Churches That Make a Difference , livre ebook

Churches That Make a Difference
Churches That Make a Difference
Reaching Your Community with Good News and Good Works

Ronald J. Sider, Philip N. Olson, and Heidi Rolland Unruh
2002 by Ronald J. Sider, Philip N. Olson, and Heidi Rolland Unruh
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Book House Company P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sider, Ronald J. Churches that make a difference : reaching your community with good news and good works / Ronald J. Sider, Philip N. Olson, and Heidi Rolland Unruh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8010-9133-0 (paper) 1. Church work-United States. 2. Church charities-United States. I. Olson, Philip N. II. Unruh, Heidi Rolland. III. Title. BV4403.S53 2002 253-dc21
2001043751
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION . NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified NKJV are from the New King James Version. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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To our spouses Arbutus Sider Holly Olson Jim Unruh who daily show us the love of God in word and deed
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Astonishing Opportunity
An Overview of the Book
Part 1 Understanding Holistic Ministry
1 What Does Holistic Ministry Look Like?
2 The Church s Calling to Holistic Ministry
3 Making Evangelism Central
4 Embracing Social Action-from Relief to Public Policy
5 Integrating Evangelism and Social Outreach
Part 2 The Essential Elements of Holistic Ministry
6 Divine Love and Power for Outreach Ministry
7 A Commitment to Community Outreach
8 A Healthy Congregational Base for Ministry
9 Church Leadership for Holistic Ministry
10 A Ministry-Centered Organizational Structure
11 Ministry Partnerships
Part 3 Cultivating and Implementing the Vision
12 Developing a Holistic Ministry Vision for Your Context
13 Rallying Support for the Vision
14 Dealing with Fears, Change, and Conflict in Your Congregation
Conclusion: We Can Do It
Appendix A: Profiles of the Churches in the Congregations, Communities, and Leadership Development Project
Appendix B: Holistic Ministry Resources
Notes
Acknowledgments
A threefold cord is not quickly broken, says Ecclesiastes 4:12. The threefold authorship of this book, we hope, has produced a much stronger work than any of us could have created alone. Each of us wrote first drafts of portions of the book, with Heidi drafting the majority. Together we reviewed, argued about, and revised the material, so that the final version in its entirety speaks for each of the authors.
We owe a special debt to many people and organizations. We are very grateful to all the wonderful congregations, pastors, and ministry leaders who participated in the Congregations, Communities, and Leadership Development Project. We hope others are as inspired by their vision, faith, witness, courage, and compassion as we have been. Our appreciation also goes out to the many, many unsung heroines and heroes of holistic ministry whom we have yet to meet.
The project would not have been possible without funding support from the Lilly Endowment and the John Templeton Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge the work of the team of researchers who conducted the fieldwork in the churches, whose careful data gathering and insightful field notes and reports provided the foundation for our analysis. Dr. Paul Light, as data analyst and project consultant, was particularly helpful throughout the project. We were also aided and encouraged by input from evaluators Dr. Katie Day and Dr. Harold Dean Trulear, an advisory council of local religious leaders, a consulting council of professionals in the field of congregational studies, and consultations with researchers at the Center for Social and Religious Research at Hartford Seminary. We note that the opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundations, researchers, or consultants who supported our work.
Our editors at Baker have been more than gracious, for which we are grateful. We also thank Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary for providing a home for the project, and Evangelicals for Social Action for freeing time for Phil to write. Both organizations share a mission of equipping church leaders to answer the call outlined in this book. We are each also grateful to our home churches- Oxford Circle Mennonite Church, First Presbyterian Church of Mount Holly, and Norristown New Life/Nueva Vida Mennonite Church, respectively-for embracing the holistic vision. Each of us has had special support from various individuals. Phil thanks Wendy Moluf, director of Servant Development at First Presbyterian Church, for supplying information on church ministries and resources. Heidi thanks her prayer partner Dawn Graham for her assurance, We ll keep praying until it s done.
Introduction
An Astonishing Opportunity
Never in our lifetime-perhaps not anytime in the last one hundred years- has the possibility of explosive growth in holistic ministry 1 been so promising. Today, a historic opportunity beckons Christians eager to love the whole person the way Jesus did.
For decades, most academics, journalists, and policy experts ignored or dismissed the role of religion in solving social problems. Health care and social work professionals were taught to be morally neutral and objective and to see a spiritual dimension in their work as inappropriate for professional care. Secular foundations and government insisted that for Christian social service agencies to receive funding, they would have to water down or abandon the explicitly religious aspects of their work.
Today the situation is dramatically different. By the end of the 1990s, policy elites were desperate for new solutions to urban brokenness and poverty. Neither the liberal nor the conservative approaches of the preceding decades had ended widespread poverty in the richest nation in human history. People realized that the level of social decay-failing schools, violence, broken families, poverty-in all America s great cities was both a moral outrage and a threat to democracy. Increasingly, policy experts agreed with Senator Daniel Moynihan, who said in his lectures at Harvard that we do not have a clue what social policies could solve these problems.
As this dismay about the failure of past efforts spread, more and more reports began to surface about the astonishing effectiveness of some faith-based approaches. Studies ofTeen Challenge s Christ-centered drug and alcohol rehab program revealed recovery rates far higher than in most secular programs. 2 The Ten Point Coalition, a faith-based response to gang violence led by Rev. Eugene Rivers, has dramatically reduced youth homicides in a gritty Boston neighborhood. 3 Prison Fellowship has reduced prisoners recidivism rates. 4 Faith-based mentoring teams seem to have played a crucial role in enabling Ottawa County in Michigan to help every recipient move off the welfare rolls. 5 Lawn-dale Community Center s holistic faith-based health center and other programs have witnessed a 60 percent drop in infant mortality rates in a desperately poor section of Chicago-prompting newspaper headlines and careful exploration by federal health officials. 6
Too much of the evidence is still anecdotal. We urgently need far more extensive scholarly evaluation of holistic faith-based providers. But there is enough emerging evidence to suggest the possibility that holistic organizations sometimes succeed where almost everything else has failed.
Along with the renewed interest in faith-based social services has been a growing awareness of the positive impact of faith on people s lives. When David Larson studied psychiatry in the late 1960s, he was taught that religious beliefs were harmful to mental health. Dr. Larson s careful research over the last several decades has proven his teachers to be quite wrong. Study after study by Dr. Larson and others indicate that religious people enjoy better mental and physical health, stay married longer, and avoid socially destructive behaviors such as alcohol abuse. 7 Faith also helps people counter the influence of a negative environment. A secular Harvard economist was astounded to learn in the 1980s that church attendance was the best indicator of which young inner-city African American males would escape the syndrome of gangs, drugs, and prison. 8 Highly religious people are also more than twice as likely to volunteer to help others. 9 All this suggests that helping people develop a strong faith and ties to a church community helps their chances of developing a better quality of life and becoming productive citizens.
In the late 1990s, religion returned to the public spotlight in a dramatic way. Secular journalists, academics, and public policy experts developed an amazing new openness to an expanded role for faith-based organizations (FBOs) in overcoming poverty. This growing