Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More
Your people aren’t broken. Here’s what’s really going on.
Three weeks after I got my driver’s license, I put my car in a ditch.
This was back when you could walk into the licensing office on your sixteenth birthday, get a learner’s permit, and … within a few weeks … be fully licensed, no restrictions, no supervision. And that was me. Sixteen years old, license in my wallet, and a car I was allowed to drive anywhere.
It was a Christmas party, which meant it was a winter night. I was driving home with friends, a paved road transitioning to gravel, and I hit that washboard effect … the tires skittering sideways in a way I’d never felt before. My car did something I wasn’t expecting. I overcorrected and we ended up nose-down in the ditch on the wrong side of the road.
Here’s the thing: I was fully licensed. I’d passed the test, on paper, and I knew how to drive.
I just hadn’t been trained for that specific moment. Nobody had taken me out to a gravel road and said, This is what washboard feels like, this is what your car will do, and this is how you respond. The gap between licensed and actually prepared put me in a ditch.
I think about that night almost every time a pastor tells me their people won’t invite.
Your people are not the problem.
Say it again.
Your people are not the problem.
Stop the quiet Monday-morning verdict that your people just don’t care enough, aren’t committed enough, or aren’t bold enough in their faith. That story is wrong. And worse, it’s leading you to the wrong solutions.
Spiritual guilt campaigns don’t build invite culture. They build a two-week bump and a long guilt hangover.
Here’s what the data actually says about your people.
Roughly a third of unchurched Americans say they’d attend a worship service if a friend invited them. [ref] That number climbs for lower-barrier community events. Meanwhile, three in four regular churchgoers say the sermon content is a primary reason they show up … Scripture, connection to real life, and actual teaching. [ref]
Translation: the receptivity is already sitting in your people’s friend groups. The weekend experience is already a word-of-mouth asset. Your people care, their friends are open, and the raw materials are there.
So why is your invite rate what it is?
Because licensed isn’t the same as trained. Your people are fully credentialed believers who’ve never been taken out on the gravel road. And when the invite moment shows up — a friend at work mentions a hard week, or a neighbor asks what you did this weekend — they hit the washboard and overcorrect. They mumble something vague or change the subject or go quiet.
You read that as a motivation problem.
But it isn’t. It’s a training problem and those are very different things — because one of them you can actually fix.
What your people actually need (and it’s not another guilt sermon)
Three things. Not one, not two, but three.
Train their Heads // Most of your congregation thinks they’re passengers.
Your people need to understand what role they actually play in reaching your community. Not abstractly or as a sermon illustration. It needs to be communicated as a job description.
Most people in the seats on Sunday don’t believe they have a meaningful role in the impact your church will have on the community. They think that’s the pastor’s job, the staff’s job, or the outreach team’s job. When an invitation comes up, they nod along … but in their head, they’re a passenger. You’re the one driving the bus.
Training changes the mental model. It teaches your people that they are the most persuasive communication channel your church has … more than your Instagram, more than your website, more than any ad you could run. The research backs this up repeatedly. People don’t get invited by buildings, they get invited by friends.
When a congregation genuinely understands that — at a head level — their posture shifts. They stop waiting for the church to grow itself.
Equip their Hands. // Your people freeze because nobody gave them a script.
Now give them the tools.
What are the actual words to say when a friend asks what you did this weekend? What do you text someone after they mention their marriage is struggling? What’s the language for inviting a coworker to Easter without it sounding like a pitch? What do you share on social media, and when, and how often?
This is where most churches fall off a cliff. We train people at a concept level, then send them into real conversations with no script, no prompts, and no practice reps. They freeze. Of course, they freeze! We froze, too, the first time we tried to explain what grace is to a skeptical relative at Thanksgiving.
Equipping means giving your people specific language, specific triggers for when to use it, and specific tools … shareable social posts, invite cards that don’t feel weird, text templates … that reduce the friction of the actual moment.
Language without the tool is theory. The tool without the language is a tract left on a diner table.
