This episode of Do Justice features Rachel Brouwer, Director of Community Engagement at Talbot Street Church, discussing their unique approach to community engagement and global partnership. She shares how their focused giving campaigns, like the Warm Homes Project, fostered abundance and deep connection, even amidst challenging times. Rachel emphasizes that overcoming a scarcity mindset in the church involves trusting God's provision in both small and significant ways.

This is episode 3 from Season 10 of the Do Justice podcast. 

Chris: Well, hello friends and welcome to another episode of Do Justice. My name is Chris Orme and today I'm really happy to be joined by Rachel Brouwer. Rachel serves as the Director of Community Engagement at Talbot Street Church in beautiful London, Ontario; previously has worked with International Justice Mission, and is all around a justice person. She loves talking about justice and the church's role in bringing about justice. We did a little poking around the Talbot Street website and there's a question for Rachel where she's asked, "What's your vision for ministry?" In that space she says, "It's to empower, equip, and encourage our faith community to create a place of belonging where they can invite others to find and follow Jesus." Rachel, welcome. Thanks for doing this.

Rachel: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Chris: It's great to chat with you. I get to connect with a lot of folks in my day job with World Renew and I was really happy to be able to connect with you and the folks at Talbot Street just before Christmas. It's good to be together. Let's dive right in. Let's talk about the church, let's talk about Talbot Street Church. For those of us who might not be familiar, tell us a little bit about it.

Rachel: Talbot Street is a mid-sized, diverse, and urban church. We're located right in the downtown core of London and we've been there since the early 1950s. As we've been there we've continued to discern and evolve and adapt to that changing landscape of downtown London. Downtown was once primarily a place where, back in the 50s, people lived there. Then it became a place where people would come from the suburbs to come to work, and then they would leave. We've actually found that, even in the last five years—mostly after Covid, really—it's becoming a place where people live. As people are beginning to work from home, as office space is scaling back because there's more people doing that hybrid work-place, we're seeing more apartment buildings going up. It's becoming less of a place where people go to work and then leave and more of a place where people live all the time. We're trying to figure out what that means for our community. One of the things we've seen is that more people have started coming to Talbot Street because it's within walking distance from their home, which hasn't always been the case. We're a community that is rooted in downtown but we continue to evolve with downtown as it evolves.

Chris: Oftentimes we talk about how there are three concentric circles of missional expression. We talk about a local expression, we talk about a national expression, and we talk about a global or an international expression. What's your approach to being salt and light in the face of those three levels of need?

Rachel: Previously we had a mentality of: we give a little bit to every organization, and there are so many good organizations out there doing amazing work. What we found is that it just wasn't inspiring in the way that we thought it could. Instead of doing 52 offerings a year where each week it's like, "It's this organization this week," we started asking the hard question of: what would it look like to invest deeply and meaningfully in a few, where we could really invest meaningfully in a financial way, but also really invest meaningfully in a relational way that really fit with our community. Out of that we picked two local organizations to work with and we picked two global organizations to work with. One of them has more of a mercy bent, one has more of a justice bent because we believe that mercy and justice work go hand-in-hand. We created that specific focus, again, not to say that there aren't other organizations that do amazing things, but for our community, that's what's led people to rally and really be inspired by what we can do when we get behind a couple organizations in a big way. Hopefully that's a blessing for those organizations, too, to feel that sense of partnership in the work with them.

Chris: I can say that we've been, at World Renew, been blessed by your partnership with us and the impact that Talbot Street has had in my short tenure with World Renew has been remarkable. I wonder how you balance the pet project, so to speak. There might be folks, like in any church, saying, "We're passionate about this." How do you discern as a community where to put your investment?

Rachel: For people out there who don't love numbers and assessment, it's a really boring process, but literally we had a spreadsheet. I can't claim to have created this process. I actually came across it from another church when I was working at IJM. They had put together an assessment of: what are the things that we value in organizations? What are the things that our church, collectively, is passionate about? Then, we began, for better or for worse, doing some research on these organizations and ranking them and wondering what would be a best fit for us in this season as a community. It involved prayer, it involved discernment, it involved knowing our community. We certainly have people in our community who have those pet projects that go on. We encourage and bless them in it. I think that God calls each of us to individual things that we're empowered to do and to engage with and that's beautiful, and I think God collectively calls communities into something, with a collective vision. It's not an either/or for us, it's a both/and. We've just decided that as a community, instead of highlighting all of the things that every person in our community loves, we decided to give focus to those few things that all of us can resonate with.

