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Forming Faith

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Just walk across the room

by Keith Hostetler

I was motivated to begin an evangelism pilgrimage when I saw our church attendance decline. Perhaps that is the wrong motivation. In a ten-year period, our congregation declined from 170 to some Sundays under 100. We lost families, individuals, extended families. In many cases people left because they felt as though they were not cared for or were misunderstood. I also came to the sad recognition that our congregation could not have babies fast enough to grow our membership and replace the older members that would be passing in our congregation.

As chairman of the Christian education commission I realized that part of the responsibility for training the congregation in evangelism fell to our committee. Although we knew evangelistic techniques, our congregation continued to shrink in size. Why, if we are spiritually mature and committed, aren’t we effectively reaching out to share our faith?

We look to Jesus for examples to model our theology and how to live our lives after him. Yes, we are willing to pass out the food to the hungry. But when we look at who he spent time talking with, we are faced with a severe challenge. We don’t know tax collectors, prostitutes. I suspect many in our congregations don’t have many friends or acquaintances in these categories. For many of us, our Mennonite separateness has taught us to avoid those people.

So how does a shy Mennonite reach out to others? We decided to learn how to start friendships with other people. We brought together the adult classes to study the book, Just Walk across the Room, by Bill Hybels, on friendship evangelism. The book encourages readers to have the courage to "walk across the room" to begin friendships. "The goal for every Christian is to reflect Christ’s love and follow his example by taking simple walks across rooms—leaving our circles of comfort and extending hands of care, compassion, and inclusiveness to people living far from God," Hybels writes.

Is this friendship evangelism working? A little. We have seen new faces, but sometimes they seem to quickly fade away. We still have a lot of work to do on integrating new people into the social fabric of our congregation. We need to embrace each new person and help them become part of the body of Christ.

At the same time as we were studying friendship evangelism, some were putting faith into action by creating a street ministry of serving soup to the homeless in Cleveland. God blessed those actions by bringing into our lives colorful, needy, and loving people. We found that in taking the risk of sharing our faith and asking total strangers about theirs was not that difficult. They filled our souls as much as we filled their stomachs.

But, when the day was done, we returned to our rural homes. Our attempts to bring them home and show them our way of life failed. Instead, God led some in our congregation to start a food pantry that is serving

40 families a month, more than are in our congregation. Can we move from providing food to providing life? Are we willing to be friends to those on different tiers of society, those that aren't self sufficient enough to make it on their own or have different morals? Is this how we are called to increase the kingdom?

So how does a shy Mennonite reach out to others?

As I think of those that need to be reached, I look at the church growth models of the mega churches in our communities. I see many of them attempting to attract the beautiful middle class families. We would like those families too, but perhaps our mission is different. Perhaps we are called to reach out to the tax collectors, sinners, thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes. We have to invite them into our lives. How can we do that? By walking across the room to meet them.

Keith Hostetler is a health care management consultant. He is a member of Crown Hill Mennonite Church in Rittman, Ohio.