Fifteen years ago, some Christians volunteered to help serve and prepare food for a New York City AIDS hospice with a clientele primarily of homosexual men. Since the hospice was involved in the gay rights movement, its administrators were nervous about letting church volunteers inside their doors. They made the expectations clear: you can come and serve, but don't proselytize.
Today, Christians still come and serve food in the hospice. But they also come to help with something else, something that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago: a worship service.
This service was started at the request of hospice residents, who over the years developed deeper and deeper friendships with the church folks who showed up every week to offer a loving presence. Now the name of Jesus is heard regularly in what was once the most secular of environments.
This story illustrates one of the stickier relationships in ministry: word and deed. While most Christian leaders will quickly say the two can't be separated, the question remains, especially with more and more churches focusing on justice ministry: how open can Christians be about their faith? In many situations, the "serving" is welcome but "proselytizing" is not. How do Christians bring the name of Jesus into works of compassion, mercy, and justice?
The love of Jesus in public schools
"We bring Jesus in through the relationships that we build," says Efrem Smith, pastor of Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
For years Sanctuary Covenant has ministered within the Minneapolis public schools, running a tutoring program to help children get reading and math skills up to grade level. Another initiative is called Hip Hop Academy, an after-school arts program for a district in which arts programs have been slashed. It teaches kids to enjoy hip-hop culture apart from its associations with gangs, drugs, alcohol, and abuse of women.
More recently, since Minneapolis teachers have experienced budget cuts and layoffs, Sanctuary Covenant has tried to bring encouragement through gestures of appreciation, such as gift cards or coffee and bagels in the teachers' lounge.
As the AIDS hospice once did, the public school system prohibits outright evangelism. But that doesn't mean that these ministries haven't borne fruit.
"We've seen teachers and families of our kids join our church and come to Christ," says Smith, "not because we went in and said, 'You need to accept Jesus,' but because we brought the love of Jesus to them."
So how are Sanctuary Covenant tutors told to approach their ministry? "We say, 'Go in there prayed up, and tutor that kid,'" says Smith. "'Help them in their reading and math skills, and trust the Holy Spirit. Ask God to use you as a tutor to extend his love and present his gospel.' We should not underestimate how God works through our integrity and character as we do the work, and we should also trust the Holy Spirit to do something on the hearts of those people so that they end up asking questions like 'How can I get to your church this Sunday?' or 'How can I learn more about God?'"
Adds Smith, "We can't guarantee everybody we encounter will become a Christian, but we can guarantee everybody we encounter experiences the love of Christ."
Disclosing why we do this
NorthWood Church in Keller, Texas, pursues justice ministries, among other places, in Vietnam, working in poverty alleviation and development through hospitals, orphanages, and education. It also offers business classes for corporations and vocational schools for kids.
If the name of Jesus can spark trouble anywhere, it's in a place like Vietnam. But even if NorthWood volunteers don't come into the country with suitcases full of Bibles, they also don't mask their allegiance to Jesus.
"I hate it when Christians sneak in and do the humanitarian work and don't talk about who they're doing it for," says Bob Roberts, pastor of NorthWood. He thinks that when churches try to cover up their Christian purposes, they are not only disingenuous, but also naïve. Yet he sees it happening everywhere.
"As Christians we are having two conversations," he says. "We're having a public conversation—'World, this is who we are, this is what we believe'—and we're having a private conversation—'Well, this is what we really want to do.' But there are no private conversations anymore … people can go to your website. They're going to figure that out. And that comes across as deceit."
Roberts applies his "one-conversation" mentality to the church's many justice initiatives, since he often partners overseas with non-Christian leaders. He has found that he doesn't have to be bashful about his faith as long as he establishes common ground.
Roberts warns, however, that many Christians chase after common ground in the wrong way. For example, some Christians start with beliefs that they and their non-Christian partners can agree on (with Muslims, for instance, that Jesus brought a message from God) and then work their way back to the points of difference (Jesus was God himself), which they then try to resolve, usually by deemphasizing the distinctive beliefs. Roberts calls this an "inter-faith" platform.
Instead, he favors a "multi-faith" approach:
"As Christians and Muslims, we come side by side to work on projects together. I tell them, 'I'm grateful to be in a relationship with you because the best of both our faiths teaches us that we should be in a relationship. And at the end of the day, let's be honest; we have some irreconcilable differences in belief. But whether you ever agree with me or not, I'm going to love and serve you with all my might, because of Jesus living inside of me.'"
The distinction is that an inter-faith approach puts the focus on the beliefs, while a multi-faith approach puts the focus on the shared task. A parallel to multi-faith might be found in C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves. Lewis imagines that the ancient beginnings of friendship may have revolved around the hunt, with men pursuing their common goal shoulder to shoulder, and then filling in the idle times with talk.
In practice, then, interfaith tends to kill the conversation—we agree on this, we agree on that, and we will ignore what we disagree on—but multi-faith lets you build a relationship and keep talking through your differences as you work alongside each other.