Chris: We talk a lot about partnership at World Renew and we have denominational partners that we work alongside. It's beautiful to see it, it's beautiful to be part of it, but one of the things I am wondering is: what does it look like, not only to give, but also to go with these organizations? To walk alongside? I'm thinking, in particular, of how you folks at Talbot Street integrated our partnership into your worship services. To me, that was one of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen. Maybe you can talk about how that has played out and, with some other partners, how you've integrated it into your worship space.

Rachel: Back in 2017 we began Christmas giving campaigns. We began looking at this idea of generosity and how generosity is this act of hopeful resistance against consumerism. That we feel it exists all the time in our culture, but it really invades our lives during the Christmas season. So we viewed our Christmas giving campaigns as being this stark contrast that reminds us of the priorities of the Kingdom of God that Jesus came into the world to inaugurate when he was born. It's this kingdom that we partner with God in building here and now. We encouraged people in our community to match whatever they spend on themselves and their loved ones at Christmas and then to give it to the gift that we're making to an organization. Chris, you mentioned that we partner with World Renew. We love World Renew and the work that they do and every year we're blown away by peoples' generosity, but I specifically want to talk about our project that we did in 2021 called the Warm Homes Project. If you can take yourself back in your mind to 2021, we were in the midst of Covid. The markets were down. There was a lot of instability and uncertainty. We were sporadically meeting on Sundays depending on what lockdown protocols were and we weren't even sure how many people in our community were still engaging online. It was really hard to do that online engagement and for people who were afraid to come in person, that also presented challenges. So, in the midst of all that, we were worried about whether we were even going to make budget that year. Will people still give generously? Did they have the means to be able to give? And we also didn't want to necessarily do a campaign that would completely demoralize people. We didn't want to, "Yeah! We're going to raise all of this money!" And then it ends up we only raised like 25% of our goal. Over the past three years we had done similar campaigns. We had raised around the ballpark of $50,000 each year, which was just amazing, but we also didn't really want to stretch people when they were already so stretched. So we decided we were not going to set a financial goal that year. We didn't want to fall too short, we didn't want to be demoralizing, we wanted it to be rallying for people. We ended up connecting with you, Chris, and we chatted with World Renew and said, "What's your biggest need this year? Because there are a lot of needs, but what's the biggest one that you're struggling with?" You told us about a partner that World Renew works with called MERATH in Lebanon and we loved what MERATH was doing. They were empowering and supporting the church in Lebanon to provide heaters and blankets and mattresses for Syrian refugees that were living in Lebanon at the time. At the time, Lebanon had also had that massive port explosion and so they were struggling, too, in the midst of all that instability, and then taking on so many Syrian refugees in their country. We loved what the church was doing there. We loved how MERATH was equipping the church to be the church and so we decided to partner with World Renew in that. We put together this campaign called the Warm Homes Project and, like Chris said, typically what we'll do is we will have three or four Sundays where we frame our entire worship service, our teaching series, around that campaign. I think that year we talked about Jesus as a refugee. What did that look like? We told the Christmas story through that lens as we explored it. We had one Sunday where we turned off the heat in the sanctuary for worship. We warned people ahead of time, because we were like, "What if there's somebody that has severe health challenges?" So we warned people ahead of time. We said, "Hey, this is what we're going to do to stand in solidarity. Our worship is going to be really cut back. We're not going to have much lighting, because this is part of reality for people living in a war zone." So we went and we faithfully put together this campaign and you want to talk about scarcity and abundance? I think we went into that with a real scarcity mindset. We were afraid that we weren't even going to make budget. We were afraid to put too audacious of a goal out there. I think that there was wisdom behind those things, but at the same time I think God uses abundance in this beautiful way when he wants to say, "Hey, look what I can do." We were able to raise $100,000 for that project. It was just phenomenal. I think that continues to be a story that shapes our church in really profound and beautiful ways. I think when our goals are oriented around the goals of the kingdom of God, that's when his abundance most obviously comes out. And it came out in this beautiful financial way, but it also came out in a beautiful relational way. On the first day of this campaign, a gentleman who lives in the building next door to us and had walked past our building many times, his name is Richard, decided that that Sunday he was going to go in. He had kind of grown up in the church but had not been to church in a really long time. He sat kind of near the back and we opened up our service and talked about how we were starting this campaign, we were raising money for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. After the service he excitedly came up to our pastor and was like, "I'm Lebanese! I'm an immigrant from Lebanon and I know all about the plight of the Syrian refugees. How did you know that I would be here this morning?" So it was this beautiful testimony for him to have walked into this space of Christians who cared about the things that were so near and dear to him. The following Sunday we interviewed him on the stage and he was able to share beautifully about what's happening in Lebanon and I think part of that inspired such generous giving. People saw that as, wow! God is in this, not just financially, but relationally. So those continue to be stories that we tell to remind ourselves of God's goodness and faithfulness.

