pat loughery

One of my regular coaching sessions is with Ed Cook (“Papa Ed”) of Seattle Vineyard. Ed is a deep, deep thinker and is quite gifted at listening to my rambles and rants and then calling B. S. on them ;-).

In our recent meeting (and the one before that, if I recall correctly) as we were talking about finding ways to serve our community, Ed pointed me to an interesting thought from Handbook for Churches and Mission Groups by Dorothy Devers and N. Gordon Cosby.

I’m quoting more than I had originally planned in order to place the best part into context. I’m putting the part that’s grabbing my attention in bold.

“For a mission group and a church to give full allegiance to Jesus Christ, four dimensions of life must be recognized as essential:

1. Change. To belong to the church of Jesus Christ is to become part of a community whose very purpose is to nurture its members in such a way as to bring about a transformation of life. […] The Christian life is a laboratory of change.

2. Witness. […] The church is a people who witness with clarity to the Power which can produce change. […] Some question the wisdom of naming the Name (Jesus) […]Those who declare it inadvisable to do so fear to alienate persons to whom they would speak of the gospel. […] The inauthenticity so often evident in the church causes naming the Name to be tremendously alienating to those outside the church. But if there is authenticity in the life of a church, the world will not be alienated by the bearing of witness; in fact, the only way we can have any genuine dialogue with the world is clearly and emphatically to name the Name and to be outwardly what we are inwardly. If people want to know me, they have to know me as a person in Christ, because that is who I am. The same holds true of a genuine Christian community.

3. Nurture. The church of Jesus Christ is a nurturing community that stands ready to provide direction and encouragement for those who need shepherding […]

4. Action. […] Not just any action, but Christian action. A group touched by some segment of the world’s pain will, in the name of Christ and with the help of the HOly Spirit, endeavor to bring about the healing of that pain.”

The Witness piece was most interesting to talk about, especially in the context of service projects. We constantly have to consider how we communicate to those we’re trying to reach. Part of our thought process is that we don’t want to be too aggressive, carefully considering that we want to nudge people along in their understanding of God in Jesus. But we also want to be clear that what we’re doing is in the name of Jesus, who loves and restores each of us and calls us as a church to extend a hand to our neighbors.

Here’s a risk in not being explicitly clear on the “why we do this” part: People might think we’re doing this because we’re nice people, or because we’re a nice church, or even because we’re a church of servant-hearted people. Now that doesn’t sound so bad, but… didn’t Jesus say, “In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:16)? I’d really hate to set us up to take glory that really should belong to my Father.

Ed – who claimed he was working through these questions for himself and they weren’t just questions for me to consider – mused that the oft-quoted St. Francis of Assisi line, “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words”, must be heard in the context of remembering that Francis lived in the heart of Christendom, and his vows would have required him to wear a robe or cassock, the uniform of the priesthood/monastery – meaning that as he said these words, nobody hearing them would have mistaken WHY Francis was doing works of charity or kindness. It was inherently obvious that Francis was working in the name of Christ.

For us, it’s not so inherently obvious – and we have to consider how, and how much, we make that clear to those that we are serving.

In our photo booth project, our printed handouts said, “This is simply a gift to brighten our day”; we also gave out our servant evangelism cards, which say, “This is our simple way of saying that God loves you”, and we put stickers with our contact info on the back of each photo sheet that said, “Here’s a photo of someone God loves”. We talked to people as they were waiting for their turn to sit for a photo, or waiting for the prints to be done, asking simple questions: where do you live, what brings you out to the Festival, etc., and then answering whatever questions people had about our church or the project. My own stock answer to the “why are you doing this” evolved over time, but it was generally something like, “we’re a church who believes in serving our neighbors in order to bless them, and we wanted to do something that was free and valuable.”

I hope that we were able to communicate clearly WHY we did what we did, but I wonder if I’d have a more explicit stock answer to give to people now that I’ve thought more about this issue. It’d be interesting to have a few words to say about God’s love for the individual person, and maybe a bit about humanity as the image of God to each other…