When you’re trying to engage with your community, your church may come across some challenging hurdles along the way. Here are just a few – including some pointers to overcome them…
1 Buildings
Sadly, your building may be a hurdle for both you and the people in your community. Many people find church buildings alien, and even forbidding, places. You might also feel limited by the facilities on offer.
Investigate local alternatives, including community and medical centres, schools, and other ‘neutral’ venues. Don’t be afraid to ask to use venues for free if you’re offering a service to the community. The worst answer you can get is “No”.
2 Baggage
However great your church is, inevitably there’ll be some ‘historical baggage’. Maybe it’s a long-running dispute with another church. Maybe it’s disagreements inside the church, which are more likely to be over smaller practical issues than serious doctrinal disputes. You might have issues with your neighbours – do people complain about parking problems in the streets near your church on a Sunday morning?
Trying to get over all the other hurdles you face while carrying weighty baggage is nigh-on impossible. The solution might not be easy, but realistically you may need to foster a forgiving attitude inside your church, a partnering attitude towards other organisations, and the desire to be good neighbours – then you can start clearing those other hurdles more easily.
3 Feeling overwhelmed
One solution to feeling overwhelmed with community engagement is to choose to start small. This isn’t too difficult for a smaller sized church because they don’t have a choice. But realistically, every church will find it easier to start off small.
It’s often better to start small for two reasons: first, because you can learn as you go along and not cause too much damage. Second, because there is nothing like success to breed success. When you succeed with a small project, you will feel fired up for the next challenge.
4 Finance
A major hurdle to engaging with your community might be the church’s budget. But being outwardly-minded doesn’t have to cost the earth. You don’t need a lot of money if you’ve got a willingness to engage.
One way of looking at engagement is to ask the question “How big is a family?” On average in the UK, it’s two adults and 1.6 children. It’s often smaller – it could be one adult and one child. The best way to engage with families might be to start with one family in the church befriending a family in the community, offering empathy and understanding, and maybe some practical help.
Your church doesn’t have to have an expensive ‘programme’ of engagement – just a genuine desire to make a difference in people’s lives.
5 Personnel
Getting people on board may be a challenge, and you may find yourself needing more people than you physically have in your church on a regular basis. Sometimes we need to be willing to ask for help. It may be from within our denomination or stream, or from some of the larger local churches in our town or city.
There’s a good New Testament precedent for this – Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia asking him to “Come over to Macedonia and help us”. That led to a most fantastic expansion of the Christian church into Europe.
Sometimes we will be the person doing the asking; sometimes we might be the person who is being asked. But whichever one we are, the willingness to ask, and the willingness to respond, can help us engage with our community far more effectively.
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