My soul is uplifted when I visit churches and there is a discussion of what the congregation will do to sharpen their evangelism.

Talk normally revolves around new, exciting events or ways to engage with the community that has had no contact with the church. Connection with the community is certainly what is on view. 

But in these conversations, I’ve noticed that there are many people who have come to events and church in the past, but we have forgetton to re-invite them. This surprises me because such people have usually appreciated joining in, are favourably disposed to faith and generally 'warmer contacts'.

I am certainly not opposed to, in fact I am a strong supporter of engaging 'cold contact' with the wonderful gospel claims of Jesus, but not when we neglect our warmer contacts.

I wonder whether we forget about warm contacts because we think they won't want to come again, or we may be stretching the friendship to re-invite friends. Or it may be that we are afraid to continue the conversations at a personal level for fear that we might get it wrong, but think the event is not what the friend now needs.

However, I have noticed that many warm contacts, after their conversion tell the story of waiting to be re-invited to consider Jesus. We laugh at, but it is so common, to hear the testimony of the person who says they had to ask their friend to bring them back to church.

So, I want to recommend we think about continued warm contact evangelism.

Here are a couple of simple suggestions about what we may do.

"¢ visit those who used to come to church, but do so no longer. This is particularly appropriate when you get a new member of the ministry staff or open a new building, or begin a new ministry. The new minister could go around and introduce himself to those who once attended, or (as a lay friend of mine does) host afternoon tea for former members to meet the new minister. 

"¢ send invitations to everyone who has given you their details letting them know the things that are coming up, and take the opportunity to visit or phone those who might be particularly interested in the event. For example we recently had the commissioning service for a long term member of the congregation for missionary service.  This is a great time to invite those who knew the family. The same goes for baptisms. 

"¢ just phone up a friend before church and ask in an off-handed way, "I'm off to church in an hour, would you like to come with me?" We make these invitations all the times to other things we are interested in, why not church? 

Warm contact evangelism is humanly easier than cold contact evangelism, but for some reason we keep being drawn to only engage in cold contact evangelism.