Motivate their Hearts. // Guilt is not vision.
And finally: the why.
This isn’t about guilt or obligation, and it’s not another way of saying that better Christians invite more people.
Real motivation is vision. It’s the moment your people see that this — inviting their coworker, their sister-in-law, the single mom down the street — is how their community actually changes. This is how a marriage that’s quietly falling apart gets a Tuesday night small group. This is how a lonely senior gets a ride to church and a coffee after. This is how the teenager whose parents just got divorced finds one adult who keeps showing up.
This is how we change the world. Not from the stage but from the seats.
Motivation isn’t about making your people feel bad. It’s about letting them feel the weight of what their life is worth when it’s spent this way.
Here’s why this matters for you specifically
The pastor who thinks our people just won’t invite builds culture around guilt and shallow inspiration. Neither compound. You’ll run that sermon series every September and get the same spike every September and wonder why the baseline never moves.
The pastor who thinks our people need to be trained, equipped, and motivated builds systems. And systems compound. Year one looks modest. Year three looks like a different church.
One of those leaders is still running the same spike-and-drop cycle in 2031. The other isn’t.
The question isn’t whether your people care. They do. The question is whether you’ve ever built them a gravel road to practice on, or whether you keep handing out licenses and acting surprised when they end up in the ditch.
The Invite Culture Audit — May 12
On Tuesday, May 12 at 12pm ET, I’m hosting a free workshop called the Invite Culture Audit Workshop.
It’s not a pep talk. It’s a diagnostic.
For twenty years, I’ve had a front-row seat to what’s actually working inside growing churches across North America. And here’s what I keep seeing: the churches that are growing aren’t doing more. They’ve just made inviting normal.
In 60 minutes, we’ll work through three things together:
- Why healthy churches get stuck — the hidden reason your church is doing all the right things, yet guest flow stays inconsistent and big days spike then settle right back.
- The 5 Gears of Invite Culture — the specific systems growing churches use to move from hoping people invite to expecting they will.
- Your 90-Day Invite Culture Blueprint — a practical plan to mobilize your people, multiply invitations, and build real momentum heading into fall 2026.
You’ll walk out with your Invite Culture Scorecard — a clear picture of where your invite culture is strong, where it’s leaking, and which of the three — train, equip, or motivate — is the dominant blocker in your church right now.
You won’t get a generic answer. The answer will be specifically your own.
That’s the starting point for building the training your people never got.
Zero pressure, no hard pitch, and your whole team is welcome.
→ Register for the free Invite Culture Audit Workshop
One last thing about that ditch
When the police pulled me out of the snow that night, they asked me where I wanted to go. My parents were out and I knew enough that I shouldn’t go home to an empty house.
So, they drove me to Pastor Dave Lewis’s house – my senior pastor and a good man. (Plus … if I’m honest, I figured when they came to pick me up at Pastor Dave’s house that would soften any initial parental pressure.)
He opened the door in whatever pastors wear at 10 pm on a winter night, and he wasn’t angry and he wasn’t disappointed. He was just kind. He let me sit on his couch, shake a little, and eventually call my folks to tell them what happened.
My parents expressed concern, but — honestly — they didn’t freak out. They were just grateful I was alive. And then the police showed up at the front door with the real consequence: a one-month suspension. No driving.
Here’s the truth: I didn’t want to drive after that experience. I was sixteen, and I’d scared myself badly. That month off did something the license test never did. I came back to the road a different driver. I was slower, more careful, and more aware of what I didn’t know.
To this day, I drive slower than my wife. She’ll tell you that, cheerfully.
I think about that sometimes when I’m talking to a pastor whose invite numbers are flat. Because your people aren’t reckless, they’re not uncommitted, but most of them are quietly in the ditch — they tried, it went sideways, they stopped trying, and now they’re just driving to work and back.
The audit isn’t a lecture. It’s closer to Pastor Dave’s couch. We figure out what’s actually happened. We name the specific thing that went wrong. And then, together, we build the training your people should have had all along.
That’s how you get them back on the road.
