Loving Our Communities
Take a moment and reflect on your congregation. How does your local church seem to be oriented? Do they have a tendency to look outward or inward? An important role for leaders is to help the church be outward-focused. The efforts of the church are both theological and missional. Churches that have become inward-focused over the years may have reduced the majority of their focus and mission to what happens inside the church. Leaders need to encourage their churches to adjust their focus outward and to keep focusing on God’s mission in the community.
How to evangelize and fulfill the command of Matthew 28:19 has been a challenge for many churches. Some churches have compromised the most basic tenets of Christianity by working off of an attractional model, focusing on needs rather than on the missio Dei. In his book Introducing the Missional Church, Alan Roxburgh says this “deforms God’s story,” making wealthy Western Christians “the subject and object of the gospel” (p. 69). Much like how Israel became focused on their blessings rather than their responsibilities, our churches today can become self-focused rather than seeking to share the Good News and their blessings with their community.
In order to evangelize in a way that is responsive to our communities, we need to place ourselves in the role of learners, entering into a two-way dialogue. We need to practice both observation and active listening. We need to listen without judgement as we seek to understand what others are saying, feeling, and doing. This helps defuse defensiveness. Engaging in this way will involve living with the community with our eyes and ears wide open, while also demonstrating another way of living. It will involve entering into difficult conversations. When a church understands the problems the community is facing, it can help develop answers and solutions. Peter Rollins says in his book How (Not) to Speak of God that, through listening and learning, the church can actually help people lower their defenses and open up to God (pp. 53-54).
To live out Jesus’s commandment in Matthew 22:39 to love one’s neighbor, Christians will have to work hard to understand the people living around them. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, in his book Everyday Theology, teaches that cultural literacy is an important part of evangelism (p. 19). He defines popular culture as being composed of “the shared environment, practices, and resources of everyday life.” The “cultural text” orients and gives direction, providing the ethos that influences the way people process life (p. 28-29). Ultimately, the basis for using and understanding culture is the incarnation of Christ: Christ came in a form to which humanity could relate, using forms and images humans could understand. We must learn to navigate our culture Christianly and become culturally literate enough to teach Christ in a way that others can understand. We have to be able to wrestle with complex questions, entering into deep discussions, while keeping our morals right side up. This can feel like a daunting task at times, but the church needs to learn how to relate to the society around it.
In Jesus’ prayer in John 17, we see His heart for his believers. We see His desire for them to remain steadfast while using their lives as part of its witness to the world. Figuring out how to engage our communities in conversation, and how to invite them into our own church events, is a part of this. David J. Bosch, in his book Transforming Mission, warns that evangelists should not steer away from some parts of culture but rather should declare the reign of Christ in all areas of life and society (p. 417).
We are certainly living in a time period when the impact of the lamp Jesus used in His parable in Mark 4:21-25 rings true. Just by demonstrating righteous living, our example can be even more impactful in a world that is struggling with darkness, confusion, and challenge. Jonathan R. Wilson, in his book Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World, says he believes that a Christian’s walk in today’s world contributes to the spreading of the Gospel. Wilson says “living faithfully simply is the Christian mission in the modern world” (p. 45, emphasis original). As we are preparing and guiding our churches to be outward-focused, the way we present the task is important. We should not talk about evangelism as merely something to do, but as more connected to our being. It should not just be another task, but how we live. Helping members reframe this important task allows the Church to become more outward-focused in a way that will demonstrate Christ’s love to our community, holding them close rather than seeing them as an object to be changed.
