In John 1:35-51 Jesus calls his first disciples. They had previously been followers of John the Baptist, but John points them towards Jesus.

Jesus asks them:

“What are you looking for?”

They ask where he is staying, and Jesus says:

“Come and see.”

Then we read that they “came and saw where he was staying and they remained with him that day”. One of them was Andrew. His first action was to find his brother, Simon, and bring him to Jesus.

The story is of those searching for truth, finding it in Jesus and sharing it with others.

One of my favourite bible quotations consists of those three words:

“Come and see”.

We sometimes think that being a Christian is about going to church, believing certain things, behaving in certain ways… But here it seems that discipleship is an open-ended invitation to “come and see”. As the song lyric has it,

“Who knows where the road will lead us?
Only a fool would say!”[1]

The invitation is to walk the road with Jesus: no guarantees about what lies ahead, other than the promise that Jesus accompanies us in this life and offers something better in the life to come.

I became a Christian in 1979 at St Aldate’s Church in Oxford. It was my first Sunday as an undergraduate. I had arrived as an agnostic, from a non-church family; not a church-goer of any kind, but some members of the college Christian Union asked me to go to church with them. At St Aldate’s, I heard a sermon which ended with an invitation, and I responded. I joined a Beginners’ Group (‘Alpha’ hadn’t been invented yet!) and became a regular worshipper.

I joined the college Christian Union. The following year, I was leading the college Christian Union and helping to run a Beginners’ Group at St Aldate’s. After graduation, I spent a year working as the Verger at St Aldate’s – a post that acted a bit like an internship, giving hands-on experience of working with the church. Like a number of vergers before me and since, I went on to ordination. I had no idea at the beginning that that is where my journey would take me. Ordained ministry led to me serving in parishes as diverse as Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, Clock Face and Sutton Manor in St Helens, Halewood in Liverpool, and Stretton and Appleton Thorn in Cheshire!

And that’s my point. Who knows where the road will lead us when we respond to the invitation from Jesus to “come and see”? Christian discipleship is an adventure, a call to follow Jesus wherever that might take us. How on earth have we managed to turn that call to adventure into the duty of attending church on a Sunday morning?!

Which is not to say that I am against people going to church. I’m all in favour of it! Theoretically. But I’m sure that’s a long way from the call to discipleship that Jesus makes. Church on Sunday is there to encourage us to live as Christians from Monday to Saturday. What we do from Monday to Saturday is to live out the stuff we say, hear and sing on Sunday morning!

Where will your journey take you? The invitation from Jesus is “come and see”.

[1] “All The Way”, Lyrics by Sammy Cahn (1957), song made famous by Frank Sinatra