Best Practices

The past few weeks I have been taking a new bus route to work from my friend’s house. The route passes through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood that is seen by many as a place of homelessness, poverty, and addiction. While there are many homeless people on the street who seem lonely and isolated, there is also a deeper sense of relationships and a tight-knit community where people care for and look out for one another, and share their hopes and pains with each other – like a family.

You don’t need big buildings, budgets, or clever programs to impact your city.

You do, however, need a new scorecard and upgraded approach to ministry.

A New Scorecard and an Upgraded Approach

For generations, churches have measured attendance and budgets as indicators of success. Why? Because we have a strong bias toward self-preservation. Let’s be honest, the purpose of our congregation is often centered on the members.

A few weeks ago my sister was visiting me and I excitedly wanted to play her some new music that I’ve really been enjoying. She listened and enjoyed it too. But she also raised a concern with me. She had been with me a few days and almost all the music we listened to was made by men. As a musician herself, she told me more about some of the struggles women face in the music industry.

And I realized I was part of the problem. The diversity in my music collection is not great.  

In the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke, a lawyer put Jesus to the test by asking a bold question - “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer already knew the answer written in the Law, which is love God and love your neighbour. Not fully satisfied with the answer, he followed up with an honest question, “And who is my neighbour?” I have been thinking about this simple yet challenging question as I encounter others in my daily life, work, church and neighbourhood.

We are a people who deeply believe in the importance of promises, and also, seem, ironically, to not be very good at keeping them.

My Nigerian friend and colleague in the work of peace and justice, Bulus Ali, has been an icon of peace to me; a representation of and witness for what Peace is and Justice does.

I’ve known and worked with Bulus for 30 years, first when he was an agricultural extension agent in Nigeria for CRWRC (now World Renew) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more recently in his capacity as the liaison between the Reformed Churches in Nigeria’s Peace Justice and Reconciliation Committee (PJRC) and CRC ministries supporting the work of the PJRC.

I know that my heart is not the only heavy one out there. In the last couple weeks there have been unjust and violent events, and I find myself reeling emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Presidential executive orders which do not jive with our lived out faith to love immigrants and refugees (Leviticus 19:34). A terrorist attack on Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Quebec City. I have been navigating social media, news articles, and political statements all while simultaneously fact-checking and processing through the lens of my own Christian faith.

I am a dual citizen. I and others from my faith tradition hold dual citizenship.

I am a citizen of the United States of America and I am a citizen of what my Reformed-Presbyterian branch of Christianity calls “The Kingdom of God.” I was born and baptized as a child into that community of faith and it is my primary and deepest citizenship. My identity.

We are in the season of Advent. As a pastor preached this Sunday, the liturgical church year does not begin with triumph or with victory, but with, of all things—waiting.

We turn back to the beginning of our devotionals ordered by church year; we hear Scriptures read of prophets forthtelling and foretelling of the coming one, the shoot to grow from the stump of Jesse’s tree, the one who will make all things new—and we wait.

What does Mary Crickmore, a CRC missionary in Mali, West Africa, for over 30 years, have in common with Robert Moffat, a 19th century Scotsman who arrived in what is now Botswana, Southern Africa, in 1821 as a missionary from the London Missionary Society?

You might be surprised.