Jim Currin
One of the abiding memories of Hope08 was that 1500 church groups ran carnivals, environmental projects, new street pastor schemes, youth projects, old people’s luncheon clubs to serve the local community. You name it, the churches did it! Brilliant.
Last month I reflected on mission from the perspective of Churches Together in England, and said that we needed to be ‘customer driven’. This may have seemed obvious to some but it is a clear challenge to others.
We are so used to putting on church activities, often in the best possible way, but more because we have a good idea or it suits our needs rather than those with need.
I was involved in a mission weekend when we planned two activities. One was an evening meal in a nice hotel, so nice in fact that the church decided it need to subsidise the cost. ‘What a great idea’ I hear you say. Yes it was, but no one really wanted to come. In contrast, the afternoon activity collected people from four homes for older people for a community sing-along: which was so successful we had to limit numbers. One was a good idea, the other served a need.
So, having established the ‘customer driven’ principle, which, by the way is exactly how Jesus approached the people around him, lets now look more at the second principle: that of being ‘project led’.
In my experience churches do not work so well together when the aim is just to get to know one another. Important though that is, the real attraction for people to get involved is when there is a joint project to run, especially if it serving the needs outside the church community.
As illustrated in the evaluation of Hope 08, all sorts of groups got together who had not worked together before, mainly to serve a new common cause. Disagreements of theology and practice melt away as service of other people takes over.
Friendships, coalitions, partnerships naturally develop when you want to make a project going. Again this is a Jesus principle as we might see in the feeding of the five thousand or the sending out of the seventy two. Like them we may well ‘return with great joy’.
