Reneighbor: Yes or No?

Churches: When should they close? When should they open?
Why do churches disconnect from their neighborhoods in the first place? This displacement is complex and can even be demonic. It can also be historical and political, racial and financial, personal, generational, and spatial. In our post-Christian culture we rarely invest our best assets in places with the least resources.

If we did, we would understand a theology of location as much as our other theological amusements. If we really got it, w would be putting skilled and fully funded teams of transformational leaders in strategically critical urban areas to build collaborative ministries.

It takes time and faith to earn the love and respect of a stranger. What’s more, it takes courage.
We have incredible social capital to reinvest in our urban places. Sure, there are identical problems facing people in our suburban and rural places, too. But the tragic fact is that despite or because of the challenges of scale, it is in the places of greatest concentration of need that the fewest spiritual and other resources are invested.

We should think twice before closing a vital neighborhood resource like a connected congregation. And we should not hesitant to close ineffective, unable-to-be-reneighbored congregations, nor hesitate to start a new neighborhood-based ministry.

Blessings,

Kevin

Slipcovers

My Aunt Alyce was the most loving person I could imagine. She loved everybody. She loved her family. She loved dogs. She loved the neighborhood kids. She loved her life. She loved her church. She loved God. And, what was very evident to me: she loved me, too. I know that because she always called me her favorite nephew. (Yes, there were other nephews. :))

But her love had an anomaly. It was a confusion between now and then. A present offering of love versus a future one, and it had to do with slipcovers.

Aunt Alyce apparently loved the people who would eventualy get her living room furniture when she decided it was time to get rid of it. You see, she put clear, plastic slipcovers on the couch, chair, and ottoman. You ever sit on a plastic slipcover on a warm day with shorts on? Whoa. It always amused me that she should be so careful. I had always wanted to ask, "Aunt Alyce, why do you use slipcovers? You should enjoy your furniture. (Thought bubble: I want to enjoy your furniture!) The only thing you are doing is making the furniture nice for the next owners, while you can't even sit without sticking to it." I suppose my Aunt Alyce would just have smiled. She didn't get it.

Churches have slipcovers, too. Things that keep the hardware preserved for some future What?, yet esentially un-useful to people now is a sign that the church has become absent for people it is called to serve. To become present for others is really pretty simple. Be there. Be there in the morning. Be there at noon. Be there at night. Be there on weekends. Be there during the week. Allow the resources to be used to meet needs, of course according to the mission plan, but serve now.

In my congregation, we decided that we needed to be present. To tell and show a neighborhood that God loved it, 24/7, not just for an hour or two Sunday mornings, but every day became my passion, not just my mission.

We opened those red church doors and took our imagined, but just as real, "slipcovers" off the gym floor (not used for twenty-years or more !), and let kids from the community reclaim our assets as their own. Whoa, did we have kids in the neighborhood!? Not a few of our Elders shuddered at what we were nervously trying to do: give ourselves away. This was our social capital, our God-given assets for the common good.

Note to church: barriers, even plastic ones, diminish mission. Future potential is not the same as realized present. Aunt Alyce was right about everything, except the slipcovers. She was also right about who her favorite nephew was, because she was my favorite Aunt, my Aunt with slipcovers.

Blessings,
Kevin

Nouns and Verbs

Every church building I pass seems to turn into a time portal, of sorts. I am transported back to Miss Espenshade's fifth grade English class. Whoa. Not an entirely pleasant trip. A crystal clear image rises in my memory of drill exercises on the difference between nouns and verbs. Nouns are objects. Verbs are action words. Nouns are objects. Verbs are action words. Ahhh. O.K. Miss Espenshade, I get it!

As the church blurs by me on the right, I think: the Church. It's a noun. An object. Not an action word. Church, an action word? Umm. Miss Espenshade, I have a question.