A New Paradigm of Compassion Ministry

In our last post, we continued to explore the importance of “choosing the right soil” as we seek to plant a church: the soil of the broken, the poor, and the needy. This For it is only when we choose the right soil with which to work that we can expect an overwhelming response to the gospel. But what implications might this have for the resource-hungry “institution of church” as we know it? How could the machinery of today’s consumer-driven church support the decrease in financial capital that would naturally follow? But even more importantly, how can the church truly pursue loving relationships with the needy if it remains the exclusive domain of a select few members?
One of the greatest obstacles to truly making serving a “way of life” in the church today is the overbooked schedules of its members. Unless radical steps are taken in our churches, committed relationships with the poor will never materialize for the vast majority of American churchgoers today. How can it be otherwise when Sunday meetings, prayer meeting, small groups, and leader’s huddles dominate our already harried schedules? Something in the church is going to have to go if we are to transcend these limitations and concentrate on what’s really important. For City On A Hill Community, this has meant incorporating service of those on the margins into our regular weekly meetings, as we exchange one traditional meeting a month for a churchwide serving project that week. On the first Sunday of every month, we worship God not by another church service but by serving the poor and needy together. The structure of this may vary from week to week; some weeks we go to a homeless shelter, perhaps others to a nursing home. During the summer months, we have decided not to meet in a home or private gathering place, but rather in a city park that is known as a place where the homeless of the city naturally congregate. Though we still have a long way to go before we truly realize God's heart for the poor, we hope that these are at least positive, beginning steps in the right direction. One thing is certain in our community, however: we’ve all agreed that we’ve heard enough messages about serving the poor and would rather begin to put these ideas into actual practice when we meet together.
I believe that God is calling His church today to employ radical, unconventional, and out-of-the-box measures today if we are to truly live up to our calling of serving those in need. The church cannot wait any longer for the needy to show up at its doorstep: as experience shows, these opportunities will rarely present themselves without any effort on our part. In our insulated suburban culture, the poor and marginalized rarely cross our paths today. A truly radical church recognizes this fact, and in response adopts a more proactive approach to reaching out to those in need. As Tony Campolo once said, “Jesus never says to the poor, ‘come find the church’ but He says to those of us in the church, ‘Go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned, Jesus in his disguises.’” The truly radical church takes this search for “Jesus in His disguises” seriously by “going into the highways and byways, and compelling them to come in” (Luke 14:23).
By proactively taking the good news of Jesus to the marginalized and needy around us and actually building the church among them, several beneficial results are produced. First, it fosters a lifestyle of caring for the needy in all of the church's members, a goal not attainable with present paradigms of church. Second, greater response to the gospel will be seen in the “good soil” in which such a church is planted, a phenomenon that is common to endeavors such as these. Thirdly, it draws unbelievers to the church who are presently alienated from traditional models of church, yet who desire to serve those less fortunate than themselves. By tapping into the common desire of both believer and unbeliever alike to make a positive impact in the lives of the needy, the gospel is freed from its “Sunday morning shackles” to bear fruit in the lives of many.
I believe that a radical new model of church is needed if we are to truly “turn the world upside down” with the message of Jesus Christ. It is high time for us not to seek not friendships with the rich and powerful but to identify ourselves with those on the margins in the example of our Leader. In the words of Minna Canth, “Christianity has been buried inside the walls of churches and secured with the shackles of dogmatism. Let it be liberated to come into the midst of us and teach us freedom, equality, and love.”