Church as a kid: Friend Day0
Posted In Church as a kid
“Oh, we are totally going to shave your head! I am going to invite everyone I know!!”
That right there was my inspiration for inviting people to “Friend Day” at church. For those who didn’t grow up in church or didn’t get the joy of having Friend Day, it’s one Sunday a year where EVERYONE invites neighbors, classmates, friends, maids, garbage men, etc to church. They didn’t even have to be your friend.
Now, I could take this post the route of “Every Sunday should be Friend Day,” but I’m not going to do that. That would be too easy and quite frankly, kind of fundamentalist of me.
I don’t know about you, but at our church we had a goal. A number that we all were trying to hit. If we did, something bad happened to our pastor. If we didn’t, we still would give our effort a standing ovation when the total was announced the following week. (Once, all our friends were gone of course.)
“Last week we had 577 friends that came. A little short of the 700 we wanted but still an amazing number. Oh, and the winner of the potluck dinner for having the most friends in Sunday School is…. drum roll please, oh wait, we don’t have drums… the 60-65 class!”
In the end, Friend Day was about getting people’s contact information. That way the church can send them a few letters a week, call them and email them. The most popular way to get in touch, though, was Visitation Night. Every Monday night we had to gather to go visit “prospects.” This turned into some of the most awkward moments of my life. Visiting your friend from school with a random adult and being in the same room as the adult asks some of the most uncomfortable questions imaginable was just awkward. For everyone. I imagine that God was even cringing.
By the time I was in high school I would encourage my friends not to fill out the card. (I know that was wrong of me, but they would have been seriously bombarded and I’m the one that heard the complaints.) I still invited them though and that has to count for something. I did my part to see the pastor with a shaved head.
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