Finding gaps

Recently I was visiting with a church group about their outreach ministries, and they observed that their rural county had many churches, and that the area was largely "churched," with most people being members of congregations. Yet as we visited further, it seemed increasingly clear that despite a large number of established churches in the area, and the perception that most shared similar Christian values, there was strong evidence that there were many folks who had no ongoing, meaningful relationship with any church. Perhaps most were nominal Christians, folks who would consider themselves believers. But the fact that none of the existing churches was "bursting at the seams" on a given Sunday suggested that many felt little need to be involved in church.

The conversation also revealed that the county was struggling with a high rate of unemployment. A local treatment center provides opportunities for people to turn their lives around from drug and alcohol dependency, but upon completion of the therapy there are few jobs available. That lack of employment opportunity also means that when young people go off to the university, they usually don't come back. Someone else noted that, as in many other rural areas, there's a problem with meth labs. Just in a few minutes, we began to recognize that even in that somewhat "churched" community, there is a significant mission for any church! We admitted that we had just barely scratched the surface of the kinds of needs in the community that Christians need to be addressing. Mission, often, is about finding the gaps. Where are needs not being met, where are folks falling through the cracks, where are our assumptions about the spiritual vitality of our community getting in the way of sharing our faith in tangible ways?