CRC Congregations Enter Their Communities

Members of Trinity Christian Reformed Church in Fremont, Mich. recently took time during a  Sunday service to share stories about conversations they had with people in their community.

These were ordinary conversations, and yet not really so ordinary, since church members were consciously approaching people they didn’t know to talk to them.

One woman spoke of how she was at the local post office and decided, with some trepidation, to strike up a conversation with a man who was wearing a motorcycle jacket full of patches.

“Before she knew it, other people in line at the post office started talking and asking questions about the jacket,” said Rev. Ronald Baker, pastor of the church.

Baker recalls how another woman talked of sitting next to a woman she didn’t know at a basketball game and how “before she knew it the the whole history of the woman’s troubled life came pouring out.”

Baker’s church is one of three West Michigan congregations that came together over the last year, with the help of Christian Reformed Home Missions, to develop and implement a short-term learning community titled Enter:Community as a way to connect to their neighborhoods.

“We asked people to do something that they may not be comfortable with,” said Baker. “We talked of how if God is going to bless us, we need to go beyond where we currently are. We need to do something new with our feet, eyes and mouth.”

Enter:Community emerged out of the CRC’s Strategic Planning and Adaptive Change Team (SPACT) which visited and spoke with congregations across the denomination to learn what challenges and issues they were facing. Among these challenges, congregations said they need to learn/relearn how to connect/reconnect with the local contexts in which they minister.

With this in mind, Enter:Community teams in Classis Muskegon gathered to learn about and design experiments that motivated their congregation to see, experience, and engage with their neighborhoods.

“This was a short-term learning community in which churches were asked to consider practicing new behaviors,” said Sam Huizenga, a member of the Great Lakes Regional Team of Home Missions, who served as a coach for the churches undergoing the process.

“The idea was to ask the whole church to become involved in finding ways to reach out to their community. We were asking them to take some baby steps in reflecting, learning and taking action.”

The group, she said, implemented the experiments in their churches, then followed up with learning and reflection on what worked or did not work. 

“The goal (of this experiment) was to help the congregation experience (and learn about) the community,” said Huizenga. “We were not asking people to come to us; we were going out to experience the everyday things our community experiences.”

This was the second group of churches to take part in Enter:Community.

She said the first group ended up doing such things as holding prayer walks in their neighborhoods.

After the prayer walks, these churches dedicated part of their worship services to hear the stories of answered prayers, spiritual conversations with neighbors, and new connections made in the neighborhood, she said.

One church sponsored a scavenger hunt to help members experience their neighborhood and its particular culture, she said.

During the most recent Enter:Community experiment in Classis Muskegon, she said, one church asked members to pray for eight strangers in three weeks.

“One woman reported how she was annoyed at a driver who was passing her and how she suddenly had a change of heart and prayed for the driver,” said Huizenga.

An overall theme for the process came from Luke 10:1-12, in which Jesus sends out 72 disciples two by two to every town and place where he was about to go to help prepare the harvest.

Baker at Trinity in Fremont said the church committed to activities geared to having the entire congregation see themselves “as one of the 72 and be willing to share their journey/experience.”

As part of this, he said, they had handmade posters containing the Bible verse posted around the church. In addition, the church placed announcements asking “Are You One of the 72?” for several weeks in the weekly bulletin.

Baker said not everyone in his church participated, but even those who didn’t had the chance to hear the stories during services of how it had gone.

“We see this as a modest effort at more intentionally connecting in our community,” he said. “When we do this, we have the chance to see God at work in the moment. In the end, it has stretched us.”

He said that being part of this encouraged he and his wife to host a neighborhood block party, which proved to be a success.

The other churches involved in this effort were Celebration Community CRC in Muskegon and Fruitport CRC.

Altogether, the Enter:Community experiment has created powerful new connections and opportunities in churches. But even more encouraging was the environment it created among these churches for shared learning and support, said Huizenga.

 “Leading the Enter:Community process has been a privilege”, says Huizenga. “I have watched groups identify and wrestle with real barriers to outreach and honestly discuss how we can behave differently. These are Holy Spirit moments.”