For the past four years, a church in our area has grown at a phenomenal growth rate-more than 20 percent a year. From a single service in a strip mall, it now offers three Sunday morning services, two Saturday evening services, and a Wednesday night service. Without question the church needs a bigger facility.
Plenty of buildings are available for rent, but here’s the problem: repeatedly the city council has refused to give them the “conditional use permit” that would allow them to change locations and hold services in an industrial park, warehouse, or even the old flea market building. Today the church is trying to relocate further down the strip mall into a vacant former box store, but the city has threatened to declare the entire mall as “blighted” and just passed an ordinance whereby “there could be no church located within 25 feet of a liquor store.” A liquor store happens to be adjacent to the box store. (Normally ordinances of this type are passed to protect a church not the liquor store!) The city leaders, in effect, have declared, “Growing Churches Not Welcome Here.”
Is this a scene from a Peretti novel where the forces of good are pitted against the demonic forces of evil? Not necessarily. There’s another side to the story.
City leaders are elected to represent the interests of the community. By and large they are rational folks weighing economic alternatives. The city needs revenue, and to them, tax-producing businesses benefit the community more than churches do. Many city officials cannot imagine how a church could possibly benefit the community more than another Starbucks, Blockbuster, or tanning salon. They’ve never been given enough evidence to the contrary.
In contrast, on the west side of Jacksonville, Florida, every month the city council holds its meetings at Potter’s House Christian Fellowship. The mayor of Jacksonville has spoken at Potter’s House events and openly credits the church as one that is changing Jacksonville for the better.
What makes the difference? How can one group of city officials be so against a growing church while another group so openly embraces one?
A growing number of churches have realized that church has got to be more than growing attendance, seeker sensitivity, and small groups. They’re fighting the perception that churches are isolated, insulated, and uninvolved with the life of the neighborhood. Seeking to be transformational salt, light, and leaven, they’re taking ministry outside their four walls, and thinking about themselves and their neighborhoods differently.
Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin, pastor of Potter’s House continually challenges the 60-some pastors he mentors with a haunting question: “Would the community weep if your church were to pull out of the city? Would anybody notice if you left?”
Here’s how churches are making the changes necessary to transform their communities and leave people fundamentally better off-whether or not they ever join that particular church—and thus show themselves to be good neighbor.
From “serve us” to service
Chuck Colson has observed that when the Communists took over Russian in 1917, they did not make Christianity illegal. Their constitution, in fact, guaranteed freedom of religion. But they did make it illegal for the church to do any “good works.” No longer could the church fulfill its historic role in feeding the hungry, educating the children, housing the orphan, or caring for the sick. What was the result? After 70 years, the church was largely irrelevant to the communities in which it dwelt.
Take away service and you take away the church’s power, influence, and evangelistic effectiveness. The power of the gospel is combining the life-changing message with selfless service.
In the mid 1980’s a small group in Mariner’s Church in Costa Mesa, California, met for a year to study every Scripture that had to do with the people of God and the needs of a community. They read Christian authors and began to acquaint themselves with other community agencies that were meeting the needs of people. They challenged themselves with two questions—”What could we do?” and “What should we do?”
They landed on four ministries they felt they could help—the Orange County Rescue Mission, Habitat for Humanity, Hannah’s House (a women’s shelter), and World Impact (an urban church planting movement).
This was the beginning of Mariner’s “Lighthouse Ministries.” Lighthouse volunteer ministries are built around relationships. Light-house pastor Laurie Beshore says it this way: “What the hurting people of our community need to know is a small part of what they need. These people need someone to believe in them. And we believe in them.”
Today Lighthouse is employing volunteers’ hearts and entrepreneurial skills to believe in the under-resourced in Orange County. In 2001 Lighthouse Ministries employed nearly 3,400 church volunteers who gave 95,000 hours of service (the equivalent of 46 full-time staff!) in the form of tutoring foster children, mentoring motel families, taking kids to camp, visiting the elderly, teaching English at one of their learning centers, working in the Mariner’s Thrift Store ($168,000 in sales last year) distributing Christmas gifts, team building with teens at their leadership camp, assistance with immigration papers, working in transitional housing, or volunteering with Orange County Social Services. They they touched the lives of nearly 12,000 people in their community.
This year they had their first student from their Teen Leadership Team, who lives with his family of nine in a one-bedroom apartment, to be accepted to a 4-year college. Their mission of “Bringing Christ’s hope to those in need” is being fulfilled.
Embracing city services
In our Colorado community a number of pastors realized that they knew very little about the various agencies serving our community. They organized a one-day “Magic Bus Tour” to meet the directors of these agencies, to find out what they did and what help they needed.
They visited eight agencies, including the local homeless shelter, the food bank, a day-care facility, a women’s safe house, a home for runaway youth, and the AIDS project. Though initially met with skepticism, this was the beginning of bridge-building relationships between the churches and the city.
In the spirit of Jeremiah 29:7 (“Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper”), new openness, healing, and friendships have begun. Like Nehemiah who was changed when he came face to face with the needs of Jerusalem, our pastors were changed.
One pastor, who is now taking meals to AIDS patients on a weekly basis, was drawn into this ministry by two things: “This was a group of people who were in need of the grace of God and also the group I was most uncomfortable with, so I just thought it was something God wanted me to be a part of. If anything, this ministry is changing life.”
Nearly every community has a number of human service agencies, morally positive and spiritually neutral, that are doing their best to meet the needs of the under-served and under-resourced people of the community.
