Congregations Who Soar with Faith Focus on the People They are Called to Serve
A Post in the Congregations Who Soar with Faith Series
Rundown:
FTI Blog Post 106 is an article in a periodic series called Soaring with Faith: The Difference Maker for Congregations. This post includes—the Article, personal Reflections from George, and questions for your Reaction.
Background: Who Are Congregations Who Soar with Faith
Congregations who Soar with Faith have exceptional clarity about their mission, purpose, and core values. Of great importance, they are captured by God’s empowering vision for their full Kingdom potential. Clearly present are substantive vitality and vibrancy, leadership competency and trust, an external local and global missional focus, effective disciplemaking processes, and creative ministry innovations.
Congregations Who Soar with Faith Focus on the People They are Called to Serve
By George Bullard
Soaring Congregations focus on their community context, or the people groups they feel called of God to serve. If they are called to serve their community context they strive to understand and strategize effectively for their community. If they are called to serve various people groups, they seek to understand the demographic, lifestyle, and spiritual needs of people.
Is Another Pandemic Needed to Help Us Focus on People?
When the global pandemic revealed itself early in 2020, nations throughout the world responded without a clear sense of how to counter the fast-spreading virus. It was unclear if this would mirror other epidemics or become a long-term pandemic.
How to react was a guess. Science revealed some possibilities. Competing voices confused early response.
People were frightened. Some passed it off as nothing. Leaders in the medical and scientific world realized the virus would overwhelm health care systems. Others felt this was alarmist.
Epidemiologists who understood the patterns of epidemics that become pandemics sought to speak into the situation. Not everyone was listening then – or now.
Governments threw resources at the pandemic. Addressing the symptoms as the pandemic spread. Attacking the causes later.
Daily news conferences talked about masks, PPE (Personal protective equipment for infection), ventilators, other health care equipment, and medicines produced in inadequate numbers for the fast-spreading virus.
Governments and businesses – at least in the first world – bragged about the resources they produced or bought, and shipped to various locations. A huge information gap emerged between what was heard at news conferences and the reports from local communities.
Missing was a focus on people who were directly impacted by these relief efforts. It was more about what government and business were doing, than help for people.
Millions of beneficial items shipped. Too little was known about their accessibility by the people needing help.
Relief must be about people in every community context, and what is actually happening with them! That remained an unknown and a frustration during the pandemic for people in many communities.
Congregations Must Focus on People Groups in Community Context
Similar things happen in the everyday life of congregations. Talk focuses on the programs, events, processes, ministries, activities offered by congregations to which they hope people will respond.
Few churches realize their focus is on the wrong starting point. It is not about what we offer to people. Those things for which we want them to sign up and attend.
It is about the opportunity to love, challenge, show compassion, and be gracious to people. For the people on whom we focus to feel our efforts are genuine and that we care deeply about them
Soaring churches begin by talking about the people to whom God is sending them. The holy actions most needed.
Or the community context where God wants the church to be received through their spiritual and compassionate ministries focused on the people who live there.
Any strategic thinking about the people we are called to serve must begin with understanding the people. Plus, the community or network context in which people live.
What is unique about the people group? How will ministry and evangelism work best in a given community context?
This is not the approach of many congregational leaders. They do not start with people. They start with the programs, events, processes, ministries, and activities in which they want people to engage.
The pastor and staff seek laypeople they can get to lead these programs. The laypeople focus on the pastor and staff because that is why they were hired.
Laypeople often talk about programs that were successful in former churches they attended. Or the ones they or their children experienced growing up.
Pastors and staff persons in their quest for a quick fix launch the program they learned about at a recent conference, read in a new book, or heard from a ministry colleague.
Focus on the People the Church is Called to Serve! Congregations should focus on the people they are called of God to serve. Begin by asking important questions.
Who are they? What are their characteristics? Where do they live? What is their life situation? What are their lifestyle habits? How do they approach spiritually in their lives?
Where can you get accurate information about them? Are they our kind of people? Does that even matter? Will they want to change our church?
How can we best love them unconditionally? Share the Good News in ways which will connect with them? Invite them into a genuine spiritual community relationship?
Who are the missional volunteers in our congregation who have the spiritual gifts, life skills, and cultural networks to connect with these people? How can these volunteers best be received by the community context or people groups to whom God is sending your congregation?
So many questions! Perhaps you are already tired just thinking about them. “Let’s just sponsor an event at church and see how many people come,” you say.
We have all heard someone reference the fake openness of their congregation saying, “Everyone is welcome here. Our doors are open for anyone to come and worship.”
Probably these people have never debriefed a person who visited worship and left saying they would never be back again.
Reflections by George
The first new church launch in which I was directly involved met in small conference rooms and sleeping rooms in a motel along an interstate highway. Having my Sunday School class in a motel bedroom as a fifteen-year-old was titillating. Having my mother as the teacher took the slightest bit of a teenage boy’s joy away.
The motel conference room in which the worship service met could comfortably seat 60 people. Seventy could crowd in as long as no one told the fire marshal.
An interesting thing happened once attendance reached the room’s capacity. Up until that time the enthusiasm for reaching new people was intense. Once room capacity was reached the desire to keep reaching people waned.
Room capacity did not cause a change in the theology or missiology. It changed our practice. Organizational and institutional development took over.
“We need a bigger place to meet and then we can once again start inviting people to join with us,” appeared to be the mantra of leaders. This replaced the strategy of connecting with people and communities.
In this new congregational expression it was an early sign of culture eclipsing theology and missiology. When this happens in a congregation, it is difficult to restart a focus on people not currently connected with the congregation.
It moves from genuinely connecting with people to offer a Christ-centered spiritual journey, to reaching people to make our congregation’s programs, ministries, and activities successful.
When this happens, people become a means to an end rather than focusing on their spiritual relationship with our Triune God, and their development as disciples as our focus.
Soaring churches care about the community context to which God is sending them, and the people who need to hear and receive the Good News of Jesus.
Reactions:
You are invited to share some reactions (comments)—using the link below—to this article and my reflections. Here are three questions to guide your reaction:
Is your congregation soaring with faith? If so, what is the evidence you would offer?
Does your congregation focus on the people or the community context it is called to serve, or on the programs, ministries, and activities you want to offer?
Or do you see reaching people and communities for your congregation in a different way and would be willing to share it below as a comment?