Institutional v. Missional Church: Serving Community

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This will be the last post in this series, at least for a while. Later this week, I’ll be posting an open invitation to the Blogtown Football League for Fantasy Football on yahoo. It’s free if you have a yahoo id – which is also free. I’ll tell you more about all of that later.

So… service. The Institutional Church often falls into the trap of looking at people as existing to serve the Institution and its programs. We see “prospects” as potential leaders, workers, attenders and tithers, which is an obvious violation of God’s plan. The way we get there is the belief that the church is the solution to their problems rather than God being all in all to them.

We most often see this reflected when white collar professionals move into town or visit our churches and they get visits, phone calls and personal attention from the Pastor himself, while folks less well dressed and connected often fall through the cracks. Why? certain ones fit the needs of the Institution and others don’t.

On the other hand, when the Missional Church acts as servants of its community, it opens doors to conversation and the Gospel.

We need to ask the question: Who is supposed to be serving whom?

Further, we need to make sure that the things we offer as services to the community, that they are actually desired by the community. This seems like an obvious statement, but we are so used to looking at everything with us at the center of the thought process, it becomes difficult. Rather than finding out what the community needs and meeting it, we often look at what we can or want to do – what is easy for us to do – and do it, expecting the community to be grateful.

The absolute back end of this would be if we do something to “help” the community and it actually offends them and builds a wall instead. At that point, we create a backlash that hurts everything worse than if we just sat in our pew and stayed out of their way.

This wall is often built when we “intrude” on them. We had some neighbors of our church in Kentucky that dubbed our church Fort God, because they perceived that we were all about ourselves and didn’t care about our neighbors. We would have an annual Fall Festival where we would seal off the parking lot, hoist light rigs and set up booths all over the place, inviting the community for a safe, free and family oriented event. What we didn’t anticipate was that people would park all down the streets in a “less-than-considerate” way. Meaning they clogged the thin streets and parked across driveways making it nearly impossible for our neighbors to navigate the path to their own homes.

So, then, it is vital for the Missional Church to accurately understand what it can do to serve the community without becoming a burden to the community.