Michael didn’t want his church to be isolated, an island shut off from the world. Michael wanted his church to connect with the community, invite the community, and even be the heart and soul of the community. Michael wanted his church not to hide from the town or oppose the town but to be the center of his town. Michael wanted to live in a Christian community, not live apart from townsfolk who regarded his church as a weird or even dangerous cult. Michael wanted his church to show the community that its members were law-abiding, generous, stable, and fun people who contributed greatly to the community, indeed who were its rock and soul.
Engagement
Churches have biblical grounds on which to engage their communities. Monks may retire to their monasteries for spiritual contemplation and nuns to the convents, but even the monasteries and convents have historically been centers of learning, healing, feeding, serving, and other community life. Churches do best for their members and their communities when they actively engage the community, without compromising their commitments to the Lord but instead sharing the Lord’s love, truth, and sacrificial service. Churches rightly first concern themselves with the salvation, care, correction, provision, and healing of their members. But churches also rightly desire the same things for community members. Churches can guide, lead, sustain, serve, and redeem their communities in any number of creative ways. Don’t let your church exhibit the common fault of only looking inward. Help your church discern and pursue creative and redemptive community connections.
Facilities
One way in which churches can regularly connect with the community, already mentioned in a prior chapter, is to permit community uses of the church facility. Community discussions, social services, job fairs, book fairs, festivals, and training events may find your church’s sanctuary, hospitality area, classrooms, and grounds conducive for these and other activities, especially if the community lacks an equivalent community center or event center. What does your church gain? Churches can be intimidating places for guests who are unfamiliar with both the membership and the facility. When a church permits community uses of its facility, the church becomes a familiar place to local residents who might otherwise never venture into a church. Church facilities can also have powerful influences on the secular mind, with the orientation of their design, artwork, and displays toward the Lord. Local residents who attend a community event at your church and who have no church home will silently consider your church their home. Some of them may begin to attend Easter, Christmas Eve, or other special services, to eventually become members. They may also recommend your church to family members, friends, and new residents.
Services
Your church can also connect with the community through service opportunities. Some communities plan annual public service events like street clean ups, park clean ups, beach walk trash pickups, yard leaf raking, tree light stringing, flower-box planting, and other maintenance and improvement of public spaces. Encourage your church to participate. Wear t-shirts identifying your church, and encourage participating members to greet passersby and to pray publicly for the community. Encourage your church’s youth and adult groups to include community service as part of their ministries. Plan your church’s own annual or seasonal events calling all members to community service. Choose specific disadvantaged neighborhoods, groups, families, or individuals to serve, while communicating your church’s care and prayer for them. Follow up after the service with continued prayer and service support. Also join with community-service partners, whether other faith organizations or government agencies or social-service providers. Help your church connect with your community through service activities.
Meals
Community meals are another way churches connect with the community. Church meal and feeding programs can meet community nutritional and fellowship needs. Meals satisfy both the body and soul. Your church’s community meal may be potluck, cooked on site, or catered. The setting may be formal or informal, indoors or outdoors. Begin the meal with a blessing, and accompany the meal with live music, skits, toasts, speeches, or other joyful entertainment. While your church can hold meals for the membership, it can also promote meals as welcoming and serving the public. Holding your church’s community meal outdoors in picnic style with cookouts and during a local festival can increase community participation. Churches that support their local neighborhoods with open doors for periodic public meals can build substantial goodwill. Nothing quite witnesses like a friendly meal and accompanied by sensitive spiritual discussion. Use your church’s kitchen and skilled chefs and organizers to plan fun and meaningful community meals and public fellowship.
Education
Churches also connect with their communities through private Christian education. Private Christian schools from preschool through elementary and secondary school, and Christian colleges and universities, can make substantial contributions to local communities, not only in education but in the other community events, facilities, and services that schools bring. Churches establish their own Christian schools or join consortiums of churches supporting Christian schools. Your church may have families sending their children to local Christian schools and young adults attending a local Christian college. Your church can connect with local Christian schools by offering your pastor to preach at a chapel service, sending your church’s music team to lead chapel, and having members volunteer at the school and mentor school youth and college young adults. Your church can also offer scholarship support for member families sending their children to local Christian schools or support a local Christian school directly with funds. Help your church connect with local Christian schools as a way to engage the community.
Clubs
Your church may also support Christian clubs or similar initiatives in the local public schools. Public schools must not unlawfully discriminate against student religious rights and expression. Public school students have a constitutional right to form Christian clubs and engage in scripture study and prayer, to the same extent that other students may engage in secular clubs and activities on public school grounds using public school facilities. Public schools may have Christian students wanting to form a club but no pastor or lay adult faith leader to serve as club sponsor and supervisor. Your church’s leadership and members can support local public school students in their faith activities at school. Doing so provides an important community service and makes a critical community outreach, showing the whole public school community that your church takes an active interest in the public education of children and development of youth. School-based ministry can break down secular walls, showing youth and young adults that faith works well in secular settings. Recruit and equip a school-based ministry leader in your church.
