8. How Would You Answer

The pressure is on. You are in a city council meeting for your community. One of the members of the council has just asked you to stand and give a report. The Council person says, “What benefit does the property on which your church stands provide to the city?”
What is your answer?
Time’s up! Did you have a ready response? Is there one answer, or do you have a host of possible answers?
In the book, “The Externally Focused Church,” the authors tell of such an experience for Tom Shirk, pastor of Calvary Bible Church in Boulder, Colorado. He was able to tell that his church had built a Habitat for Humanity house, renovated a house for runaway teens, and the church building served as an overflow homeless shelter for the city. Not a bad response.
How about your congregation? Most of us aren’t in congregations large enough to have a list that long, but all of us should be able to demonstrate that we are an active and vital part of the community we serve.
While it is good for us to worship each week and provide Christian education for our members, all of that only amounts to taking care of ourselves. Jesus commanded us to love God, but Jesus also told us to love our neighbors.
As it turns out, there is ample opportunity for loving. We can do simple things such as hosting funeral dinners in the community without charge or hosting Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts in our building. We can take it up a notch and offer our Christian education space as a day care during the week even though the children scuff the floors and scratch the paint. We can go outside of our building and into the school to do tutoring, or over to the clothes closet to keep its doors open during the week.
In our society’s current context, we can hold career fairs or hold classes about balancing our financial checkbooks (Financial Peace University is a popular offering these days). Here in north Missouri, we have a need to work with community leaders to stop the meth labs that set up in our communities, and we need to help create business that will add to our population in the community. Our teens need healthy and safe places to gather, and we need to help improve the quality of housing for those who are moving into our communities.
As I travel across northwest Missouri, I often hear church members say that the new people in the community don’t want to come to church. I am told that the newcomers are different from the old-timers, and they don’t care as much about the community.
It could be that our problem is that we keep thinking those new people should be coming to us rather than us going to them. Perhaps they are not interested in our churches because they don’t see us making a difference in the lives of people. It is normally true that people will participate in what they value and where they find value. The more we can do to make a difference in the lives of others the fewer excuses our members will have for being in other places each Sunday.
Are our people too busy to be in church these days? Do they often say they have just gotten out of the habit? Do they seem to make it less of a priority? If so, our best bet for getting them back in the habit is to turn them on to serving others. If the new people in our community don’t want to come in our doors, it may be that our best way to get them involved is to wander over to their house to see how we can help them.
When we do that, we will always have a ready answer when the questioner challenges us to show how we are making a difference.

7. Keep it Simple

It is simple.
At least that is what Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger concluded in their book, “Simple Church.” They contend that we struggle as congregations because we make things too complicated. We try to do too many things. We wander in too many directions, and we have trouble keeping our focus.
I suspect they are right. Over the years, we have tried to be many different things in our society. We once thought we were the ones to start the hospitals and colleges across the land. At another time, we initiated the pre-schools, day cares, and Parents’ Day out programs. We went through a phase of thinking we were responsible for building the recreation buildings on behalf of the communities that surround us. Early in the 20th Century, we considered ourselves the social gathering spot where folks could get together and catch up on the news in town. Soon after that, we thought our task was to offer the place where people could get together and salute the flag and talk of patriotism.
And that is just a partial list of the phases we have gone through in the United States. It seems that the Church is constantly tinkering with its mission as we try to figure out what we offer the world. Looking back at the list, we have done much good for our society. None of those phases were bad when they started because they started as an outgrowth of our mission. In several cases, though, they quickly became our mission and we took our identity out of their success rather than measuring their success by how they helped us accomplish our mission.
Rainer and Geiger call us back to a simpler approach. They suggest that all we really need to do is 1) Know, believe, articulate, and live out our mission, 2) Implement a step by step plan for accomplishing the mission, 3) Align all of our resources toward carrying out that plan, and 4) maintain focus to the point of choosing not to do many of the good things that are not helping us accomplish our mission. Each part of this process is vital to the success of the others.
Our mission is simple. Though we spend many hours writing mission statements and trying to use just the right words, all we really need to do is go back to our Book of Discipline. It describes our mission as “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.“ Our mission is not to have the nicest building, not to take in the most money, not to keep church members happy, and it is certainly not to keep the doors open until we die. Rather, our mission is to seek out those who don’t know the love of Christ, offer them this life-giving love, help them mature in the faith, and send them forth offer that love in the world.
Our process of implementation is simple. It often doesn’t seem like it because we try to do so many things. However, our process doesn’t have to be complicated. Some have said it is Know God, Love God, Serve God. Others would add some connecting steps between those three. However, we might express it, though, we simply need to know the steps and be sure we connect them to one another. We should keep asking, “where does worship fit in the process,” “what are we doing to help people mature in the faith,” “what opportunities are we giving for people to reach out to others in the community?”
Alignment is simple. Every employee and every volunteer should know her or his role in carrying out the process. As long as each person knows that they are helping the congregation carry out its mission in a specific way, he or she can be more effective. Do we offer Parents’ Day Out? The answer doesn’t lie so much in whether the community would benefit from it as much as it lies in how it helps the church make disciples for the transformation of the world.
Focus is simple, but hard. Over the years many of our congregations have begun projects that are worthwhile and sometimes profitable. They may have helped accomplish the mission when they started, but more recently they have simply become something we always do. Focusing requires us to have the courage to quit doing them. Is that fall sale helping us make disciples, or is it simply the project that helps us pay the bills? Is the day care program bringing new people into the church, or is it simply draining the energy of those who might be able to focus on something else. If we are going to get back to simplicity, we have to know what God calls us to do and be and what God is not calling us to do and be.
Keep it simple. Make Disciples. Nourish their growth. Send them out to transform the world.