As “The Hole in the Gospel” Campaign begins to draw to a close people are asking great questions. One that has been asked in just about every corner is: “What are we going to do?” We all want to engage and respond to what we have been learning. The desire is so great we could easily forget that in the midst of this campaign we did a Tent Drive!
Let’s take a moment and remind ourselves of Community Covenant Church’s core strategy (Reach Value), based on Acts 1:8 "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." (NIV) I want to focus on the phrase “Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” We have applied this passage to our church metaphorically to mean that Jerusalem was anyone who touched Community Covenant Church. We identified our Judea to be those people in the USA who culturally were similar to us and Samaria to be those in the USA who culturally were different than the people who normally attend our church (we use the notion of USA but practically we have applied these two metaphors to our local community). Of course, “the ends of the earth” refers to our global neighbors (people outside of our culture and land).
For several years we have ministered in each of these communities. To illustrate, within the church (Jerusalem) is Divorce Care and GoodSense, to our Judea we offer the opportunity to re-think church through the Egg Hunt and Gearfest, to Samaria we administer the Women reaching Women Prison Ministry, and outside of the USA there is our involvement in Haiti. This is not a bad resume (and only a small sample of what we do), but today there is a desire to do more as the campaign has created a thirst in all of us to make a difference.
There are other factors that add to this discussion that we face. The circumstances of our community and Haiti have recently changed dramatically. The impact of the economy over the past year cannot be bypassed and must be considered. There are several new types of poverty in our communities and many fear what will happen to needed social services as stimulus money is exhausted. Most believe, in terms of the poor, the impact of this economic downturn will be long lived. Of course the impact of the earthquake in Haiti cannot be overstated. While we are in the process of revising our strategy for the Global Leadership Summit (GLS), we must determine how we can become more directly involved with the rebuilding effort.
Looking at all that needs to be considered, it quickly becomes obvious that there is more to be done from a leadership perspective than our staff and elders can manage. Therefore, we have been envisioning how to expand our church’s leadership in these ministry areas.
“The Hole in the Gospel” Campaign is primarily an awareness campaign and, while it certainly gets our individual juices flowing, developing a church wide ministry strategy will take much time and effort. A relatively new book, “When Helping Hurts,” may help those who are interested in being part of developing our next steps to become informed and prepared to assess opportunities and responses. The book is designed to facilitate group discussion and learning at a deeper level than our current campaign.
So where do we go from here? On Wednesday night, April 7th (7:00PM), we would like to invite anyone who is interested in this topic to attend a “conversation” meeting. At this meeting we would like to discuss the issues related to on-going ministries in both our local community and in Haiti. From this meeting we are hoping three activities form that will take us through the Spring. First, we hope that many of the small groups that have formed around this campaign will decide to stay together and read “When Helping Hurts.” Second, we would like to start two groups, each with a particular focus. The first will concentrate on our community ministry development (Judea and Samaria) and the second will focus on our Haiti ministry development. These two groups will also read “When Helping Hurts,” but will be led by Dennis and Sean. Third, over the summer we then would seek out members of the church who are called to serve on one of two teams – a local community ministry team or a Haiti ministry team. We envision these two teams to be tasked to develop and lead our church’s ministries in each of these areas. It is our hope that this will create a leadership structure that is effective and honoring of God’s purpose in our life.
A final note – we believe that whether you feel called into leadership or not, you would be well served to participate in a group reading of “When Helping Hurts” so that you will better understand decisions that are made regarding our ministry to the poor as we move forward.
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