It is important that we don’t lose sight of what we are supposed to be about. We are in the business of disciple-making. The end to which our outreach activities must point is the making of disciples. If they are not doing that, or we have no plan or understanding of how we get people from what we’re doing to being disciples, then we’re not really doing much more than filling a room in the same way as anyone else.
Yesterday, just before I had a meeting with another pastor, I was able to spend a bit of time around the end of our English Classes in church. I was so encouraged to see how they had grown. What used to be one class, which later became one big class with a little adjunct second class, turned into two reasonable sized classes and is now two fairly sizeable classes. Every person attending represents somebody from the local community we now have meaningful, ongoing contact with and the breadth of nationalities represented is significant. As has been noted a number of times, by our Muslim neighbours locally, when they run things for the community they tend to be monoculturally Asian; everything we do is always multicultural. We are probably the most multicultural thing in the area.
I don’t want to suggest that any of that is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Without things like our English Classes – but all the various other outreach works we do too – we simply wouldn’t have the reach into the community that we do. So, don’t mishear me here. Without these works we would not have the excellent contact with so many people in our community that we do. So doing these things is important to us.
However (and you knew one was coming), frequently people’s excitement stops at these works. They see the growing English Class and say, ‘wow! We’d love it if we could do this’. They see the plethora of nations represented in the room and say, ‘wow! We’d love to have this at our church’. They see the efforts made to show practical love this way and say, ‘this is brilliant!’ To which I always want to ask – genuinely, and not facetiously at all – what is so brilliant about it?
Too often, we get wowed by people in a room. But when all is said and done, our English Classes, our Dialogue Evenings, our Food Security Programme and all the others ultimately are just people in a room. Yes, we might say we are showing the love of Christ to people. But let’s not pretend the Food Bank down the road, the interfaith forum in town, the English courses in the college aren’t doing exactly the same stuff without any attempt to show the love of Christ to anybody and they look, frankly, much the same as what we’re doing.