Mark your calendars now and make plans to attend our 2024 Family Day. The event will held here at North Heights on September 29th, 2024. Invite your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, secret crushes, worst enemies, Little Moe with the gimpy leg, Cheeks, Bony Bob, Cliff.
Yes, even Cliff.
Family Day is not just a special Sunday. Every Lord’s Day is special. Obviously, we would love to have everyone you know and love worship with us every week, but there’s something to be said about picking one day on the calendar and saying “This is the date, if you only had one Sunday to attend, make it this one.”
When I preached in Guy, Arkansas, we started out very small, with only a few handful of us. We were in the middle of nowhere, in a town not found on many maps, surrounded by larger, more well-known areas. It was critical for us to reach out and invite people to worship with us. Very quickly, however, it became apparent that most people we knew were typical church-going folks. They already had somewhere they frequented on the Lord’s Day. Even those who didn’t attend somewhere every week still had somewhere they felt connected to, even if they only showed up once or twice a year. Getting someone to darken the door of a strange building is not easy. What we did was set aside one Sunday in the Spring and treated it like a special occasion. Now, to us, every Lord’s Day was a special occasion, but to someone who was not a regular attendee, that one particular Sunday seemed like something out of the ordinary. They were, after all, the sorts of people who might only attend on a holiday like Mother’s Day or Easter. All we did was create another holiday for them to mark on their calendar. In addition, we encouraged our regular attendees to invite their friends and family who might worship faithfully at this or that congregation every week. We weren’t asking those people to leave a good and godly congregation. We just wanted a visit. The combination of those two things brought a bunch of people to our assembly, encouraged unfaithful attendees to come back, and helped our small nucleus of regular worshippers see that we had something cooking, that we could have a full house from time to time, and that slowly, we could build up our small nucleus into a thriving congregation.
At Guy, we started with a dozen or so, and slowly grew to well over a hundred. Our “Friends and Family Day” special Sunday often packed over 200 into our small church house.
At North Heights we’re already starting with 350 or so, but the principle for growth is the same. There are unchurched and sparsely-attending people all around us. We have friends and loved ones whom we’d love to have worship with us from time to time. Set aside Sunday, September 29, 2024 as the day we get them all under one roof. Let’s make next year’s Family Day our biggest yet.
~Matthew