Good Soil vs. Poor Soil

In our last post, we explored the limitations of traditional approaches towards caring for the poor practiced by the church today. As we saw, caring for the poor is not accomplished by short term mission projects, rare serving events, or mere charitable giving, but can only be done in the context of loving relationships. Christ calls His followers not to just open their wallets to those in need, but their lives, their homes, and their hearts to them as well. This call stands in sharp contradiction, however, to the current paradigm of the American church that view the poor as mere recipients of charitable acts rather than integral members of the church itself. For though we may
occasionally serve the poor in our churches today, rare is the church that attempts to actually build its membership among the needy. When it comes to church growth efforts, the needy are seldom part of these attempts, but remain a peripheral group that although are valued, remain separate from the church itself.

If the church is to prosper again in our day, it will only do so when it chooses to concentrate its building efforts among the poor and marginalized. As Alan Hirsch notes, all the great missionary movements in church history have begun on the margins rather than in the center. Examples of successful outreach movements do exist in the suburbs, but they are few and far between. The greatest responses to the gospel are almost always seen among the poor and marginalized, and church history bears ample witness to this fact. However, when a church grows more by transfers from other churches than from conversions on the margins, as is the case in most of our suburban churches today, the work of the Spirit is markedly absent in contrast.

This consistent response to the gospel at the margins is consistent with the teachings of Scripture on this topic as well. In the Parable of the Soils (Matt. 13), Jesus tells us that some people are good soil and some are poor soil. Jesus’ point to his disciples is clear in this parable: we cannot expect the same response to the gospel among all people groups. Not all groups of people are good soil. The Bible is clear on who these people groups are who tend to be poor soil: the moral (Luke 5:31,32), the educated (I Cor. 1:26), and the wealthy (Luke 18:24,25). All of these descriptions tend to be descriptions of the middle class suburbs that so many of us call home. Generally speaking, people like us, who are moral, churchgoing folk, fairly well educated and certainly well off financially, tend to be poor soil. It’s not that smart, wealthy people won’t come to Christ; it’s that relatively speaking, fewer from this demographic will respond than from others. For this reason, it is very hard to find successful church planting movements started in the middle class suburbs.

Simply put, the wealthy and educated suburbanite tends to be poor soil. It is this fact that has been overlooked in today’s church and one of the main reasons the church is floundering in America. If we continue to concentrate our church building efforts among the middle class, we will continue to see little response to our evangelism efforts.

So if we wish to build the church of Jesus in good soil, where do we begin? We will explore this in our next post.