Engaging the World
For those who lead in mission, service and
peace ministries.
Reading Your Community
By Art McPhee
If your congregation regards its work as a participation in God’s mission to the world, you will want your community involvements to align with God’s purpose. The Bible describes that purpose variously as: the coming of God’s shalom to the world; humanity brought under the lordship of Christ; and the coming of the fullness of God’s kingdom.
But where do you go from there? How do you read your community so that you know specifically what God wants you to do? A lot depends on where your eyes are fixed. Here is one set of suggestions for “looking”:
1. Look up.
With God’s crowning purpose as the controlling motif, missional churches do well to follow Jesus’ pattern of doing nothing apart from “looking up” for instructions from God. Churches need to be led and empowered by the Spirit. That means they need to look beyond logic for direction and be willing to move out of their comfort zones.
2. Look out.
The apostle Paul prays for doors to open for sharing the gospel (Col. 4:3). Following that image, churches must research their communities for open doors. It may mean surveying community needs, studying demographic changes, and finding out who the newcomers are. It will also mean stepping out into new ventures. For example, many churches have discovered that people who cannot come to church on Sunday morning will come on Friday or Saturday night. Who said God is a morning person?
3. Look in.
A deliberate inward look at church’s assets and limits—a self-reading—is essential if a church is to narrow its options for ministry. For example, in feeling a call to prison ministry we might see a need to serve not only offenders in crime, but also their victims, their families, and criminal justice professionals. However, because members have limited time and resources to give, the proliferation of opportunities in our minds must be balanced with the realities. The possibilities are endless; we need to do an honest assessment of what we can do.
4. Look around.
Reading a community also involves looking for ministry partners. Once upon a time, churches thought of one another as competitors. But today, we network. For example, a Boston Mennonite church, the area Southern Baptist Association, and a Messianic Jewish congregation built a worship center together. Together, the three groups hosted community meetings, coordinated community concerts, held joint Passover and Resurrection Sunday services, and lent their building to community groups. A decade later, the relationship continues. Possibilities for networking are different in each community, but they are important everywhere.
5. Look back.
Churches can also read their communities by asking historical questions. What have been the high and low points in the community? What scars do the people carry? What could the church do to ease the pain of factories closing and jobs lost? How might it work at healing old conflicts and wounds?
6. Look ahead.
A community cannot be read without anticipating its future. What does it mean for the future of ministry in Vancouver that more than 56 percent of the city consists of minorities? Or what does it mean for the future of ministry in a 24-percent Hispanic Goshen, Indiana? What are the implications of Internet literacy for future outreach?
And how will we reach the growing segment of our communities who have no church memory, or whose idea of music is alien to lovers of organs and four-part harmony? That question has led some churches to try new ways of reaching friends and neighbors. Contrary to those who charged that “contemporary worship” was a shallow alternative, they trusted the authenticity of their community readings. Their success has confirmed the value of their vision.
Finally, in thinking ahead, it is also important to remember that the old notion of a church’s community must be rethought. The community is no longer just the population in the proximity of the church building. Church members are more scattered than in the past, and so are the people they want to serve in ministry. Today’s lifestyles mean that relational patterns are different also. The old notion of a church’s “parish” therefore needs to be expanded. Our ministries will be more dispersed, more flexible, more often home-based, and more diverse than we have previously known—which makes the task of reading our communities especially urgent today.
Art McPhee is Associate Professor
of Mission and Intercultural Studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary
in Elkhart, Indiana.