Reading where we are

How much time do you spend thinking about where you are?  How much time does your church spend taking a measure of the community in which it ministers and which it serves.

In the Church Planting Manual from the Redeemer Church Planting Centre they encourage you to do a survey of the area, then plant using information from that survey.  They then encourage you, having launched, to continue learning about the area which you serve and if necessary to re-launch.  Not necessarily in terms of stopping everything and starting again but simply in terms of learning to read the area you are in and seeking to show Jesus love in tangible ways.

This launch - learn - relaunch/model strategy is one which I think largely goes untried in the UK.  I wonder particularly if the older the church is, in terms of how established it is, the less likely it is to be engaging with, enquiring of and learning from the community around it.

As we have settled into our new home, both on Sunday's and on Monday's we are continuing to learn about the community we feel God has called us to serve.  And one of the things we are learning most of all is that there is a deep seated suspicion of church.  We have had a number of conversations recently which have been very revealing about church in general and the way it is perceived.  There were those we spoke to who would come to the toddler group if it was just run by those individuals running it, but won't come because it's run by a church, even though it is the same individuals running it.

Why?  Because of previous bad experiences of church and of Christians.  Learning must inform our approach to ministry and serving the area here with the gospel.  We know it must be long term, we know it will be hard and slow, we know that we must work to win people over before they will even enter a toddlers let alone church, we know that relationships with individuals and families will be key, and that they need to see more than ever our love displayed in practical ways that astound them.

There are other ways in which we are learning about the area; people feel they need to be invited to church, they do not assume that there is an open invitation to come along to church week by week.  So how do we relearn, how do we relaunch (small scale not big)?  We must develop a programme of year round accessible invitational services, we must expect to have to invite, invite and invite, and once people come we must make a point of welcoming people so well that they know they are always welcome.

There are hundreds of other ways we are learning every week, in every conversation at the school gates and at the local shop and in toddlers, and we need to take time to think about what God is showing us about the people he has called us to love, serve and take the gospel to.  And as we do so we need to be thinking about where we relaunch, whilst certain that we will never need to relaunch the gospel.

My fear is that too often the community we read is the wrong one.  It may be that we read the community inside the church in which case we will just become more 'churchy' and less and less accessible.  Or we might read the 'disenfranchised Christian community' - those who have left church for one reason or another - and only want to come back to a church in the image they want which meets their needs.   These people need reaching with the gospel, they need grace and love.  We may need to ask their forgiveness, but I don't think they are the community we should read.  The gospel, missional discipleship calls us to be reading the unbelieving community round about us, so that we can reach them with the gospel.