• Have the main service on Sunday in the morning. Everyone loves to sleep in on Sunday morning.
• Dress up when you go to church. It makes things more intimidating, and makes people without nice clothes feel like church is not for them.
• Use hymns/liturgies/versions of the Bible that are hundreds of years old. That way things will be harder to understand and most connections to real life will be lost. Phrases like "Lamb of God" and "marching to Zion" bring the most wonderful blank stares from the unchurched.

quote:

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Christianity often appears, however, to preach that if men will try hard enough to live Christian lives, the crucifixion can somehow be reversed. This is because Christianity has forgotten itself, forgotten that always it must first of all stand at the cross. Not that this world cannot be improved-one of our goals is certainly to work for peace, justice, freedom. But while it can be improved, it can never become the place God intended it to be. Christianity does not condemn the world. The world has condemned itself when on Calvary it condemned the One who was its true self. "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not" (Jn. 1:10). If we think seriously about the real meaning, the real scope of these words, we know that as Christians and insofar as we are Christians. We are, first of all, witnesses of that end: end of all natural joy; end of all satisfaction of man with the world ahd with himself; end, indeed, of life itself as a reasonable and reasonably organized "pursuit of happiness." Christians did not have to wait for the modern proponents of existentialist anxiety, despair and absurdity to be aware of all this. And although in the course of their long history Christians have much too often forgotten the meaning of the cross, and enjoyed life as if "nothing had happened," although each one of us too often takes "time off-we know that in the world in which Christ died, "natural life" has been brought to its end.

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And yet, from its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible. But within this impossibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning. Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.

Let us, therefore, forget for a while the technical discussions about the Church, its mission, its methods. Not that these discussions are wrong or unnecessary-but they can be useful and meaningful only within a fundamental context, and that context is the "great joy" from which everything else in Christianity developed and acquired its meaning. "For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy"-thus begins the Gospel, and its end is: "And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy." (Lk. 2:10, 24:52). And we must recover the meaning of this great joy. We must if possible partake of it, before we discuss anything else- programs and missions, projects and techniques.

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