Changing Landscapes

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.