Ecclesiology 17 - The New Church: Mission

    As we have been discussing in recent posts, the New Church can start easily enough by simply bringing together a small band of people with a common interest in prayer and meditation.  This will not, however, provide a stimulus for continual dynamic growth.  For this, it would seem from Scriptures, we need two other ingredients: a mission and persecution.

    There are plenty of Western Protestants who think they are under persecution today, but I see little evidence to support this belief.  In fact, most of the complaints I hear are of the nature discussed in this blog back when the subject was atheism, that many church leaders get bent out of shape whenever a student ventures to ask a question about doctrine.  Ask the question once and you receive a dismissive answer.  Continue asking long enough and you are accused of being blasphemous and persecutory.  As almost any reader of this blog knows, Christianity is the dominant religion in the West today.  It's almost impossible to persecute the "guy in charge."  If anything, it works the other way round.

    Nor am I necessarily suggesting that the church should be persecuted, although I acknowledge that the greatest periods of church growth do coincide with periods of persecution.  I do believe that, as the apex religion of the West, it is beholden on Christianity today to recognize its status and use its power for social reform and unification rather than divisiveness.  True, Christ did say that he himself would one day separate the sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), but at no time did he invite his followers to get the ball rolling on his behalf.  I once saw a bumper sticker that summed it up nicely; "Just love 'em all.  I'll sort 'em out later. -God."  So, the bottom line for this discussion is this: while the Western church is not currently under any sort of persecution, and I do not prefer that it should be, it might be advantageous that we remember our days of persecution and learn from them to apply to others the mercy denied us at the time.

    Enough of that.  Let's discuss our mission: service to the poor.  As discussed at some length on July 18 of this year, the entire point of the church, of Christianity as a whole, is service to the poor.  Almost immediately upon Pentecost, the church expanded on the concept of "poor" to mean far more than the financially underprivileged.  They also made a point of serving the poor in Spirit, the downtrodden, the oppressed.  In today's terms this will still include the biblical examples of widows, orphans and convicts, but it can also mean anyone systemically oppressed; the minority, the infirm, the female, the immigrant, the LGBTQ.  These, too, are to be a focus of our mission, but not at the expense of the actual financially poor.  I could spend the rest of this post quoting Jesus regarding the need to serve the poor.  The subject seems to have been on his mind every time he opened his mouth.  So, I will continue to refer to the poor, but always bear in mind that, in doing so, I mean these other groups as well.

    So, exactly what shall we do to help out our poor family members?  Beyond evangelize, I have no idea.  And even that is a bit shaky.  When it comes to missions and evangelism, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.  Our efforts must begin with a bit of research into the specific needs of the poor around us.  Some demographic information from the city or county government can be helpful in this regard, but there is no substitute for living and working among our neighborhood poor and getting to know them on a personal level, to a point such that we and they have enough mutual respect and confidence so that we can ask "what do you need?" and anticipate honest answers.  Our mission and evangelism program will begin with these answers.  And, yes, I still contend that this exchange is best done within our congregations.  "The poor" should not be a vague demographic of people "out there;"  they must live among us within our small groups and worship services.  Snyder's numerical goal is set at 50% of our congregations living at or below the poverty level.  This seems about right to me.

    As we learn more about our neighbors, it is important to not duplicate those services being provided by others.  I have two examples from my own life to illustrate what I mean by this.

    In the city where I live, there is an area within about a 5-block radius where our local homeless population tends to congregate.  It is an area of mostly derelict commercial buildings.  I have no idea whether the homeless congregate there by choice or city decree, but the point is moot for purposes of our story.  The crux is that there are three large, well-managed organizations conducting shelter/soup kitchen operations in the area, and some other churches/volunteers occasionally show up in the area with sandwiches, socks, etc.

    Several years back, as I was driving through the area, I noticed a new sign attached to the wall of one of the more prominent derelict buildings announcing that a new soup kitchen would be soon opening within.  The sign included a business logo which I did not recognize; certainly not one of the three organizations already present in the region.  Noticing this sign created a torrent of questions in my mind.  A new soup kitchen within walking distance of three others?  Why?  Are the other three insufficient?  Does the hunger issue extend beyond the combined capacity of the current three?  If, so, how will the presence of a fourth help?  That's a pretty old building; there's bound to be a great deal of money needed to bring it up to modern building code, whether it is being purchased or leased.  After that, there is the equipment, furniture and accouterments to purchase.  Even if they use an all-volunteer staff and all donated food items, there will still be the gas, water and electric bills to be paid every month, to say nothing of the rent/mortgage, dumpster, custodial and security services to be paid for.  All of these will be an enormous drain on the organization's donation dollars, and, it seems to me, there is no point to it whatsoever.  If the three current soup kitchens have facilities insufficient to meet the need of the local poor population, the organization choosing to open this fourth soup kitchen could much more easily and far more effectively select one of the three and donate their planned volunteers, food and money to the chosen organization, thereby expanding that group's capacity to serve the poor without the need for all that additional overhead, at least doubling their direct impact on the poor.  The only downside, so far as I could tell, was that the institution in question wouldn't have the chance to slap their logo on such a prominent facade. Mercifully, some time later the sign was gone and no new soup kitchen had been installed.  One prays that this is due to the organization having come to its senses.

    As mentioned previously in these pages, I recently spent time managing a local food pantry.  One of my great distresses in this job was what I perceived to be the minuscule impact we were having on the local food desert, due largely to the small size of our facility.  We had plenty of food being donated, so much that I frequently lost food to spoilage simply due to my limited storage capacity.  In the meantime, I was providing each of my guests with two or three days worth of food and only allowing them to return for more once per month.

