Engage 2026 is a national prayer initiative calling every believer to commit to praying for those who do not yet know Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Over time, our prayer is that this initiative will continue to deepen our understanding that prayer and mission are inseparable, and that every believer takes personal responsibility to pray for those around them.
During this year of prayer, we are inviting ministers to share experiences from their churches which may help and encourage other congregations. Rev Peter Turnbull, of Burghead and Elgin Free Church, has shared about Try Church Sundays.
By Rev Peter Turnbull
There remain – for the time being at least – a number of ‘high traffic’ times throughout the church calendar: those points in the year when coming to church might creep slightly higher up the average person’s agenda. Easter perhaps is one. Here in Moray, (with the presence of military bases), Remembrance is very much another. The biggest high-traffic event is, of course, Christmas.
We, like many other congregations, have tried to make the most of this as an opportunity to share Christ through kids’ events, all-age services, other one-off evangelistic events and, of course, the ubiquitous outreach Carol Service.
All of this means we have more folk ‘through the door’ in December than at any other time of the year. To try and capitalise on this interest we have often run follow-up courses in January – Christian Explored, Hope Explored, and, this year for the first time, the excellent ‘321’ course.
However, last year, partly just to mix things up, we took a different tack. Instead of a course we ran four ‘Try Church Sundays’ throughout January at both our Elgin and Burghed congregations. In many respects these were normal Sundays – we praised, we prayed, we preached, but we did all these things with a conscious eye to the outsider.
The services and the messages were evangelistic in tone. We walked through some of the life of Abraham asking questions like “who is God?” and “What is Faith?”.
Flyers for personal invitation and a paid video advert on social media helped us get the word out. The results weren’t dramatic, but guests came along, those on the fringes of church were also helped. All in all, it was a worthwhile exercise which was used by God as part of the picture of church growth and revitalisation here.