neighborhood outreach Archives | The FaithX Project

Apr 30 2020

Nurturing community in your neighborhoods… even now!

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.

Click here for the previous post

True confession: in my pre-COVID days, I always had good intentions about being a good neighbor and nurturing community. I thought about joining the neighborhood association, had casual conversations like “wouldn’t it be great to have a block party” but never made it happen, met people with whom I intended to get together but never did, but mostly, I would raise my hand and speak when passing, pick up trash when I saw it, and disappear into my backyard sanctuary for solitude, gardening, and fellowship with friends (most of whom are not neighbors).

This kind of describes a lot of pre-COVID churches I know, too. They are friendly to their neighbors (the people and business owners), they care about the appearance of the neighborhood, they offer assistance to those in need… but often, friendly church members park in front of the church, enter the church doors, and find meaning and fellowship with people like them inside the walls, and work to grow and nurture what they find there.

I can almost look back to those church days with some measure of nostalgia. While it always felt uncomfortably comfortable, it was familiar, it was easy, and it was stable… or was it? It’s time to get real and let go of our attachment to what is comfortable, familiar, easy, and stable. Those days are gone for a while… for a long while (or perhaps it was just a myth). We are now pilgrims on a new journey. We may not know where we are going or how we will get there, but we have left the building… and we have left the building together.

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Apr 21 2020

A Time for Outreach (Part 2)

By Steve Matthews
Outreach Time

Keeping Congregations Connected is a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post.

Last week, Mary Frances, Senior Associate Consultant with FaithX, wrote a blog encouraging churches to continue to think about outreach time. It can feel scary and maybe even premature to think about reaching out to our neighbors and inviting them into our faith communities again; but as Mary pointed out, the limitations of COVID-19 are challenging us to find new avenues of faithfulness – even with regard to outreach in a time of quarantine and social distancing.

FaithX can help. As experienced church planters and church redevelopers, we have learned to think strategically and creatively. We also see great value in “trying things on” to see what practices and experiments might work.

One tool of great value to faith communities right now is a free COVID-19 resource available through our affiliate, Datastory (click here for the link as well as other COVID19- resources). With this tool you can identify populations in your neighborhood at greatest risk. What connections and possibilities might emerge for outreach time if your church hosted an online session using this free resource and invited your church leaders as well as leaders from other neighborhood faith communities and nonprofits? This creates the possibility for collaborative ministry as well as building important relationships in the neighborhood.

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Apr 16 2020

After the In-Reach, Time for Outreach…

By Mary Frances
Time for Outreach

Keeping Congregations Connected is a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post.

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that just about everything you learned about how to do church has been turned upside down in the last several weeks. You have led your congregations through change that may have taken decades previously, you have turned on a dime to offer virtual worship, online bible study, and calling teams for pastoral care.

And to all of that I say, well done!

And now that you have all of that (AND Easter) under your belt, is it now time for outreach? How do we make sure that the people outside of our communities can access what we are doing online? How do we continue to invite, connect, and serve? I realize that this may seem a bit extreme to some, yet I think about the disciples, in the upper room after the resurrection, scared for their lives. And what did they do? With the blessing and breath of Jesus upon them, they went out into a very scary world and told about what they had seen and experienced. It’s our turn to tell about what we have seen and experienced. Perhaps we can’t go out physically, but we can still connect and invite. The time for outreach is now.

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