Those of us over age 40 remember returning glass soda bottles to the store to receive deposit money. Bottling companies would buy their bottles back, clean them, refill them, and send them back out, a process called redemption (some states still practice this today).
Redemption is different from recycling in at least one important way. While recycling destroys something in order to reuse it, redemption buys something back for its original design and purpose.
Charleston Outreach in South Carolina is committed to redemption—restoring the world around us to God’s good design and purpose. God’s purposes include a person’s eternal destiny and the quality of their life on earth. So we work to ensure that people’s lives are whole and healthy, and that they develop right relationships with God and with each other.
Church congregations are essential to this task. They meet spiritual needs as bearers of God’s life-restoring story. And they can round out the redemptive process by partnering with local agencies committed to meeting human needs.
Our ministry, for example, collaborates with the cities of Charleston and North Charleston, receiving over $1.1 million of federal funding for owner-occupied home rehabilitation work. We have served multi-family housing communities through backyard Bible clubs, sports camps, and more. And for the last five years, we have helped churches collaborate with local governments to provide redemptive responses to community issues.
The king’s money
Jesus says we should be “wise as serpents yet innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). One application of that is for local churches to follow Nehemiah’s ingenious example and use some of “the king’s” money to rebuild their communities as a way to express God’s life-restoring presence.
To do that, local churches must identify human needs in their communities that local governments (and other non-profit agencies) will be willing to meet through partnership.
Churches motivated by redemptive vision can inspire human service agencies to lend their support.
Of course, the closer we get to the conversation regarding the human soul and its eternal destination, the more exclusive our partnerships become. And there are limitations to what government funds will cover. Government money can’t pay for Bibles or religious instruction or an evangelistic speaker. If a church is hosting or administrating a government funded health clinic, for example, volunteers cannot demand that a person listen to a gospel presentation in order to receive treatment. Nevertheless, Christian volunteers are free to share the gospel at government-funded relief ministries if people ask specific questions or the natural flow of the conversation leads to a discussion about God and his purposes.
While there are a few limitations, government money can pay for food, safe housing, mentoring, free healthcare clinics, and a host of other resources. In other words, if your vision of redemption includes the whole person, it is well worth collaborating as you minister to the whole person.
Conversations toward collaboration
Churches can only use the king’s money if they are aware of the needs in their community and have relationships with the local agencies that can meet them. So where do churches begin? The narrator of the novel Tom Jones puts it this way: “A true knowledge of the world is gained only by conversation.” My twenty years of ministry confirms this. The first step in identifying needs and building relationships is conversation—lots of conversations—that lead to cultural immersion and foster the trust necessary for effective partnerships.
Our first step with churches is to discuss, “What does God want for the people of our community?” Then we pray: “God, what role would you have us play in helping your desires become a reality?”
This process, which we call Redemptive Journey, helps churches discover the needs in their communities that require redemptive action. As part of this process, we take walks through the church’s neighborhood. During these walks, we ask church leaders to pray, “God, help us to see what you see, hear what you hear, and smell what you smell, and help us to know how to respond.”
We then lead churches to dialogue with people who live, work, play, and shop in their community. Our goal is to discover what we can do to help people experience whole, healthy lives and to identify the obstacles that keep them from right relationships with God and each other.
This is not a one-day venture. It takes multiple visits into the community to gather insight, develop relationships, and pray about how God would have the church respond with the resources he has provided—gifts of people, facilities, finances, relational connections, or community assets.
Getting to know Caesar
In addition to talking with community members, we suggest attending the regular meetings at which non-profit and governmental agencies talk about issues, how they are responding, and what needs to be done.
These relationships have their challenges. Sometimes conversations can be derogatory toward people in the political realm I support. Other times I’ll disagree with an agency’s approach to meeting a particular need. For example, agencies often advocate welfare systems based on entitlement: giving with no clear expectation of life change. Charleston Outreach and its partner churches, on the other hand, believe that we should empower people for life change. That means there are times I have to suppress my personal, theological, and socio-political views to enable me to stay at the table.
Before you speak out, ask yourself, Can any good come from my adding a new perspective or taking the conversation in a new direction? Or am I just trying to win a debate? Sometimes voicing your opinion isn’t worth the potential relational cost.
Despite the challenges, the fruit of these relationships is well worth the effort.
For example, after conversations with community leaders and local government and non-profit agencies, Charleston Outreach began facilitating the Human Needs Crisis Network, a partnership with church leaders from a three-county area of South Carolina and Trident United Way. Partnership churches network in geographic areas to handle day-to-day basic human needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter (in the form of rent or utilities aid). This crisis intervention leads to ongoing relationships, through which local churches can address long-term issues, such as marriage counseling, parenting coaching, job training, or mentoring.
Leading by example
When churches are motivated by a redemptive vision, they can inspire human service agencies to lend their support. A recent experience illustrates this well.
In April 2008, local churches and community leaders partnered in repairing the home of Jackquelyn, a single mother of three, whose oldest son works to help put food on the table. Two nearby churches had already interacted with Jackquelyn’s neighborhood of 309 homes in a variety of ways over the years—home restoration and repair, replacing the Community Center roof, inviting men to church events. For the most part, those efforts had an end vision of simply helping individuals. This Saturday in April was different.
Discussions among community leadership about work on Jackquelyn’s home began in November 2007. Charleston Outreach communicated the churches’ long-term desire. While the initial project was restoring area homes, the long-term vision is for a more comprehensive restoration of the community, not just to do work for the community, but with them.
And we have not been disappointed. On the day we met to work on Jackquelyn’s home, more than 70 percent of the people who showed up were from the community itself, and five churches in the vicinity were represented on site. Ladies from the community provided water, sodas, and food, and the men repaired the roof and porch and groomed the yard.
Our work that day resulted in two great successes. First, though the initial project was church funded, Charleston County was inspired to join the cause and has pledged funding for future projects in this community and five others. Perhaps the greatest successes, though, were the relationships of trust we developed. By the end of the day, the churches and community members were already asking, “What’s next?”
Churches may be intimidated by the prospect of cooperating with local governments. But just as collaboration was necessary to redeem used soda bottles, so today the church can work with local officials to fulfill God’s work of restoring the world to his design and purpose.
If your vision of redemption includes ministry to the whole person, you can’t afford to ignore local government in your mission.
Chuck Coward is executive director of Charleston Outreach in Charleston, South Carolina. www.CharlestonOutreach.org.
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