It is disastrous to develop a recruitment process that is invitational without being expectational. To invite someone on a life changing journey without giving them some idea of what that journey will do to them and require of them is not only a set-up for horrible retention, it's cruel. And yet that is exactly what many mainstream churches have opted to be: invitational but not expectational. Perhaps because of an overall decline in attendance, membership, and general participation in our local churches we feel that we will scare people off if we have high standards. So we choose instead to invite everyone (which is very Biblical) and only express the positive possibilities of being a disciple without being honest about any aspects of Christ's calling that are very difficult (which is unbiblical). Perhaps we figure that if we can get new people to keep coming to our churches and get involved in our ministries and programs, they will naturally become disciplined, faithful, and trustworthy servants of the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately we see that this is not at all the case. In most of our congregations the back door that lets people out of engagement in the church is wider than the invitational one that people enter into at the front. We experience high turnover, a lack of committed leaders, and slipping sense of responsibility among most members.
I believe a big part of our problem happens at the moment of invitation. Jesus did not use marketing strategies or persuasive techniques to gain disciples. He invited them to a full commitment to his own person and if they asked what the conditions were, he was clear that the relationship with Him must be primary to all other concerns. He did not compete with the folks who had major allegiance elsewhere. Instead his market was those who had nowhere to go at all, or those who were desperately seeking for a new way of life. There simply was not a group that was invited to be moderately engaged in the life of discipleship, to have Jesus as one of many Lords. That is not to say that there were not moderately engaged people. As the opening of this passage in Matthew points out, there were crowds that followed Jesus and he would accommodate their relationship to himself. But these crowds are distinguished from disciples. As far as we can tell there is little difference between the crowd that listened intently to Jesus' teachings and the crowd that shouted "Crucify Him!"
It is time that our local churches are more honest about what Christ calls his disciples to be and become. To do this we must first seek an earnest understanding of what that is. What does it mean to be a disciple? What are we really inviting people to? Moderate participation in a religious organization? Or life changing commitment to a savior and community that was designed by God to transform the world?