Chris: It was remarkable to be a small part of that and just to see how we talk about it, still. How integrated you guys were on putting this at the forefront of your community. For anyone who's been in the ministry space, church, para-church. Since 2020 and the pandemic, every year we come to the end of the year like, "Well, that was the weirdest year yet!" [both laugh] And that doesn't seem to be stopping. I was talking to a colleague the other day saying, "It just gets weirder, eh? We can't envision how things are going." One of the things about where we are now is that there are a lot of conversations about investment in working with vulnerable communities, people living in vulnerable situations. There are a lot of questions about budget and finance and how we can show up as the church, how we can show up as para-church ministries. There's some pretty robust polarization out there, these days. I don't want to focus on that part of it, but in that landscape, how do you encourage your church to be responsible fiscally, of course, but also to not be defined by scarcity?

Rachel: I think sometimes scarcity is a mindset more than an actual reality. I think a lot of times—and it's part of culture! That's bred right into everything we do. We live in this 'not enough' culture, and scarcity thrives in that place and that space where people feel like they have this lack. It's what drives consumerism, it's what drives advertising, right? We see between 5,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day. Marketing is like a $1 trillion industry. It's no wonder that we feel this sense of lack. My question would be: as Christians, how are we actively combating that lack? Because I think it does actually take a robust and conscious choice to say, "No, actually, I have enough." Even if—I think "enough" and "abundance" are two separate things. We see both in the Bible. We see this sense of "enough" when God provides for the Israelites when they're wandering in the desert. They get the manna from heaven but it's just enough for that day. We hear it in the way that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray: give us today our daily bread. Not enough for tomorrow or whatever, for tomorrow will worry about itself. So there's this sense of enough. I think sometimes God pulls back the curtain and just surprises us with this abundance mindset. So what does it look like as a church to operate, instead of from our lack or what we think we lack, and instead operate from this space of, "No, we have enough and God is going to provide." And like you said, Chris, doing that in a fiscally wise way, but I think it invites us into a deeper trust. Like I said before, I think that God shows up in these big and beautiful ways when we believe that he is a God of abundance. When it aligns with God's kingdom and the things that are closest to God's heart, it's no wonder that we had this outpouring of abundance for something like the Warm Homes Project. I think we can all agree that that is something that is near and dear to God's heart, so God showed up in this beautifully abundant way through his people. Those are two different Biblical ways of looking at the opposite of scarcity. So what was your question? [laughs]

Chris: I guess, how do we encourage the church, then, to not be defined by that scarcity? I could frame it in a way, too, like I spent some time in church ministry and we had beautiful souls who just wanted to serve the church, say, on council or the finance committee. It was amazing. But there was a year that we had a tight budget and I was having a conversation at sort of the post-church coffee and this one gentleman, with tears in his eyes, said, "I don't want to be the one who makes a decision that puts us in a bad place as a community." I was like, "Oh, man." I just put my arm around him and said, "Thank you for that level of care." But how can we encourage folks who are in the decision making space or are in the space of leadership within the church to not be hemmed in by that scarcity?

Rachel: I think sometimes when we talk about abundance we look for it in the miraculous. I was chatting with some of our staff and said, "What are some of the ways that you've seen God's abundance flow out of what you thought, or initially perceived to be, these places of scarcity?" A lot of the stories that came out—one of my colleagues Lindy, she responded, and she said, "Well, I've got something, but it's not miraculous abundance." I think that this is a common refrain, right, within the church. If it's not somehow this miraculous abundance, maybe it's not God's abundance at all. That's why I think talking about abundance or every-day abundance, everyday ways that God provides, it begins when churches make a conscious choice that in the small things we're going to trust God. Maybe it's not going to be something big and risky, initially, it's just going to be in this small thing. We're going to pray about it, we're going to sense for God's leading, and then we're going to see what happens and actually have eyes to see it and have an awareness of it. I think God's spirit is at work in the church all the time and we're often preoccupied with our own stuff and our own, "On to the next things!" That we sometimes miss those things. I would say to those churches: begin looking for the small ways that you can trust God and find that he is faithful, and then slowly that's going to expand your trust to then trust God with the bigger things and continue to find that he is faithful in those things. Now again, I say this all with discernment and prayer and all of these other realities, but I think if we begin to recognize God's provision in those everyday moments of enough-ness that will expand our vision and move us out of that scarcity mindset. That's what I would say to those churches: just start in small, faithful ways and actually pray to God that his spirit will give you eyes to see the ways that he is providing and to move you out of that scarcity mentality.

