I've been excited to be working on and with the New ACT team for the past year. There have been lots of ups and downs, lots of questions and few answers along the way. The one thing that keeps me excited about doing this work is that as a team we really are trying to think outside of the box and do something that gets church folks and non church folks alike excited about God.
One of the piece of our vision statements is "To be God's love with our Global neighbors" That statement really excites me. Although I have to stop and think what does that mean?
I have to go to my perspective of faith and Methodist history to understand what that statement means for me. My first thought goes to the idea of 'soul' I'm not sure that my idea of 'soul' would make it through the theological rigors of my friends who really study this kind of thing, but for me soul is that little piece of God that dwells in each of us. In order for us to be engaged in relationship with God we have to engage that piece in our self and in others. In order to understand just how I would do that I turn to the book of James and our founder John Wesley. James' idea of faith and works have been hotly debated, but for me it seems one of the easiest things to understand. If you are going to walk the walk than you better talk the talk.
This statement says to me that we want our churches to do a lot more walking. So what would that look like... Well there is no easy answer. It all depends on your place and where God is calling you to act. However, wouldn't it be great if whole congregations of people were focusing on what was going on outside their buildings? A colleague told me a story of a church group that was trying to get involved within their neighborhood so they brought some pizza over to the local housing project and started talking to the neighbors about what their problems were. The church has expected to hear about crime, or unemployment, child care. etc. They even had some ideas about what they could do about those situations. Instead, what they heard the neighbors complain about most were the rats. So what did the church do they found an exterminator and helped take of their rat problem. It doesn't sound churchy but that is what they needed most at the time.
So I think that is the first step. Churches need to know what their community needs. That involves going out and talking to community members. It means listening and not assuming.
Maybe there is a gang issue in the community. So instead of just doing summer VBS maybe a church holds VBS and an additional hour of working with kids to understand how not to be caught up in gangs.
In a rural community there is an invasion of an non-native plants that are hurting crops. How about the church bring in an expect to talk about ways of preventing the spread or salvaging the crops.
Instead of just having a soup kitchen, have church members sit down with those being served, building relationship and even invited those being served to serve....