Workforce
Workforce development is another way that your church can connect with the community. Churches have substantial work to accomplish, much of it at the entry level for labor, especially custodial and grounds work, but also event setup and takedown, kitchen cleaning, meal preparation, and various routine maintenance, repair, and improvement activities. Churches nearly always have a need for extra hands. Churches can also be especially sensitive places to guide and develop new, disabled, or struggling workers. A church facilities director, operations director, or ministry leader may have the time and sensitivity not only to supervise developmental workers but also to guide, encourage, and pray for them. Your church may thus be a great place for local law enforcement to assign community-service workers. Your church may also be a good place for a nonprofit organization’s workforce training program for mentally or physically disabled adults. Your church may be able to establish and operate its own workforce development program or partner with an existing program, for the community’s great benefit.
Respite
Your church may also make helpful community connections through respite programs for couples caring for infants, singles caring for children, and families caring for mentally and physically disabled youths and adults. Churches naturally plan weekday and weekend evening gatherings for scripture study and fellowship. Couples, singles, and families having infants, children, or adult members with special needs may wish to join those events while the church ministry provides volunteer care for the infants or children, and supervision, care, and activity for the disabled youths or adults. Indeed, the ministry may wish to provide a rewarding evening activity for the special-needs family member, while the caretaker family members have an evening on their own. Respite for caretakers is rare. A church that provides that respite shows genuine concern for some of the strongest, bravest, and most important members of the community, while also caring for some of the most vulnerable and needful community members. The church that provides caretaker respite also earns great appreciation and devotion from the caretaking families. Help your church connect to your community through respite care.
Networks
Your church can also connect to the community through social and professional service networks. Church members generally have a wide range of community contacts with social and professional service providers. Church members include doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, therapists, social workers, lawyers, tax preparers, contractors, movers, mechanics, and others who provide essential health, legal, financial, social, and consumer services. Those service providers have their own community connections among their own patients, clients, facilities, colleagues, and other networks. Your church can serve as a formal or informal triage center, clearinghouse, and referral service for professional, social, and consumer services provided by members or by providers whom members know and trust. Vulnerable community members often struggle for lack of network access to the appropriate service provider. A church care ministry, with its leader and volunteers trained in needs assessment and knowledgeable about network resources, can be an especially effective network hub for needful community members. Pastors and other ministry leaders can do the same. Help your church connect with the community through service networks.
Prayer
Your church can also connect with your community through prayer. Your church may hold prayer walks through neighborhoods, with member volunteers walking together and stopping to pray for homes, businesses, schools, and any willing community members whom the volunteers encounter. Your church may also commit to pray for specific or general community needs. Ministries within your church may commit to pray for special community populations and community concerns touching on their ministries. Your church can promote community prayer through its social media, website, newsletter, announcements, and other communications. Your church publicly invoking prayer on behalf of community concerns shows your community that your church has an outward face of love, thought, care, and concern for the community.
Evangelism
Salvation in Jesus Christ is the greatest thing your church offers your community’s residents. Your church can carry out a deliberate ministry of evangelism. Your church could set up a booth or stand at local festivals, inviting residents to accept free Bibles and tracts, prayer, and faith discussion and confession. Your church could offer weekly or other regular sessions at local coffee shops, parks, or other public gathering places, to meet a pastor or lay leader to discuss faith, accept prayer, and consider faith confession. Your church pastors, ministry directors, lay leaders, and members may participate deliberately in public meetings and events, offering invocations, sharing faith views, and inviting confession. Your church may also hold periodic open forums at the church or at community sites to discuss and explore faith. Evangelism can take creativity, boldness, and dedication. In whatever form it takes, evangelism may be the most essential and beneficial way that your church can connect with your community.
Celebration
Another way to connect your church with the community is to participate in local celebrations of community life. Show the community that your church is a significant contributor to that life. If your community holds seasonal parades celebrating holidays and memorializing events, then plan for your church to participate prominently with a float, vehicle, signs, banners, or other fitting displays identifying the church and honoring the holiday or event. If your community holds annual or seasonal festivals, then find a suitable role to participate in the festivals, such as setting up a booth, hosting a festival event, or providing refreshments, a resting place, and even a meal for festival workers. If your community holds special memorials for prominent community leaders or veterans, offer to host the events, encourage your church’s pastors to take leading roles, and encourage ministry leaders and church members to attend, serve, and participate. Anything appropriate that your community celebrates, encourage your church to celebrate with it.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how effectively does your church connect with, engage, and support the local community? What community groups are your church’s service, prayer, and evangelism focus? What community organizations are your church’s service partners? Do your church and its ministries regularly promote prayer for community interests, groups, and concerns? Does your church participate in community service events? Does your church offer community meals and nutritional programs? Does your church support local Christian education? Does your church support Christian clubs in the local public schools? Does your church support local workforce development programs? Could your church offer local caretaker respite opportunities? Is your church’s care ministry an effective service provider triage center and referral hub? Does your church participate visibly in local community celebrations?
Key Points
Your church should fruitfully engage the community to connect.
Offer your church facility for community events to connect the church.
Offer your church’s service to the community at annual service events.
Open church meals and picnics to the community to connect.
Support local Christian education to connect your church.
Support Christian clubs in the public schools to connect your church.
Offer local workforce development programs at your church.
Plan community caretaker respite events at your church.
Offer your church as a service provider hub for network referrals.
Commit your church members to pray for local community concerns.
Plan local evangelism initiatives to connect with the community.
Encourage your church to participate in community celebrations.