Access Church

It's Sunday morning, and I'm not going to church.

It's not that I don't like church. I do. I love the music and relevant message, and I mostly love the people. Oh, and my kids are crazy about Waumba Land and UpStreet.

But the church community I'm a part of only meets twice a month. It's a strategic decision we made early on to not exhaust our volunteers. We won't go to weekly services until we have enough volunteers so that we can distribute the workload and operate in a healthy way. (Small groups, though, meet every week!)

But it turns out that not meeting some Sundays has a really cool side effect. It gives our family the opportunity to hang out on Sundays with friends from our neighborhood who don't even think about attending church.

You see, the people we're trying to reach at Access are not in church on Sunday morning. In fact, studies say that 800,000 in this city are not in church on any given Sunday.

On the one hand, every-week services will double my opportunity to invite others to Access. But it will also decrease my ability to invest in unchurched people.

Since that's who we started this church for, I want to challenge Access attenders: Quit hanging around church people on our "off" Sundays.

Instead, go to the beach, go to the lake, go to the mall, go to the park... with unchurched friends, neighbors, colleagues and family! This opportunity (having Sundays off) is short-lived. Make the most of it, and invest in people who don't even consider church as a Sunday option.

Just an idea.