I grew up on a farm in the foothills of the North Carolina Mountains.
In my mind, I can see the two branches where we often drank freshwater. I can
map how both branches flowed into the creek where we use to fish and play. I
moved away from the farm when I was 21 and I have never again walked back over
the entire farm. We closed the farmhouse when mother went into an assisting
living center in 2008. Mother died January 12, 2015 and my siblings and I are
in the process of settling the estate. While the house looks the same, much of
the landscape has changed. The grassy meadow where we use to pick blackberries
is now grown up in pine trees so thick you cannot walk through it. The bottomland
we use to farm has grown up in brush and would have to be cleared again before
any farming could take place on the land. The truth is that much of the
landscape is foreign to me. It looks different than what I remember and is very
strange to me. As I recall the “good ole’ days” of my youth working in the
fields and playing in the woods, I become nostalgic.
Similarly, the urban landscape changes around our churches. Like
the farmhouse, the church looks the same as we remember, but the truth is the
landscape has changed. The United States is the third largest country with
approximately 325 million of the world’s 7.3 billion people. This year (2015),
83% of the US population is considered urban. Our cities are more diverse than
ever before and a leisurely walk around the neighborhood will reveal many
places of different faiths and cults. This was not true in my childhood. My
friends were Black or White, saved or lost, and their religion was Christianity.
The county I grew up in had only one small Catholic church and until my late
teens I never new a single Catholic. Although I took Spanish in high school,
the only person I knew who spoke Spanish was the high school teacher who taught
it. During our second year of Spanish, we took a trip to a Mexican Restaurant –
65 miles one way to the closest Mexican Restaurant. Oh how the landscape has
changed!
God knew when the church you attend was planted that the
landscape would change. In fact, he knew then the diversity makeup your church
would need to reach in this present age. The question is, did you continue to
walk over the farm or did you move away and abandon your relationship with it?
To know the landscape means you have to live in the community, walk the hills
and valleys, and talk to the neighbors. People have to be more than a statistic
in a report. We have to now who lives in the houses in our neighborhood. We
have to know their hurts and pains, their hopes and dreams, and their passion.
Many urban churches are dying because the church lost touch with the changing
landscape, as I did with the farmland. While they may know the demographics,
they do not know the people the statistics represent.
Take the members outside of the church. Do a prayer walk.
Serve coffee and doughnuts on the sidewalk. Celebrate the community. Throw a
party and invite the neighborhood. Think of the effectiveness of the church,
not in bodies in worship on Sunday, but as the lives you are touching that are
being transformed. The apostles were not content to be inside a building
complaining that people didn’t come to them. Instead, they prayed, sought God,
and went to the people to with whom God was already working to restore. God is
at work in your neighborhood. He is at work in those the statistics represent.
He is at work in the residents’ hopes and dreams, hurt and pain, and their
passion for life. Most of them need Jesus and you are the one church and the
one person that can share Jesus with them. Just as God came and dwelt among
humankind, your church must be incarnational within its community or your
church will die, and many in the church’s neighborhood will die without
salvation.
Will you accept the Challenge? Walk
down the street 500 feet in any direction of your church. Do you know the
people in the homes you walk past? Do you know their hurts and their dreams? If
not, I challenge you to learn these families. I challenge you to meet them
face-to- face and introduce yourself to them and start a relationship with them.
Not because you want them or their money in your church, but because you want
to love on them as Jesus would.
