After 14 years in corporate America, Eric Elton was looking for something more. When his pastor called to ask if he'd be interested in an open Mission Outreach Director position at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Burnsville, Minnesota, where he was a member, the decision was quick and easy. Years of volunteer service had already made Eric passionate about Prince of Peace's approach to outreach through service. It was an approach that Jeff Marian, now lead pastor at Prince of Peace, picked up on immediately after joining the staff in 2008. Over the last few years, the church has recast its vision around filling community needs in collaborative partnerships with other organizations, including The Salvation Army, Feed My Starving Children, and the local hospital. Elton and Marian spoke with BuildingChurchLeaders.com managing editor Laura Leonard about how an emphasis on outreach and service has changed their church, why they believe more churches should pursue collaborative partnerships, and how to prepare and train people to be an extension of God's heart and hands in the community.
How does outreach play into your church's mission and identity?
JM: When I was interviewing here, I was trying to listen for where the energy was as people talked about ministry at Prince of Peace. There were a couple of hot spots: one was our partnership with Feed My Starving Children, and another was the work that was being done in the Mission Outpost, which is our food pantry and clothes closet and furniture ministry. People talked about the significance of that work with a sense of pride and joy, so that was an area where I sensed the Spirit was really at work. And Burnsville, where we're located, was a booming suburb on the southern growth edge of the city back in the 1970s and '80s, but has become much more urbanized today; poverty is all around, and there is a ton of need. Those two things fit together well.
How do you see this outreach shaping the future of your church?
JM: We've got about 120,000 square feet—two buildings and 23 acres—but if I could wave the magic wand, I would downsize to one multi-purpose building that houses multiple collaborative partners who are sharing our ministry, and focuses on children, seniors, and people in poverty. We would have social workers here, we would have other not-for-profits, we would have tutoring, and we would have county health. That would be the front door for people who are coming with need as well as a place where we can bring our friends and neighbors who are not necessarily connected into spiritual community to serve, as opposed to inviting them to a church service. The church growth movement that I grew up in was trying to get people into church. Now it's, "Come serve with me."
What does this process look like?
JM: We're praying a lot. We just released a vision to the congregation, and this weekend is the last of a five-part sermon series that lays it out. We have an implementation team in place and are talking about what we can reasonably do in the next 12-18 months. We're on a planned development campus with a hospital, a senior center, a YMCA, and another medical clinic. Our first conversations are with our partners, to ask, "Is there property here you could use? What can we be doing in greater collaboration?" Eric and his team just opened a dental clinic here, and that came through a partnership with the hospital, who said, "We're getting a ton of people in the ER with dental pain, and they really don't need to come to us; how can we change that?" Now we have a part-time registered hygienist on staff as our clinic coordinator, and dental professionals donating their time and their talents to do extractions and fillings, which are the main sources of pain that were bringing people to the ER. This is a place that not only serves people in need, but it also provides an opportunity for dental professionals to give back to the community.
How do these collaborative relationships develop?
JM: Almost every healthy collaborative partnership that I've ever seen happened because members or senior leadership of those institutions knew one another well and worked well together. We're aware that there is a tremendous amount of redundancy in our general area when it comes to service. So job one is to map what the need actually is, and job two is to discern each other's strengths and agree on values. We realize not everybody will want to play in the same sandbox, and that's okay.
What challenges have you encountered working in these types of relationships?
EE: Some of it is differences in theology, and some of it is how they might receive their financial support and how their reporting structure might be different than ours. You've got people that work alongside you but you don't have any ability to tell them they're doing it wrong, because you don't supervise them, and you don't have their paycheck. You have to figure out how to live, breathe, and work together. It's a constant conversation. In this partnership with The Salvation Army, it's gone very well.
What have you been able to do with them that you couldn't have done alone?
EE: One thing they bring is name recognition. The red shield that says The Salvation Army on it—people know that to be a place you can go for help. And that is what we have become as well. They reinforced what we were already doing.
JM: They brought the refrigerators and freezers that we did not have access to earlier, which means we're now able to offer perishable goods, milk, and meat. And we have been able to help one another with volunteers.
