I’ve been pondering this for a while. And I won’t claim to be an expert on this. So, again, I’m just processing here…
Our church is making a push for outreach in 2010. One thing we’re planning is “service oriented outreach”. This means instead of just helping out ourselves on things, we plan to help others who aren’t connected to our church. I’m one of the leaders on this project. We’ve been talking about this for months and will hopefully get out of the “talking”stage soon and move on to some actual work.
I’m somewhat confused, though… When we use the word “outreach” we often assume that we’re helping the “disadvantaged”, the “tired your poor”. Maybe confused is a poor choice of words. I’ve taken a stance that the outreach has little to do with the people we’d actually be serving. It actually has to do with “us”. Just the act of serving is what we should be doing. Not that the end result doesn’t matter at all.
I’m not sure we are equipped to actually serve the “disadvantaged”. And why pick on “them”? Can we serve people who aren’t necessarily the “needy”?
I tend to think that we pick on the needy because it’s easier to serve them. Their needs are more “public” or at least more visible. So, do we actually cop out in trying to serve others, perhaps the “not so needy” because it’s actually harder to serve them? Driving by the house with holes in the siding. That’s an easy target. And hopefully we’ll actually do something about that.
But, can we serve in other places? Our church is (currently) located in the middle of fairly new middle class houses. Yes, if you go a half mile away, there are houses that fall below this category. But, immediately surrounding our church are people who don’t necessarily fall into the “needy” category.
And yet, there are needs there. We just don’t see them from the outside.
Is there anything we can do to reach these people? What does that take? What does that look like? How can we serve them?
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all for serving the “needy”. And I’m sure we’ll do that.
If just serving is our primary goal, what’s our secondary and tertiary goals? If we are wanting to share the Love Story of Jesus, then how can we do that? We talk about not using outreach to grow our own numbers. But, let’s be honest, that’s generally an indicator of “success”.
Maybe I should have thought about this more before writing… Still so many questions.
