Ten years ago, as a church, we began to ask what it might look like to be a blessing to our city. We were studying through the book of Acts, and came to this passage in Acts 8: “The crowds paid attention with one mind to what Philip said, as they heard and saw the signs he was performing . . . so there was much joy in that city” (Acts 8:6–8). When we asked ourselves if there was “much joy” in Raleigh-Durham as a result of our presence there, we believed the answer was “no.” So we resolved that with God’s help we would become a blessing to our city—to demonstrate Christ’s love to them, to bring his healing to the places in our city that needed him most.
We’ve grown a lot since that time, and I’ve seen God’s hand in so many stories of lives changed and communities impacted by Christ’s love on display. As I look to the future of our local outreach, I’m excited about what God will continue to do as he uses us to love, edify, and build up our community.
Over the next four days, I’ll be sharing the ten “plumb lines” that our local outreach team has developed, the principles that make up our local outreach DNA. These plumb lines represent our attempt to add some clarity as we continue following Christ into the darkest and most broken parts of our city.
While these plumb lines have arisen out of our shared experience as a church, the content here comes from Matt Mig, our Pastor of Local Outreach. Be sure to also read Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
1. The Gospel Is The Center Of Everything We Do
In local outreach and community ministry, we prioritize both demonstrating the Gospel in deed and proclaiming the gospel in word. Our initiatives and projects are designed to demonstrate God’s love as a crucial part of the message, but they are also designed to build relationships with people who are far from God so he can draw them to himself.
This is crucially important: local outreach is not our public relations project. It’s not our way of creating goodwill in the community or forging partnerships with the city—though of course we want both of those things! At the core, local outreach is about taking the gospel to the people God commanded us to go to (everyone) that live in places we don’t (homeless shelters, prisons, etc.). If we leave the proclamation up to another ministry, we’ve gutted our local outreach of God’s power for transformation in our city and opened ourselves to doing more harm than good.
If we avoid proclamation, we’re leaving it up to people to infer the gospel from our actions. But that’s just not how the Bible teaches us that people will believe in God. As the Apostle Paul says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Rom 10:17). Big, bold deeds of love and service certainly cause people to ask questions about God, but they don’t provide answers. The answers to those questions are only found in the gospel. The gospel isn’t a good example about what we do; it’s a message about what Jesus has done to save us.
Focusing solely on good deeds also leads us dangerously close to what Jesus warned against in Matthew 6. He tells us to “beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” Proclaiming the gospel with words guards us against this pitfall, because there’s no way people can hear the gospel message and then give us the credit.
Deed-centric ministry runs the risk of communicating—even unintentionally—that God primarily cares that people have more stuff, not that they have a relationship with him. Materialism isn’t limited to rich people, and many service programs simply produce very poor materialists. God may use the pain of homelessness or prison to call a person to himself, and we should never obscure God by helping people to overcome their earthly problems without also pointing to the eternal solution.
2. The Church Is God’s Demonstration Community
This plumb line characterizes not only community ministry, but also our church’s ethos as a whole. We exist to share the good news, and tangibly displaying God’s love is an important part of how we do that. We do this because we are imitating Jesus, who as he preached also healed the sick and fed the hungry as signs of a Kingdom that is not of this world. As N.T. Wright puts it, our acts of service and mercy “sketch out with pencil what Jesus will one day paint over in indelible ink.” As the body of Christ, we are helping people see God. They should be able to look at us and glimpse—however faintly—aspects of God’s character.
We demonstrate God’s compassion for every one of his children by treating those who are marginalized as valuable. We demonstrate his perseverance by loving others even when they don’t seem to appreciate or accept it. We demonstrate his grace by occasionally helping even when we know it will be squandered. And we demonstrate the size of his love by doing big things like ServeRDU week. Our call to imitate or demonstrate God is why we put such an emphasis on proactively going to the homeless or the prisoners wherever they are in our city, rather than waiting for them to wander through our doors. Most people who need a tangible expression of God’s love the most won’t—or can’t—come to us.
Being God’s demonstration community doesn’t just dictate that we serve; it also directs how we serve. As the body of Christ, how we serve always demonstrates something about God, whether we’re being intentional about it or not. The real question is whether we’re demonstrating what’s true about God or not.
Here’s a gut check for us: do we only have time to serve if it fits into the gaps in our calendar, or are we willing to adjust our lifestyle to make room for someone? Do we write checks or donate a few “like new” items, but refuse to commit to being involved in the messy parts of someone’s life? Are we willing to stick it out for the long haul, or do we shy away from those opportunities that require us to commit? If a person knew nothing about God other than what they could see through our service, what would they think of him?
The privilege we have in being God’s demonstration community is what leads our staff team to invest in initiatives that prioritize relationship and to push people from our church to commit to consistent involvement. It’s much more difficult, but service like that demonstrates the truth about God.
