Fat Tuesday

I have been saying over and over for a long time that foot traffic + invitation = opportunities for entrance into Christianity. If we invite people into our space, they will have the opportunity to be introduced to a saving relationship with God and with others. But, we all know that it is about as easy for a pre-Christian to enter a church as it is for a Christian to enter into afternoon prayers at the local Mosque. Not easy! But, if we can find ways to be in Christian community that will allow pre-Christians to enter into our homes, our businesses, our lives, and our churches, we can begin to make Sunday Morning (or Evening) more plausible for the Pre-Christian. At Jonah's Call, we are making invitation happen in three ways. First, we are going out and loving our neighbors. Every Wednesday I hang out at the Skate park. Throughout the year, I hang out at the dog park. Every week, my wife hangs out in the waiting room of the gymnastics center. In these spaces we make friends with pre-Christians and over time those friendships become real and strong. We call these places, third places (Thanks Joy and Francois!). A third place is that place that you find some semblance of community that is not your home and is not your work. It is your third places. It is within our third places that invitations to two arenas that are powerful transmitters of the Gospel occur. First, we can invite people into our small groups where they will find authentic Christians living in some form of healthy community (we share our property, possessions and purpose in following Jesus). Additionally, we can invite our friends to large gathering where we worship that are not Church. At Ascension-Jonah's Call, we have begun to do this by having festivals. Our first festival was the Fat Tuesday Festival. We turned Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Tuesday) into a festival by serving Pancakes, Sausages, Apple Sauce, hot cider and cocoa, and by adding a bouncy gym, balloons and face painting for the kids, live music and some fire pits outside for younger folks and families, and then we had stuff like Fat Tuesday Bingo, the pancake decorating corner, and the pancake eating contest to round out the fun. What was the result? We had between 300-350 people show up. My favorite visitors were a Muslim family a Jewish Family and a bunch of students from Pitt and CMU. One of our friends said, "How quirky, serving pancakes for dinner. It's so fun. I also loved that you guys had a coat check (our overzealous greeters were hanging up people's coats!) Anyway, it was an amazing night. Now, a bunch of folks who might have been scared of our building, have had a great time inside our space, know where to park, and are a lot more likely to come when someone mentions the word Church. The Gospel will be credible to the Pre-Christian when we love them authentically over time, allowing them to belong, before they believe or behave the way we expect them to.