Rather than starting a new ministry (which is quite costly to begin and maintain) these pastors found they could form partnerships with existing human service agencies as “partner ministries” of their local congregations.
Instead of each congregation having its own food pantry, they partnered with the local community food bank. Now, when hungry people request food, they refer these folks to their “partner ministry” in which many of their members are serving, thus working side-by-side with others, but as partners who serve “in the name of Jesus.”
In our community, after the “Magic Bus Tour,” churches are effectively touching their cities with the love of Jesus through agencies and mechanisms that already exist! They are now ministering to AIDS patients and using their churches for overflow nights in partnership with the homeless shelter.
No need to expend all the energies to launch a separate tutoring program when Big Brothers and Big Sisters have 200 boys on a waiting list, and Christians are able to invest in the lives of these young people.
Scores of new volunteers are teaching children to read, building Habitat homes, and serving meals to the homeless.
From churches to The Church
Just as the church can be more effective in community transformation when it partners with the community, each congregation can be more effective as it unites with other churches doing together what can’t possibly done alone.
This recaptures the biblical sense that there is really one church in a particular community (The Church in Corinth—or, say, The Church in Little Rock) even though it’s made up of various local congregations throughout the city. All around our nation, from Boston to Maui, ministry leaders of different ethnicities and denominations are uniting around a common purpose, and in the process they are learning to be friends, prayer partners, and co-workers.
Little Rock, Arkansas, is a growing example of the effectiveness of working together. Several years ago several pastors began to meet yearly for a four-day prayer retreat. Praying together led to knowing, respecting, and eventually loving one another.
Unity of spirit grew into a resolute unity of purpose. Was there something they could do better together than any of them could do by themselves? The idea of implementing a significant community service project emerged.
Fellowship Bible Church (FBC) pastor Robert Lewis writes, “Whereas prayer became the catalyst for a new unity between our churches, good works have become a catalyst for building a new credibility with our community.”
The pastors made an appointment with the mayor of Little Rock and asked one question, “How can we help you?” The mayor responded with a list of challenges facing the greater Little Rock area.
For the past four years, more than 100 Little Rock congregations and over 5,000 volunteers have served their communities by building parks and playgrounds and refurbishing nearly 50 schools. They set records for Red Cross blood donations and have signed up thousands of new organ donors. They began reaching out to the community through “life skill” classes (on marriage, finances, wellness, aging, etc.) in meeting rooms at banks, hotels, and other public forums (with more than 5,000 people attending).
Together the churches have donated nearly a million dollars to community human service organizations that are particularly effective in meeting the needs of at-risk youth. They have renovated homes and provided school uniforms, school supplies, winter coats, and Christmas toys for hundreds of children.
After getting new shelving for her classrooms, one school principal said, “I think this is the most fabulous day of my life as far as education is concerned. I’ve been in this 29 years, and this is the first time a community or church project has come through for us.”
As a result of churches becoming The Church, they let their light shine brighter. The love and values of Jesus Christ are made real to the community. Did anyone notice?
Last year Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee commended the work of the faith community when he said, “It is the work of the church that makes possible what never could be accomplished by a governmental agency. A check will never substitute for a church.”
The city is my parish
As we see our congregations as part of a larger city church it frees us to think of our city as the parish in which God has placed us. A parish differs from a congregation in that a parish is a geographical scope of concern and responsibility. A congregation is a subset of a parish.
Urban theologian Ray Bakke says that every minister has two functions: (1) to be pastor to the church’s members and (2) chaplain to the community.
Rich Bledsoe is a pastor of a small church in our city.
“My congregation is around 70 people, but my parish is over 90,000!” he says. Rich loves his congregation but also has a heart for the parish. He thinks about the city, prays for the city, visits and prays with our city leaders and workers. Rich is a city pastor. His office is the local coffee shop. His tools are his cell phone and his laptop.
I see him as an embodiment of Isaiah 61 and those who “rebuild … restore … (and) renew” the city, thus earning the title, “And you will be called priests of the Lord, you will be named ministers of our God” (Isaiah 61:6).
A church they’d miss
Let’s finish the story of Potter’s House Christian Fellowship in Jacksonville. In 1988 Vaughn and Narlene McLaughlin moved into a depressed area of Jacksonville to begin a church designed to meet the needs of the whole person.
Today their converted Bell South building called the “multiplex” houses nearly 20 for-profit businesses including the Potter’s House Café, a credit union, a beauty salon, a graphic design studio, and a Greyhound Bus terminal, all started by church members who lacked capital but had a dream. Another building serves as an incubator for two dozen new businesses. The multiplex also houses a 500-student Christian Academy.
In addition to ministries of economic empowerment and education, they have nearly 25 other ministries such as a prison and jail ministry, youth ministry, Big and Little Brothers, and free car repair. They have a team of 250 volunteers who “look after things in the city” even if it means to simply sweep the streets of Jacksonville.
Though an outstanding preacher, Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin considers ministry what happens outside the church. “If you are not making an impact outside of your four walls, then you are not making an impact at all.”
In 1999 Bishop McLaughlin was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Florida State University. Is it any mystery why the city and its leaders have so wholeheartedly embraced Potter’s House?
The question he repeatedly asks is the question that churches in all kinds of neighborhoods are increasingly asking themselves: “Would the community weep if your church were to pull out of the city? Would anybody notice if you left?”
In Jacksonville, they would notice. In Jacksonville, they would weep.
Eric Swanson is the associate director of the Urban Church Network and lives in Louisville, Colorado.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