Chris: I love that. It's switching gears, almost. I go back to the gentleman who was concerned about making a mess of things and he had also said something like, "We've been a church here for 110 years. I don't want to wreck it." And I'm like, "Flip that! We've been a church bearing faithful witness to the extravagant love of God in this community for 110 years. God is faithful! God continues to show up. We continue to bear faithful witness." I've had the privilege of hanging out with you and we've had good chats and I want to zoom in a little tighter here. In your life, you, Rachel Brouwer, how have you seen hope and abundance emerge in situations that seem defined by scarcity or crisis?

Rachel: I'll use some of my experience from Covid. I think for a lot of us we felt a sense of scarcity. We all remember toilet-paper-gate of 2020, right? That's the scarcity mentality. That's as practical as it gets, right? So I think back to when we were in that season as a church, we couldn't gather in person. I think scarcity mentality and abundance mentality, we've been talking a lot about finances and we've been talking about some of those realities, but I think it extends relationally, too. In that season there was relational scarcity. I don't think that that was necessarily perceived. I think that that was made real by the fact that we couldn't meet face-to-face, in a lot of ways. I had just started working at Talbot Street Church and part of my role was hospitality. So when you don' t have people meeting in person, what is hospitality? That was one of my big challenges when I started there. We would pre-record our services, so we would record our worship team throughout the week and they would come in while nobody else was here with their masks on and they would do their thing. Our pastor would go and record his message and then we'd splice everything together. We would have different people record themselves doing a prayer and kids reading the kids story for the Children's Message, just ways for people to connect with each other. It was beautiful, but I felt deeply that relational scarcity in that season. I remember being at the church one morning, so clearly, because I would go in and the internet at the church is really good, specifically for live-streaming, so I would go into the back of our sanctuary and I would hit the play button and the livestream button and then it was just me. Me in that space, and no one else was in the building because no one else was allowed to be in the building at certain times. I'd go back to my office and I'd do the live chat with people and that was great and that was beautiful, and then the service would wrap up and I'd go to the back and I'd hit ‘End Stream’, and it was just quiet. In that moment I realized: the church isn't just a building, the church is people. If you go into a building on a Sunday morning, that's not church. In that moment of relational scarcity, I began thinking of, what are ways that we can use the gifts God has given us in technology to bring people together? So I think that was a moment of scarcity for me but there was still beautiful hope in the midst of Covid. As I began being back in person, I remember one Sunday someone came up to me and she would go on to become our Children's Ministry Coordinator, which is just crazy to me. But she came up to me one Sunday morning and was like, "Hey, Rachel!" And I'm thinking to myself, "I don't know this person and I'm the Hospitality Director! This is not a good look." I'm like, "Hey, you!" And she saw my face—she's like, "Don't worry, you don't know who I am." And I'm like, okay, this is getting creepier. But she was like, "I've been watching Talbot Street Church online for the last four months and this is our first time here in person as a family." And that for me was this full circle moment of, I remember being in this building and being here all by myself and knowing it will get better. It will get better. Seeing it come to that fruition, that there were people that we didn't even know who had begun connecting with us online and who knew who we were and wanted to be a part when they could be in person. I think of that story as a beautiful one of, out of the midst of scarcity, and sometimes it takes time, sometimes you don't see it immediately, but God brought about this cool abundance and ended up turning it into someone that we employ and beautifully blesses our church and the children's ministries of our church.

Chris: Our guest today has been Rachel Brouwer. Rachel serves as the Director of Community Engagement at Talbot Street Church in London, Ontario. Rachel, thank you so much for the time. Thanks for the conversation. I appreciate you.

Rachel: Thanks, Chris. I appreciate you, too.