Good Idea/Bad Idea - Invite All Your Friends

I'm figuring out that some of my best ideas have had some of the most unexpected bad consequences. Here's another one I've learned.



Good Idea: Invite All Your Friends

• Gives students ownership
• Gives students a mission
• Provides a way for students to spread the gospel
• Provides an immediate relational connection for visitors
• Grows your ministry
  

One of the best ways to grow a ministry is to get your people excited about what is going. It gives them an easy way to invite their friends to join the community of believers.

Bad Idea: Invite All Your Friends

Students getting excited and inviting their friends is a good thing, but what happens when they invite all of their friends before the ministry is ready to handle a huge influx of visitors? What happens if they do invite all their friends?

• More people can show up than you can connect
• You can run out of chairs and room space
• What is a good program for one size is a very bad if too many people show up
• Lack of volunteers
• If the quality doesn't increase then visitors have a bad first impression

Our church is in a small suburb of Austin, Tx where there is literally nothing to do once football season ends. Therefore, over the summer our ministry grew extremely rapidly simply because we were doing something interesting. Students got excited about something new and different, and therefore, they invited their friends.

We had one week were we nearly doubled in size. That would have been good except for the fact that the quality didn't increase...it drastically decreased. We were completely unprepared. We didn't have a plan to connect the visitors. Many of them had a bad first impression due to our sloppiness. It was bad.

It was great that everyone invited their friends. The problem was that we weren't prepared for that surge of attendance.