     Not infrequently I brought this disparity to the attention of the board president.  The response was generally to point out the square footage of our building and the intrinsic limitations thereof.  My counter response was always to suggest the purchase of a larger facility and, naturally, I would be told that such an expense was well outside our budgetary constraints, which was of course quite true, but did little to dissuade me.

    While I agreed that the purchase of a larger facility was beyond our organization's ability, I also noted that within our own ZIP code area there were at least two and perhaps three dozen food pantries providing the same or similar services to our mutual patronage.  Between us, we were possibly doing all that could be done to help those in our region, but the problem with providing duplicate services is that we are also incurring duplicate expenses and putting duplicate strain on our available resources, namely the limited number of green grocers willing to donate their extra foodstuffs.  And, of course, there was also the matter of forcing our respective clientele to chase all over the neighborhood in an effort to gather enough food to feed their families for a week.

    My suggestion then was for all of the different organizations to pool their resources and purchase an abandoned supermarket within our service area.  There would, of course, be the expense of the purchase and remodeling of the facility to bring it to current building code, but the advantages of doing so far outweigh the disadvantages.

(1) The facility will already contain the walk-in refrigerator and freezer spaces needed to maintain our combined donations at the proper storage temperatures.  This would greatly diminish (perhaps eliminate?) food waste.  It may also have a few pallet jacks, a fork lift and other material handling equipment we would find quite helpful in making our operations more efficient.

(2) The supermarket will have the floor and shelf space needed to allow our patrons to come in weekly and shop for the items their families will eat rather than stand in line to be handed a box of food selected and deemed appropriate by our pantry volunteers.  It always seemed a bit silly to give a patron a box filled with Brussels sprouts and eggplant if she has a house full of teenagers who aren't going to eat anything but peanut butter and Mac and Cheese.  And, of course, there is also the dignity factor to consider.  It takes an enormous amount of humility to stand in line waiting for that box of handouts, a level that most of us who don't suffer from hunger could never muster.  It would be quite simple to create a system by which each patron would be allowed a certain poundage of groceries per week based on family size, then provided with a basket or buggy and be allowed to "shop" for their food choices.

(3) If planned correctly, we may find that there's even enough space available to invite local chefs to come by from time to time and demonstrate the preparation of a delicious family meal using only the ingredients available on our shelves that day.

(4) After the initial start-up costs, we could actually cut our expenses.  We will need the weekly disposal of a single large dumpster rather than 24-36 smaller ones.  We could make our pickups from the local grocers with a single 25'-30' refrigerated box truck rather than a fleet of two dozen 12' ones.

(5) We will have the volunteer capacity to extend our hours of operation to include evenings and Saturdays, making our services infinitely more available to the working poor in our area.

(6) If the supermarket happens to be located in an empty strip mall, we could perhaps purchase the entire facility and use some of the space to house a clothing pantry as well.  With the remaining space, the operation could potentially become self-sustaining by renting the unused space to other organizations providing services to the poor that we don't, such as medical or dental services, mental health services, job training, housing or parolee reentry services.  The possibilities are virtually limitless.

(7) Between our now combined Boards of Directors, we will undoubtedly be able to form a small committee with the political clout necessary to petition the city government to expand their current transportation services to include a shuttle bus that zig-zags our ZIP code with stops at our facility every 15 minutes.  This would allow our non-driving patrons to shop at their leisure and be assured of the ability to get their merchandise back home in a timely fashion.

(8) Since virtually all organizations involved in the distribution of food to the poor will be of a religious nature, we could conceivably schedule building usage such that all of our churches could sell their current buildings and use our centralized property for all of their own church functions, potentially doubling or tripling the money available to be spent on the poor.  And this assumes that each church will want to perform their own separate worship services and not combine with the other represented congregations into one larger service, which would actually be the more practical option.

    With all of the foregoing as benefits to joining forces, we should take a moment to consider the negative implications of the proposal.

(1) By combining two or three dozen organizations under a single unifying umbrella, we would end up with a Board of Directors numbering in the hundreds; far too many people to effectively govern our operation.  Even if we limited Board membership to the current Board presidents, we would still have several dozen voices being heard for each and every item on the meeting agenda.  We would have to cull this to a manageable number, which means the overwhelming majority of our leaders would have to find other, less conspicuous ways of volunteering their time.

    For the life of me, I can't think of any other "cons" to put on this list.

    To the credit of the organization to which I presented this idea, I understand that after my departure they actually conducted some investigations into the concept and were thwarted at two turns: the owner of the selected supermarket was not interested in selling, and the other food pantries were not interested in joining forces.  Ah, the problems of new wine and old wineskins never seem to cease!

    The conversation thus far has centered on corporate ways to help the poor.  There are an endless variety of ways we can do so individually as well.  As a simple case in point, I live in Texas where we typically endure three solid months of temperatures of 95-105 degrees.  During these months, I make a point of purchasing a case of bottled water any time I find myself in one of our local wholesale clubs which is left in the back seat of my car within easy reach of the driver's seat.  I then distribute these bottles to homeless people as I encounter them in my travels.  Costs very little, could possibly save the life of a brother or sister who has no air-conditioned home to go to.

    I'm reasonably certain that my point is crystal clear by now.  Our hypothetical new church must involve itself directly in missions and evangelism to the poor, offering services and opportunities that are actually needed, but avoiding the duplication of viable services already in existence.  If research shows that there are no new opportunities for mission to the poor in our area beyond those already being provided, we will certainly find that far, far more good can be done by our decision to join with pre-existing organizations than wasting money on our proud efforts to reinvent the wheel.

Pax