Yesterday I shared the link to an article by Kevin Harney about using existing ministries as outreach ministries. I thought the ideas presented there were excellent and fit well with the ideas in Church Inside Out.
Harney makes a great statement at the opening:
Churches, by nature, are selfish. Because the church is made up of people, and people are fundamentally self-serving, the church ends up expending much of its time, money, and energy on those who are already part of the family of God.
Yes. Exactly. I think a case in point is the proliferation of short-term mission trips. Churches that balk at sending $5000 to a missionary will easily spend $25000 to take their members to visit that same missionary.
But Harney isn’t talking about mission trips; he’s talking about church events:
I began thinking about the amazing things that could happen if local churches would vector their time, creativity, resources, and ministries out into the community. I call this the “Two-Degree Rule.” The idea is that we would take the effective and plentiful things we do for ourselves and simply direct these same things out into our community.
Your monthly church meals become meals for the whole community. Your funeral ministry expands its reach to include people in your community who don’t have a church home. Baby showers are held not just for church members but also for needy families in your town.
You get the idea. And it’s a great one. Start dreaming about how to transform your “inward” ministries into “outward” ministries.
This might necessitate that budgets be prepared in advance that would allow the costs of use of the facility in community service. In order to extend the funeral ministry to the community might entail setting aside extra money for utilities that would have been charged by our usage fees to non-members. Or to preparing an extra measure of food for the church meals.
Building a spiritual encouragement/reward system that appreciates the many volunteers who provide food or flowers or host showers or give gifts will also go a long way to maintaining that level of volunteerism. We shouldn’t expect/require members to fill needs but rather let them know that their service to the Lord is seen both by the Lord and by the church…in appreciation and gratitude for this additional generosity. Both the service and the expressions of gratitude should be inherent in our spiritual DNA–it is just who we are and what we do.