Another example would be how the dental clinic started. I serve on the board of the hospital right across the street from us, and it was at board meetings there that I heard about the community health surveys that revealed how so many people are going to ER with dental pain, and how much that's costing the hospital. We'd had internal conversations here thinking about a dental clinic, and that was really the impetus to take further steps. Now, the hospital is a financial partner and hopefully will continue to be a financial partner in the dental clinic, and that partnership has created something great for the community, great for the hospital, and great for our ability to connect with the people.
How did this shift toward outreach through community programs happen? And how did people within the congregation respond?
JM: In a sense the DNA was here before I ever walked in the door, because the Mission Outpost had been doing so well. Then I put more emphasis on it, to the point where people began to get a bit uncomfortable. Because we're living in a fear-based culture, people are more likely to say, "Why don't we just take care of ourselves, and let other agents take care of those people?" This is a great opportunity to teach a different cultural value and a different spiritual view, and to challenge people to grow. It's been a gradual shift, and now with our new vision, it's a much clearer demarcation of change in how we're doing ministry.
How did the community respond when you started building these programs and getting out there in a different way?
JM: One of the great things about this congregation—and it's been true for quite some time—is that it has a tremendous amount of community respect. It has a reputation for being a good team player and for caring about the community. The more we've swung that door open, the more I hear about the willingness of others to be collaborative partners. We're seeing that the challenges are so much bigger than any one of us, and redundancy leads to a tremendous amount of inefficiency. I realize that social agencies and governmental agencies and school districts aren't always open to the spiritual community, but when I was preaching about serving the needs of children, the superintendent of schools was here for every one of those services to speak into that, and he didn't hesitate to say yes.
How do you prepare people in the church for outreach? What does training look like?
EE: We sit down with folks every time they gather to serve in the Mission Outpost and invite them to share stories and "God moments." We do prayer requests and pray for people. If they're new, we will take them through a tour and we show them all the different roles, then invite them to say what best fits their gifts and their passions. It might be the food shelf, it might be furniture, or it might be hosting families when they come to visit. A lot of what we do is making sure that we equip our volunteers well so that they can be an extension of God's heart, hands, and feet in the community.
JM: Part of what's beautiful about collaborative partnerships is that we don't have to do all the training. We've got somewhere between 100 and 120 tutors at the local elementary school, and we don't have to train them for what they're doing—the school takes care of that. Our job is to set the template for what it means to be Jesus out in the community, at work and at play. And more and more people are starting to get that.
How do you help people make these connections between outreach and service and personal discipleship?
JM: We're trying to do a better job of consistently getting the stories out of what service did for people, and how it was transformative, for those who served and for those who were served. We also connect this into the offering on a regular basis: "Here's why we give—your generosity makes this possible." So the stories set the expectation, and more and more often people begin to see that this is their story, too.
Have you seen people come in to the church through these ministries?
JM: We've seen some. Ultimately, that is not our goal, because if we started measuring that, it would be painful—we'd think we were complete failures. Our goal is that when someone comes in to visit our dental clinic or the food shelf that they connect the dots and say, "Maybe that was God working through that volunteer that sat with me." We don't hammer the Bible down on anybody; we just choose to live it out.
What would say to a church leader or pastor who wants to get this kind of thing started?
EE: When I'm talking to somebody new, I feel for the intersection between the passions of the disciples at that church and the needs of the surrounding community, and begin there. Start with collaborative partnerships from the get-go. Spread an infection of service, and then tell the story like crazy. Work really hard with the volunteers, encouraging and equipping them and helping them realize that what they're doing is being a disciple and living out a call. Put more effort on the volunteers than on the recipients—that will be backwards to a lot of people, but if we equip our volunteers, the recipients are going to feel it and experience it.
JM: It's moving people away from the notion that Christianity is ultimately about what happens after you die, and instead thinking from a kingdom perspective that says Christianity is really about how you live after you've died and are raised again to new life right here, right now. When the emphasis becomes Jesus being the way of living now instead of a way to get to heaven, people think about faith differently. And that's been a cultural and theological shift that we've had to push. A lot of folks are getting it.
