Thursday, December 10, 2009

Do you know what's wrong with where you live?

We're in the process of understanding our community.
It's hurts.
It's needs.
It's dreams.

Really, we want to understand people's hearts and motivations in order to apply some healing salve to the wounds that are always present in the human heart. Too often, American churches have been guilty of franchising. We go to super-conference at mega-church and discover they are doing 'X' and seeing 'Y' results. "Ah," we think, "if we do 'X', then we'll get 'Y' results." So we head home to implement exactly what they did.

What we often fail to consider is that 'X' came out of a long study of the needs of their community. Like good missionaries, they studied their local culture and wrapped their ministry in something their community could grasp. They incarnated the Gospel for their local culture.

We're working to do the same with North County. We're surveying the community, asking questions, building relationships...all with an eye to demonstrating and announcing God's kingdom of love and justice.

Here's a short video about some of the demographics of North County.

2 comments:

Brian Miller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Brian Miller said...

I've heard it said that the evangelical church in American can imitate anything but imagine nothing.