we need to do if we want the church that we value to continue to be here in the future. We tend to forget that, because for a long time we could just assume that church would go on as long as there were plenty of children being baptized – the church didn’t have to keep inviting people to come along, because there were children who would grow up and take their parent’s places. But those days are gone. We can’t sit back and wait for our children to come along. I expect this village is full of people who were baptized in this church but haven’t been for years. They won’t come just because they were baptized. But they might if they were asked by people who are their friends, by people who tell them the truth, who aren’t trying to give a sales pitch, but just inviting them to join in something important to them.
It’s always tempting at this point to look around and see if there’s someone else in church you can rely on to do some inviting so you don’t have to. Like the vicar. She’s the professional, after all. Why can’t she do all the inviting for us? Well, simply, because I wouldn’t be able to. We’re talking about inviting the friends who know us and trust us, the people we can be honest with. I’ve been here a year. I don’t have those sorts of friendships with people: you do. I’m not here to do your job for you. I’m here to challenge you to do it, to encourage you to be honest, and to help you to love God and your neighbours in a real way. This is what you wanted both from a vicar and for yourselves in your Parish profile – in the objectives.    Because at bottom that’s what this is about: being honest and being real with those around you. Who do you say that he is?  Is your life real…real in the way Jesus challenges it to be – self sacrifical?  There’s two big challenges I’m wanting to put to you over the next year or so, and both of them are about considering how real our faith is and what it really means to us. Next year I’m going to be talking about planning our giving, being real about how much church means to us and what we’re prepared to give for it. But right now I’m wanting to talk about the first of those challenges – being real about church, about our faith, about following Jesus with those around us. We come here week after week, it’s obviously important to us, but are we honest with those around us about what it means to us? Can we show the courage to tell the truth about our faith to those who are closest to us?
I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, but it’s what I’m here for.  To ask you the questions, the hard ones and to love you as Jesus loved his disiples- without avoiding the hard questions.
So, what can you do? Back to Church Sunday is at the end of this month. The idea is simple: there are many people who used to go to church but have stopped coming, for all sorts of reasons, but if they were invited back, they might come again. On Sunday 27th September we’re going to celebrate Back to Church Sunday. In many ways it won’t be different from any other Sunday – we’re not trying to pretend St Johns is anything other than St Johns. But what we are doing is having the courage to speak the truth about our faith and what it means to us: to say what going to church means to us, to say that it’s a place where God meets with us, that we think there’s something of immense value here, and we’d like to share that with others.
Ideally this is something you share with those you know best, the friends who don’t come to church but who would value hearing you tell them the truth about what it means to you. But you don’t have to have an in depth conversation with someone, you don’t even have to see them face to face if you don’t want. All you have to do is give or send them an invitation. It might be someone who has been before, it might be a neighbour or friend who has mentioned faith or St John’s but never managed to come along- I am sure there would be a variety of people you think would value the things you value about this church and community. The invites are at the back of church for you to collect. All you need to do is fill out the details of the service on the first side. Leave the second side blank (this is a place for people who come back to church to offer us some feedback!) and then write the name of the person you intend to invite on the 3rd side and tear that side off- and keep it, it is a prayer card for you to pray for that person that you have invited.
Pray. Be courageous. Be open and honest. Pray some more. That’s what my challenge is to you this morning.