Welcome to Rule of Life

We have produced some resources to help children's groups from 3 to 11 take part in the Bring One Friend challenge

This year we are challenging every member of every congregation to Bring One Friend to an advent, Christmas or epiphany service. This course helps you go step by step through the challenge as together we build a bigger church by bringing one friend.

As well as following the Bishop's summer reading challenge you may like to encourage your church's young people to follow their own version with this challenge designed by Suzanne Finch, from Christ Church Newburgh and St James Westhead.

Join Bishop Paul in this year’s Summer Challenge reading the book of Jonah. Sign up to this course and you will receive weekly emails encouraging you to read sections of Jonah alongside the companion book - Journeying with Jonah: the struggle to find yourself’ by the Roman Catholic scholar Denis McBride. Find out more about the challenge and how you can get involved.

The third reflection examines how the fears we might have prevent us from inviting our friends. Bishop Paul shows how this is not sinful and draws from experience and the bible to provide advice on how to overcome our fears.

Last week we began our “Bring One Friend Challenge”. In my first reflection, I considered the significance of you being someone who invites. Your friends and acquaintances trust you. They will seriously think about coming to church, and they will weigh the claims of the Lord Jesus if you ask them to. Because it’s you, they may come. And so I reflected on persistence in inviting, and my colleagues and I set a challenge for you, namely to consider whom to invite. But if you’ve done that, and you have a shortlist of people, what are you going to invite them to? This reflection helps you consider that.

Our first challenge helps you think around who you are going to invite.

Inviting people is both easy and terrifying. Easy because all we have to do is ask. Terrifying because we have a natural fear of rejection. So as we start to think about Bringing One Friend to a service or event this advent and Christmas we need to reflect on what is stopping us. Invitation is the royal road to church growth. Clever flyers, or videos, or talks on the radio – all these have their place, but research has shown that most people come to church, and then come to faith, because of a friend's invitation. In the first of his reflections, Bishop Paul looks at the power of invitation and tackles some of the fears that prevent us from making that invitation.