THE CONTINUUM OF OUTREACH MINISTRY

 

As churches these days scramble to recover from decline and loss of membership many are deciding they have to focus beyond their walls.  This is not new.  It’s just that in the last half of the last century people just walked in the door, and churches had enough to do just making programs effective and meaningful for them.  Now we know we have to go to the people.  Jesus challenged his disciples to connect most of all with those who are poor and marginalized.  So we seek to do the same.  As both a pastor and social worker I’ve been at it all my life and I’ve learned some things.  I find there is a continuum of outreach ministry, moving by stages into deeper engagement with the people and then into the underlying causes of people’s struggles.    

We start by giving financially, putting money in the plate for this or that. Small children give pennies for starving kids in Africa.  Attenders give to some specific cause, as our hearts are tugged and swayed.  We might support an agency of the denomination.  Our church sponsors another congregation in Mozambique.  Or, we give to a Co-Care fund upon which local school social workers can call when a family is in need.  I have a Pastor’s Discretionary Fund to which people can give, never knowing who the recipient is on the other end.   

This giving can lead to volunteering.  Givers to the work of a local agency decided to give their time as well, sorting used clothes or stocking a food pantry.  100 people from four churches gather on a Saturday with rakes and shovels to help clean yards of seniors in the neighborhood.  This is direct service: charity work.                                                            

The next step is to become engaged in personal development programs, activities which help people make new choices or develop particular life skills.  This might include drug or alcohol recovery, or after-school tutoring with children.  School-based and school-linked programs increasingly involve faith-based organization collaborations- a school and a congregation partnering, with dozens of volunteers from a church in a particular school.  Naturally, such programs can engage school parents, who become church members, and all ends of the partnership are strengthened.  The primary intervention is through relationship-building.  In measurable ways people’s lives are changed. 

Such programs inevitably identify systemic community issues which can be addressed through community development.  At Grace Church in Saint Louis we discovered elderly homeowners who could not afford to keep up their historic homes.  As homes deteriorated, other property values suffered. So we initiated a repair program deploying visiting youth mission work teams to do exterior home repairs and landscaping.  We learned about government and private lending opportunities, and helped engage the seniors in more substantial housing rehabilitation where needed.  We worked with the local neighborhood stabilization officer and housing and community development corporations.  

When the people of a church roll up their sleeves to become integrally involved in the lives of people in the community, you see the patterns.  You discover the laws and policies which need to be changed to alleviate suffering or wrong.  The dialogue and research leads to social justice advocacy.  As Bishop Robert Schnase wrote, “The church also has a responsibility to bear witness to wider social change; …tend[ing] to legislative policies, changes in public funding, legal proposals, and business practices, with an eye for protecting the most vulnerable in our society.” (Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, p. 99.) Church members advocate on behalf of the poor and marginalized. 

But the most effective strategy and goal for the long term is empowerment of people to address their own issues.  This is most effectively done through community organizing.  We organize block units and a board of local neighbors to make it all work.  This naturally leads to more issues identification.  Citizens are brought together to research issues, mobilize more support, and confront decision makers to get the changes needed. As a result perhaps the city puts resources into demolition of unsafe buildings, closing drug houses, or packaging land for re-developers in partnership with local leaders.  Organizing might address transportation, health care, education, or other identified issues, whether at the very local (micro) level, at regional or state (mezzo) levels, or national or global (macro) levels. If you think about it, a religious denomination IS a community organization.  So, the institutional questions are, “For what is it organized?” and “Does that need to change?” "How might we better turn our church outreach work over to residents of our community?"

Both mercy ministry (giving, volunteering, direct services, personal development) and justice ministry (community development, justice advocacy and organizing) are necessary..  Mercy alone is not enough.  All of this is part of what we mean by “evangelism.”   People want to participate in a church which is doing what they believe a church ought to do.  We ‘make disciples’ by engaging them in mercy and justice ministry.  Many churches are finding they grow in number and spirit through outreach ministry. Where are you and your church on this continuum? 

Could American Christianity Fade Away?

I've been reading The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins.  I love his writing. Always makes me think.  This book is turning my map of Christian history upside down.  I remember in seminary I learned Church History out of that textbook by Kenneth Scott Latourette.  He was an evangelical expansionist and missionary, so he gave us Church History from that perspective.  Then later I read Justo Gonzalez' history, an attempt to tell Church History from the underside, the perspective of oppressed people and peasants rather than lords and ladies. Those were the liberation theology years, when I was a 'fellow' student of the Womanists and learning from such greats as James Cone and Cornell West and Kosuke Koyama and Dorothee Soelle.

But Jenkins tells a different story.  Did you know that the Christian faith expanded much more rapidly to the east than to the west?  Nestorian and Jacobite Christians covered Asia Minor (now Turkey) and China and even India.  Korea had a strong Christian Church when Catholics were still evangelizing in northern England and Europe. The Nubian Church in Abyssinia and Ethiopia had more followers than the Coptic Alexandrian Church in Egypt. Christianity had many adherents in northern Africa, with the center of the Church in the 5th century arguably in Carthage, not in Rome or Constantinople.

But then came Mohammed and Islam.  In just a couple of hundred years the Moslem faith spread like wildfire. Arabic replaced Greek and Syriac as the principal cultural and government language across the Mediterranean world.  Moslems had tremendous and positive influence wherever they entered.  But Jenkins points out that Islam was greatly influenced by Christian and Jewish practices.  Religions meld.  Still do.

So now we are increasingly secularized in America, as in Europe in the past several decades.  Less than 40% of Americans are connected to a church, and less than 20% attend. Meanwhile, Islam is growing.  Hinduism is growing.  We have a large Hindu Temple just down the street from our home in Bridgeton.  Thousands gather there for high holy days.  And we are welcome to join them.  Hinduism is remarkably absorptive.

We hear these days that more Christians have been martyred in the last hundred years than any other time in history.  That may be so. Jenkins liturgizes the terrible pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The Turks, apparently, committed more genocide on Christians before World War I than Hitler killed Jews in World War II.  Whole populations of Christians have been wiped off the map.  But Christians have also massacred Moslems.  I did not know that perhaps a majority of the Mongol Horde were professing Christians. They drew no quarter.  Then there was Bosnia and Herzogovinia just fifteen years ago.

My greatest 'take away' from this book is that we are always only a generation away from extinction.  the purpose for us as Christians is to share the gospel, to make disciples.  But my prayer is that in this creative time in which we live we can come to understand that discipleship does not have to include exclusivism and genocide. Can we love one another across lines of religion, and thus demonstrate the power of Christ, without having to declare Him as 'Lord' with 'one way' language?  I think so.