“I’ll be honest; people don’t trust big church groups around here anymore”

Sooner or later every single group in the Mt. Druitt area has told us this, including some church groups. When we ask why, the response is always amazingly similar and really maddens me:

A few years a go a big church got some funding and tried some things out in a poor community. From the outset the tail was wagging the dog, as availability of funding appeared to be the drive for mission.

In the end, some very earnest young people were thrust into environments and situations that they were completely unprepared for. As a result they quickly left, they had that luxury. The program co-ordinators completely underestimated what it takes to reach a poor community offering inadequate training, skills and support.

Simply being “funny, funky and flirtatious” is not enough to reach a poor community for Christ. Poor communities require committed, caring and consistent people, ready to do whatever it takes to see God revealed afresh. More people who will holistically respond to the needs of the poor are in short supply.

This desperately needs a reversal as the church is rapidly declining in poor suburbs, retreating to the “higher ground” of sedentary middle / upper-middle class suburbs. When the poor ask “who is my neighbour”? The answer is fast becoming “certainly not a Christian! (Quite ironic that we follow Christ, who lived and proclaimed “Good news to the poor” Lk 4.18).

In the above situation both sides have lost out. I am sure the workers have had their biases about the poor “confirmed” and community members feel as if they were treated as a project and not as people.

The naiveté (or arrogance) of the big church frustrates me as a missionary. It can undo the great work that many small church groups have been doing in earnest for years in the area!

As a footnote: In contrast another big Church from the same area as the other one mentioned has taken a different approach. One in which they approach community groups and offer their practical services like a working bee (only if they are not stealing jobs of local community members). This approach benefits both sides tremendously probably because it is service and not a service.