Strategy #2 "Understand Your Present Realities"

The Strategy Themes discussed below were presented by Bob Farr, Director of Congregational Excellence, Missouri Conference UMC, as part of a presentation “Renovate or Die: How to Become an Outwardly Focused Church.” The following discusses Strategy #2 of 10.

Strategy #2 “Understand Your Present Realities”

The house closest to our 175 year old country church is a fairly new modular home where a single dad, his child and girl friend reside. He is one of the 80 plus percent of the people in our neck of the woods for whom church attendance is not important. Chuck does not look like our church. The neighborhood has changed. Rather than a farm community, it more closely resembles suburbia with residents traveling to a half dozen communities for their labors instead of making their living off the farm. There are few ties to the land. So not only Chuck, but most of our neighborhood does not look like the church.

Some of our church members live on 100 year old farms. Many, many of the neighbors are new and younger and living on smaller parcels of land. Because of that, the church doesn’t know their neighbors. The church members were high school classmates of 1964 and their parents. The neighbors don’t do 4H or woman’s groups with the church members. They don’t go to the sale together, because the neighbors don’t go. Most are not sure who’s behind the new mailboxes.

(By the way, if asked, most of the members would say there’s nobody around here anymore (that looks like them). Yet, a missioninsite listing within a six mile radius returned 800 mailbox addresses!)

In the book Stones into Schools, the story of Greg Mortenson planting girl’s schools in Afghanistan, he tells of visiting a US Army fire base where the operations center tracked not intelligence on the enemy but the culture of villages, the clans, the households, everything imaginable about the community the battalion was trying to secure. Mortenson gave them high marks for their efforts to know those they were sent to serve. What if we were to strive to know as much about the communities in which we live?

Just this week, I had an Edward Jones broker knock on my door, telling me (I’m sure his tongue was in his cheek), “I’m not here to sell anything. I’m just trying to get to know the neighborhood.”

It’s easier if we have a reason to talk to people. We need to continually make reasons for invitation, reasons to knock on doors, reasons to start conversations, reasons to ask neighbors to participate with us. Adam Hamilton says that today the reason may more likely be a means of service, in a food pantry, at a Habitat work site or other work project. Some rural churches piggy back with bigger churches to offer Angel Food Ministries to their neighborhood. Servant evangelism does work. Whatever it is, we need to be searching for reason for invitation. Rick Warren calls them “bridge events” into the neighborhood. How many, how often? As many as the resources of your congregation will allow: three, five, seven times a year.

And teach your congregations they don’t have to be a theologian, they don’t have to be an evangelist. All they have to do is be able to say is “I go to church. Church is important to me. Church makes a difference in my life. Won’t you join me this Sunday.” Then make sure you give them something to take away.” (Rev. Ross Reinhiller, who grew his church from 175 to 350 attendees in 2 years in a town of 3500 people.)

Get your thinking caps on. What is your church’s reality? What do you need to do to bridge to the new reality? How do you become missional? What do you need to change to give them something to take away, something important to them?

PS. Bob’s Farrism is “Connecting to context is everything.”