By Frank Stirk

OVER several busy months this spring and summer, Eva Spenst was focused mostly on serving her community by feeding 3,600 visiting young athletes from across the province.

As a homeland missions outreach worker at Christian Life Assembly in Langley, Spenst was tasked with making sure these young people ate a nutritious lunch over the four days in July that they were in the city taking part in the B.C. Summer Games. Since the church was close to where the Games were to be held and had the necessary facilities, Games officials approached CLA about taking the feeding program. The  church agreed.

It quickly became not just one church’s project, but grew to embrace a number of Langley churches, as well as the larger community, who supplied 180 volunteers gladly giving of their time and effort. This willingness of so many people to pull together for the sake of others did not go unnoticed.

“We had an excellent response from people who actually never attended the churches,” Spenst says. “One of the [Summer Games] board members said, ‘I wish I could bring up my children in the church.’”

“It was a way to let our light shine in the community,” adds Steve Nicholson, CLA’s associate pastor for missions. “People say, ‘I don’t have $3,000 or a passport, I can’t go to Africa, but maybe I can serve here.’ And we saw a really good response that way.”

As numerous churches and ministries could testify, this level of response – their desire to unite in service to their communities with intentionality and zeal – is not unique.

Grayson Bain, a Vancouver community activist and a former CEO of More Than Gold, suggests one of the most significant legacies to flow from Christians stepping up to serve during the Winter Olympics was a greater desire among leaders across all denominations to continue working together.

“They now can put faces and names to personalities and build relationships across denominational leadership groups that they didn’t have before,” he says.

Surprising encounters

“I think individual Christians were pleased and surprised by the encounters they had, not only with their brothers and sisters outside their normal orbits, but also just the public,” says Jonathan Bird, executive director of the faith-based City Gate Leadership Forum.

“It put people in unusual contexts and allowed them to see God at work in surprising ways.”

While Bird acknowledges “there’s still quite a bit to be done,” he also believes that More Than Gold helped created a lot of goodwill with Vancouver City Hall.

“In general,” he says, “I think there’s a slow awakening to the social good that local congregations and the church collective is bringing to neighbourhoods and city life.”

Heather Robertson, the Metro Vancouver team leader of Fusion Canada, which helps churches connect with their communities through street festivals and other public events, has also witnessed this greater cooperation among the churches in Richmond.

That is certainly true of the four that Fusion works with most closely – Richmond Baptist, World Harvest, Trinity Lutheran and Richmond Presbyterian.

“People have told us this is the first time the churches are actually working together. You get together at meetings with these guys and it’s a really nice spirit,” she says.

Ministry template

As a result of successful partnerships with these churches over the past year, Fusion decided to devote itself primarily to the Richmond community and develop there a full-fledged youth and community ministry that can serve as a template for the entire region.

“We were scattered in eight different communities,” Robertson says.

“To be who we are, it was important for us to find a place we could focus on while supporting other places.”

To that end, Fusion will begin this fall a research project to determine the dreams and needs of the Richmond community as a whole and how to respond appropriately.

Even churches outside Metro Vancouver that had no involvement with More Than Gold are experiencing increased levels of cooperation and collaboration. In Esquimalt, local churches are part of the official planning to mark the town’s centenary in 2012. To help the congregations get ready, a Fusion team will visit this fall to do some training.

Voicing the faith

Graham Jackson, the director of YWAM Victoria, says this is a complete turnaround compared to perhaps eight years ago, when the churches in Esquimalt “had no voice, no nothing” in the community. That started to change in 2005, when they first worked together to follow Abbotsford’s example and launch annual Love Your City events.

“We’re endeavouring to take it to the next level, which we feel God’s calling us to do,” says Jackson. He believes their experience “is an example of how even a few churches, a handful of earnest people, who believe that by getting involved in the community, we can actually make a difference – and begin to see the kind of change that will begin to bring eternal life into a community.”

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Jackson says while the churches have not seen much growth despite their higher community profile, they are stronger for it nonetheless.

“Within two years,” he says, “these pastors and ministers, who barely knew each other, became very good friends – and to the point they weren’t just doing ministry-related stuff.”

Better stewards

In Kelowna, churches are exhibiting the same spirit of cooperation for the benefit of their congregations and their community, but in different ways. In a bid to be better stewards of their resources, several have done an inventory of the kinds of social services that each church provides.

The logic is simple, says Candace Giesbrecht, pastor of compassion and mission ministries at Trinity Baptist Church. “Why on earth would we try and deploy our resources providing something that’s already being provided?” she asks. “Why instead wouldn’t we put more energy into just the stuff that nobody else is covering? We’re all on the same team here and the duplication isn’t helping any of us.”

As a result of its response to the firestorm of 2003, when the church opened its doors to evacuees in need of temporary shelter, Trinity Baptist is also now officially part of the regional district’s emergency plan.

That meant hammering out a detailed agreement for using their building as either a reception centre or a group lodging facility, as necessary.

“It really did take some effort and some work, but it wasn’t hard work, because it matters for our community,” Giesbrecht says.

“I mean, we just had another fire in an area where we’ve had fires before. This is something our community faces.”

A safer city

Giesbrecht hopes that through the church playing an active role in efforts to keep the city safe, “people will see the love of Christ and want to get to know him more.”

In Kelowna’s downtown core, the 20-year absence of an actual church presence ended June 1, with the launch of Metro Community.

Metro pastor Laurence East says they realized that the street community they hoped to reach needed “a church that was theirs, based and centred in the downtown core.” Metro is a campus of Willow Park Church.

Metro Community is headquartered in a dilapidated former restaurant that was renovated largely by its 250 members. They also run in a separate location a midweek centre and social enterprise coffee shop called Metro Central.

“I’ve had so many public officials just say, ‘It’s so refreshing to see the church engage in this again. We thought that time had gone,’” East says.

He points out that “the evangelical churches especially did not have a good reputation of engaging in a practical and holistic way in issues of justice.”

East says Metro is now exploring mentoring relationships with other Kelowna churches that want to get out on the streets of the downtown. “It forms a catalyst where churches can say, ‘We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Why not just partner with you and learn from you?’”

Back in Vancouver, Westside Church has adopted more of a grassroots approach to community outreach by equipping people in their small groups to take the initiative right where they live.

Gospel on display

“We want people to have the passions they have,” says church planting apprentice James Bonney. “But instead, when they ask, ‘Can we start a program for this?’ we say, ‘How can you be the church where you are and display the gospel in tangible ways?’”

Westside’s small groups have done everything from rake a neighbour’s leaves to handing out blankets on East Hastings, joining First Baptist Church in its ministry to the homeless, raising money for a woman who could not afford neither food nor rent one month, and organizing and staging a Christmas program at a seniors’ residence in Coquitlam.

In addition, the small groups will meet several times a year somewhere public.

“Our small group, we’re at the Starbuck’s on the corner of Denman and Davie with our Bibles open,” Bonney says. “People just could not believe it. We just bless them – we clean up after, we tip like 50 or 60 per cent. And honestly, it blows their minds.

“We’re trying to teach that the gospel’s real, even at Denman and Davie.”

As a result of this approach, Bonney believes that “the gospel and the implications of the gospel are taking root in people’s hearts.” “It’s really helping people find their identity in Christ,” he says. “Because if they know who they are in Christ, they can actually love someone. If they don’t, they’ll serve to make themselves feel better or for approval.

“You can’t really love someone if you’re just using them to earn their acceptance.”

Photos by Graham Jackson.

September 2010