I saw something beautiful last week. I walked outside the public school where our church has made its home for the last several years and saw our teenagers playing the opening game at our youth group meeting. When I looked at them it was beautiful, firstbecause there was a group of kids learning to be the Christ-centered community that is the church, and second because it was almost fully racially integrated. It looked like the actual demographic make up of the city of Chattanooga Kingdom of Heaven
I then walked inside where my wife, Kellie, and a couple of wonderful leaders in our church were starting a new Wednesday night outreach to the elementary aged siblings of the teenagers from the neighborhood in which our church is located. You see, the teenagers have been bringing their younger siblings with them to church on Wednesday nights. It’s not uncommon for us to have eight or nine of these siblings. We had been just providing childcare with some crafts and a movie, but we felt like there was an incredible opportunity to communicate the love of Jesus with children who were literally coming to our doorstep.
We pulled out one of our old children’s ministry curriculums and decided to give it our best shot. This was our first week to give it a go, and wouldn’t you know, it was the evening we had the smallest amount of elementary kids since they began showing up; we only had two, yet undeterred we went forward. The kids were a brother and sister that had very limited exposure to the church. We broke ourselves into a boys and a girls team, each consisting of two adult leaders and a child. We played the games, we cheered, we memorized scripture, and the enthusiasm we were showing as adult leaders infected thekids and they smiled, laughed, and cheered right along with us. You could tell they were really eating up the attention they were getting from the adults.
After the games and competition portion, we broke into smallgroups and began to talk about what it means to have a relationship with Jesus. We talked about praying a prayer to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. The children told us they had never prayed a prayer like that. We asked them if they wanted too and they responded yes. Now I don’t think these second and third graders connected all the dots as to what it means to belong to Jesus, but I think it was their first step on a life long journey of growing closer to God.
The last few years have been tough for me personally. Our church was the thriving hipster church in town. We were the cool place to be. We leased a beautiful contemporary building with soft cushy seats. We had over 500 people and I was thought of as being somebody in the Vineyard Movement. But the Lord (and there is no doubt about that) called us to leave our facility and move into an “at-risk” school in our city. Within seven months we lost 50% of our congregation. Since then we have turned over 75% of our church, but we’ve added people too, which has given us a net loss of about 55% over three years. I’m no longer really thought of as “somebody” within our movement, and we are definitely no longer the “cool” church. Many of our hipster types have hipped themselves right out the door. I have had many on my leadership team leave telling me I just don’t have the goods anymore. Yet, as I see a youth group that was as white as an Easter lily become fully integrated, as I pray with children who have never heard what Jesus has done for them and are now hearing it because we’ve parked ourselves in the middle of their neighborhood, I think maybe God does use the foolish things to confound the wise and maybe there is something about that opening section in the Gospel of John where we read that the Word becaming flesh and dweling among us. Maybe, just maybe, the church was meant to be more than just an entertainment for the wealthy, and the spoiled, and the coddled, but rather a courageous community that is to go where few dare with the proclamation of the Kingship of Jesus.
