invite - Shine Your Light

Shine Your Light: Making the Invitation

Did you know, anecdotally, it can take 15 invitations to a discipleship course before someone responds. FIFTEEN! So how can we make our Shine Your Light invitations as effective and attractive as possible? Here are a few ideas that might help. As ever, adapt them to your own context but know that they have been tried and work in mine!

Be Intentional

Consider how you will make the invitation? How will people find out about your event? The more people hear about your event, the more familiar they become with it, and the more they will trust it. So, think about how you will publicise your Shine Your Light event and boost your invitations’ impact.

Be Prayerful

Before you’ve invited anyone to Shine Your Light, pray. Pray about who God wants you to invite. This isn’t just about praying together for the event e.g. as a church. This is personal. Who are the handful of friends/family/neighbours/colleagues who you know well enough to ask? Who are the people God has surrounded you with who he wants you to be intentional about praying for and praying for opportunities to share about Jesus with?

Be Personal

The best invitation is a personal one. The ideal is when an invitation to a Shine Your Light event doesn’t come out of nowhere but is part of a relationship and an ongoing conversation. These are not full-blown gospel conversations, but rather, real relationships with people we know, who know don’t know Jesus, but they know that we do.

Be Locally Loud

To bypass the 15 invitations needed for someone to agree to attend an event people need to be very familiar with it. This desensitises them to the unfamiliarity of it, creates momentum and hopefully a sense that something is happening that they wouldn’t want to miss. Essentially you need to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). So, alongside the personal invitation, the advertising needs to be loud locally. Consider advertising your event through the local press, social media groups, on local radio, through local schools, food banks, toddler groups, wellbeing cafes and churches. Where are your community spaces? Where does the church connect with people locally? If you are using banners think about places of high footfall where people will see them.

Be Creative

At Christmas we see many people in our churches who we don’t see throughout the year. A Christmas carol service or nativity is part of many people’s Christmas tradition/celebration, even if they don’t consider themselves to be a Christian. So, an invitation to a community carol event should be accessible to many people. However, there will still be many people for whom a carol event is unfamiliar, or who might not prioritise it at a time of year when there are so many options to choose from. To amplify the impact of your invitation and to help you cross these boundaries, you might want to consider ‘baiting the hook’, holding another accessible, outreach event which invites people to your Shine Your Light gathering. There are various ways to do this:

Bait The Hook

If you are holding other special events for Christmas e.g. a toddler group nativity, a school assembly, a youth event, a Messy Church, Christingle or another carol service, be intentional about what you signpost at the end as follow-up and include your Shine Your Light event.

You might want to plan an event or activity that begins to ‘warm people up’ to your Shine Your Light event, creating expectancy, engagement and familiarity.

Here are a few simple ways to bait the Shine Your Light hook:

Create a conversation via social media/websites/local press and radio about people’s favourite carols. Encourage people to vote/make suggestions and tell them that the top ten favourite carols will be revealed at your Shine Your Light event. Alternatively, include this conversation at another event e.g. a school Christmas fair, to encourage the people who attend to come to Shine Your Light too.
Invite people to introduce the carols and share why the carol is important to them. You can use the people in your publicity, and they will have an extra personal element to add to their invitations. These can be local people from churches or people like the well-known councillor, mayor, Scout leader, or businessperson.
Get a small group together to sing in a local supermarket and invite people to come to your Shine Your Light event to hear more carols.
Run a competition alongside Shine Your Light, perhaps engaging local schools, businesses, supermarkets, toddler groups, GP surgeries and coffee shops. The competition could be to write a poem (even a simple acrostic) around Shine Your Light, to design a poster for your event or to think of as many different sources of light or as many different words from ‘Shine Your Light’ as they can. Try to think of a focus for your competition that spans different ages. Your competition needs a closing date, people hand their entries into community points like schools, coffee shops and businesses and you award the prizes at your event (local businesses will often donate prizes for you).
Host a trail. People like to have fun in the run up to Christmas so a simple trail that can be done anytime e.g. the week before your Shine Your Light event after school, can be a powerful way to engage people. Trails can be pictures that people need to find, which are hosted by shops on a high street or homes in a community/on an estate. If your Shine Your Light event has a shepherds theme your trail could be as simple as pictures of sheep, with the invitation to people being to ‘count the sheep’. You could build a story around your trail…Oh no! The shepherds left their sheep to go and visit baby Jesus and now need help to find them again. If you want to take your trail up a notch, Messy Church have a brilliant resource for a Messy Knitivity which involves hiding named knitted sheep. https://www.messychurch.brf.org.uk/latest/resources/messy-nativity/ If your Shine Your Light event is focussing on light you can adapt your trail to this theme. You might want to hide pictures of different sources of light around your community. How many can people find?

Be Clear

Whatever you do to advertise your Shine Your Light event and to make the invitation, communicate clearly. To build familiarity and trust in your event people need to know where and when it is, how long it will last and what they can expect. Don’t assume that they know it will include carols and the Christmas story, tell them. If your event includes something novel e.g. glowsticks, LED candles or real sheep (yes, I’ve tried this too), then be very loud about this.

Be Persistent

We’re back to the 15 invitations to get someone to Alpha. Do encourage people to be persistent in their invitations. The people we invite might not respond at first, but it’s ok to ask again. Encourage people to be persistent beyond your Shine Your Light event too; to continue the conversations that they are having/have started with people and to continue to pray.

Our thanks to Sammy Jordan for preparing this helpful resource for us.

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