What Is Your Church's AND?

Does your church have a consistent outreach that fills a specific need? You’re probably thinking, “We spread the Gospel message. That’s what we do. That’s the need we are filling.”

For starters, I think that’s amazing! But I think Jesus left us a method we can all learn from.

Matthew 9:35 says, “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom. And he healed every kind of disease and illness.”

There’s an important “and” in there:

1. Jesus shared the Good News and
2. He healed 

He shared the Gospel message and He helped people with their profound personal struggles.

Let Me tell you a story

Not long after my wife and I got married, we moved to a new apartment. We were young, in love, and had very little resources and even less cash. Definitely not enough resources to hire professional movers. Some kind members in our church let us borrow their trailer, and another let us borrow their truck.

And our pastor at the time came down for over half a day and helped us move. We didn’t even ask for help. He just volunteered. He saw we had an unmet need, and he personally did what he could to fill it. I still remember it … nearly 15 years later. Wow!

A long time ago, a colleague of mine shared something with me I will never forget: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

After our pastor volunteered to help us, how much more open do you think we were to hear, listen, digest, and take to heart what he shared with us? Was it more before he helped us? Or was it more after he helped us?

I think the answer is pretty obvious! It’s not enough to have the knowledge—people first need to know that you care.

One Church's Story

We’ve had the chance to work with a number of churches, and it’s amazing to see the impact when a church zeroes in on filling a specific need.

One church realized there were a lot of folks they knew who had children, and they thought, “Why don’t we give the parents a break (or in their words, a timeout), so they can have a few well-deserved moments for themselves?” So, they opened up their church and invited parents to drop off their kids to eat dinner and play games, so the parents could enjoy some much-needed time off.

Do you think the church spent thousands in marketing to advertise this event? No! They told a few people, posted it in their bulletin, and made a simple announcement or two.

Then an amazing thing happened. It went viral… on a small scale, of course. But the people who heard about it told their friends, and their friends told their friends. And so on and so on. Guess what happened when the time came for the event? The entire gym was filled with kids!

This is a hallmark trait that you are actually filling a need—it’s easy to get people to participate. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars advertising it. People with the needs come, and they participate.

And the next time you have a special outreach to fill their spiritual needs, the chances of them actually participating are astronomically higher.

How do you go about finding a need?

I think you need two things for it to work:

1. A true personal need

There are a million of them. Just take a look around your community.

If you need some ideas, there has been a lot of research in this area—the most famous coming from Maslow’s theory that human beings have a set of five basic needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualization. (Even more research has taken place since then if you want to go much deeper into this area.)

But I would suggest you take a look around your community, and I’ll wager that in 30 minutes, you could generate a list a mile long.

Here are a few examples I’ve seen:

• Food bank
• Health ministry
• Serving homeless in the community
• Personal finance / education
• Single mothers
• Home maintenance classes

2. Passion inside your church to solve that need

It only takes one person to have that passion. Success leads to more success. And others will join. But you need a spark to start.

There are many more things to help your church’s “and” scale, but these are the initial building blocks.

I have no doubt you are sharing the Gospel message. But I’m genuinely curious what is your church’s “and”? Please share it in the comments below.

In later posts, we’ll discuss why it’s critically important for your church to just respond. Make sure you don’t miss those future updates by subscribing! 

And if we can be of help, we would love to work directly with your church. Just contact us and let’s have a conversation.