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.