At a meeting for one of these multi-faith initiatives, Roberts was asked to explain the Great Commission. Afterward he was approached by a wealthy Muslim. As Roberts remembers: "He sat down with me and said, 'Bob, I've enjoyed being around you. I love your heart. I hope you won't be offended, but I have really come to care about you.' Then he began to tear up. He said, 'Would you seriously think about the prophet Mohammed?'
"I told him that I had.
"'I know you've read the Koran. But I want you to read it slower.' And he began to cry more. 'Because I cannot stand the thought of you not being in heaven with me.'"
For Roberts, that statement was the "greatest compliment," and he says that to this day he talks about spiritual matters with this Muslim. The justice ministries sustain the lines of communication across religious lines so that these kinds of conversations can take place. And to Roberts, this service-oriented evangelism gives the message the right kind of shape.
"Most of our evangelism starts with the head," he says. "We think we've got to convince people first to change their beliefs, hoping that will ultimately change the heart.
"But here's my premise: we start with the hand. We sweat side by side. And from the hand, it captures the heart. I'm not saying theology is subjective to our experience. But I am saying that a lot of our theology is just wonderful as long as it's sterile and doesn't touch life. But when it begins to touch life, it's a radically different thing."
It takes time
Another church that grounds its message in deeds is Apostles Church in New York City. Apostles is an affiliate of Hope for New York (HFNY), an organization started in the early 1990s by Redeemer Presbyterian. HFNY works with churches to provide volunteer and financial support to organizations that serve the physical and spiritual needs of the poor, homeless, recovering addicts, at-risk youth, immigrants, and others.
Kristian Rose, pastor of community and justice for Apostles, explains: "If post-Christian, postmodern, secular New Yorkers are ever going to listen to the gospel, it's going to have to be legitimized in their eyes. So, while we're not doing mercy ministry to legitimize our message, we're doing mercy ministry because it's a demonstration of the message. And we have seen this awaken people's hearts."
How do volunteers verbally present the message as they demonstrate it? Rose says that every ministry situation is different.
"In some of our ministries, we're upfront and explicit in preaching the gospel (in soup kitchens, for instance). In others, we have to be more patient and build some relational capital first.
"We've been at the Ronald McDonald House for a couple of months," he says, "and I would venture to say that not all the residents there know that we're Christians. We didn't come in holding a 'Jesus Saves' banner or wearing church t-shirts. But as conversations are started and relationships are built, it becomes apparent. We're not trying to broadcast it, but just trying to be sincere."
Strategic partnerships
In many justice ministries, churches are partnering with secular or non-Christian agencies—Sanctuary Covenant and the Minneapolis public schools, NorthWood and the Vietnamese government, or Apostles and Ronald McDonald House. While these contexts can initially limit the way Jesus is talked about, these pastors also see that, when these partnerships are conducted well, they have great strategic value.
Most evangelism starts with the head, to change beliefs. we start with the hand, working side by side, which leads to the heart.
"You've got to have healthy boundaries," says Efrem Smith. "On the one hand, when I sit down with the mayor, I have to try to provide some genuinely workable solutions to the city's problems. And you know, when a kid is shot, the mayor will say, 'I don't care if you're Christian, Muslim, atheist, agnostic—whoever can help, please come.' And that's an open door for Christians to step in and show that there is something powerful about Christ's work as the solution.
"At the same time, we should never compromise who we are. Once I invited the mayor and city council members to come with us as we went on a prayer walk, and I told the mayor, 'We're going to pray, and we're going to say Jesus' name. Are you okay with that?' And he was okay, because he just wants to see crime reduced in his city. But if somebody invites me to something and says, 'You can pray but don't say Jesus,' I don't go."
Bob Roberts sees a couple of advantages behind NorthWood's secular partnerships in Vietnam.
"First, everyone you have a relationship with is someone who needs to hear the gospel. Second, a closed country like Vietnam becomes more open. If we were to focus primarily on going to the church there, we would be more limited. On the other hand, when we work through society to connect technology people with technology people and artists with artists, then there are no closed countries."
Back home in Texas, NorthWood serves its local communities with ESL classes, arts camps, health clinics, and community beautification. Roberts points to similar benefits there.
"Once again, you're connecting believers with nonbelievers; it gives you a public platform to live out your faith. And when you do this stuff in your community, you get credibility, and you get access. For example, as a result of what we've done, the mayor of Haltom City pulled together 15 top church leaders and said, 'We want to make our public schools available to you for these kinds of things.'
"You also get incredible press coverage. Churches want good stories, and it's cool to be in the news not because something was slick or something was sinful but because your church is making a difference."
For each of these churches, then, there is at least one recurring answer to the question of how we bring Jesus into justice ministry: relationships. Whether serving others in mercy, compassion, or justice, we cannot help but forge relationships, and if we hold fast our Christian identity, then into these relationships the gospel overflows.
Or maybe it actually moves both ways. For as we live more and more into the identity Christ has given us, we will be drawn all the more deeply into service.
"Serve not to convert," says Roberts. "Serve because you are converted."
And that's contagious.
Tim Avery is associate editor of Leadership.
Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
