I sometimes wonder whether we lack a bit of imagination and a level of independence. Which is not great if you are an *ahem* Independent. Not that I think you should always need to reinvent the wheel. Just that someone having invented a wheel doesn’t mean you need what they’ve invented. Wheels are great if you’re trying to move stuff from one place to another. They’re not that useful if you’re trying to cook a meal.

Now, on one level, all churches should be about the same thing. We all want to reach out and make disciples. So, we assume we all need wheels. If someone else has made them already, let’s grab a set of their wheels and put them to work for us. The thought process goes something like this: (1) churches need to do outreach; (2) this is outreach; (3) therefore, churches should do this.

The thing is, if we are going to think in terms of wheels, a better analogy is using wheels as a synecdoche for cars. While there is no point reinventing the wheel, the kind of wheels you want are going to depend on exactly what you’re trying to do. All cars will get you from A to B, but not all will do it the same way. For example, if you want to get there quickly, you’ll want a sports car. But you’ll have to accept those will only give you two seats and no boot space. If you’ve got to transport a whole bunch of people, they’re not good and you’ll need a people carrier. If you don’t have the people to carry but you’ve got a lot of stuff, you might need an estate or a small van. If you want to arrive in style to give off particular vibes (I’ll let you, dear reader, determine what vibes they might be) it’s a luxury car you’ll be needing. All of them will get you from A to B. Not all are built for the same purpose nor achieve the same things.

Like that, all churches may well be about the business of reaching out and making disciples. But not all churches are going to do that in the same way nor would it be efficacious for them to do so. It’s not good looking over at another church with a great English Class ministry and think, why reinvent the wheel, let’s do that when you live in the middle of an exclusively indigenous English-speaking neighbourhood. That’s like getting a scooter to shift a sofa when what you need is a Volvo. Similarly, it’s no good thinking about running a ministry that another church has great success with when your church is not setup to do the same things nor pointed in the same way. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but even the wrong size wheel on a vehicle will cause it major problems. Sometimes, we have the wrong vehicle altogether.

Which brings me back to Christmas. Like with many things, churches frequently look over at others and think, they’re doing this or that for Christmas. If they can reach out like that, we should reach out like that too. And, let me say this before going on, if you haven’t ever tried it before and you think, realistically, it might work in your area, then perhaps it is a goer. Sometimes, someone else’s vehicle will work just as well for your setup too.

But often, we don’t think all that deeply about it. We just see Christmas as ‘a great opportunity’. Of course we’ll use Christmas to reach out. Every church does Christmas stuff, doesn’t it? So, let’s do Christmassy stuff. People are bound to come. We need to be much more thoughtful than that. We might just find ourselves driving a rusty Robin Reliant to a fancy cocktail party, or a Bentley to a spit and sawdust pub. It’s the wrong vehicle for the occasion.

In our area, Christmas just isn’t a big deal. If people want a fancy choir and candles do in a pretty building, Oldham Parish Church really isn’t so far away. Nobody is likely to come to our pokey 1970s building. Most of our immediate area is Pakistani Muslim. Very few are interested in coming to a traditional carol service. In 10 years, I am pretty sure I can count the total number of visitors to a carol service using no more than my fingers (and I suspect I don’t need them all!) Given this, it just doesn’t make much sense for us to pour a lot of time and energy into any Christmas offering. I don’t mind doing something for our members just because they feel it’s nice, but I have to operate on the understanding that is what we are doing it for.

But the issue goes beyond how great a carol service might be at any rate. We are not primarily aiming to do evangelism by events as a church. I say primarily because it is not as though we don’t do any events. As dead as Christmas is for us, our annual Light Party this year had upwards of 80 people with the majority outsiders from Muslim and Roma families. But that event – well attended as it was – was full of people we already knew through the other, regular means of evangelism we have. Which means the Light Party – though we did share the gospel at it – isn’t our only opportunity to share the gospel with those particular people, but we have continued, ongoing, relational engagement with them a couple of time a week and usually multiple times per month. Indeed, they came because we already have relationships with them. That means the event was not the opportunity to share the gospel with them, but just another opportunity in a different setting to do so and to talk with them more afterwards.

The wider question here is not whether we are looking to make disciples or not. We should all be doing that. But how we are looking to make disciples. Like the car you use, we may all want to get from A to B, but we might not all want the same things on the way. What serves one church may not serve another. What works in one community may not be of value in another. Whilst we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, we have to figure out whether this particular wheel is the one we really need. We need a little bit of independence to look beyond what other churches are doing and, rather than just copy them, as whether it is something worthwhile for our church in this community in which God has placed us.

For us, that means not doing much for Christmas. We’ll still invite people to carols, but we aren’t going pump much time and energy into it because, well, generally people don’t come. It means making a bit more of a do at Halloween because it is a good opportunity. But it all the more means not really being wedded to particular times of year at all, but focusing more on the ordinary, regular ministries that may seem much small but long term are eminently more fruitful and effective. It means not necessarily going all out on events but focusing much more on witnessing and friendship over the long haul. It might mean creating opportunities to meet people we wouldn’t otherwise meet – sometimes at the church through things we run for the community and other times being involved in things run by the community which we can involve ourselves – but it means working on those relationships.

Nobody should look at us and think it looks like we’ve got a great set of wheels they could copy too. What we do might work for you, but it equally might not. But nor should you look at the church that looks very similar to yours and assume what they do will work the same for you either. In the end, you have to do the work of getting to know your community, understanding what will best serve them, and then organising your evangelism around both what your community want/need (who will actually come?) and what your church is in any position to do (who will actually run this?) Those two things are rarely the same between any two churches.