29 March, 2024

Serving, Reaching, and Transforming in Cleveland, Ohio

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by | 9 August, 2009 | 0 comments

 

by Scott Pugh

I grew up thinking church was boring and irrelevant. My attitude completely changed when I gave my life to Christ at a pool hall after a Christian reached out to me. But a lot of other people still think the way I did. They don”t go to church, or have been hurt by the church, and are just plain fed up with anything religious. 

How are Christians going to reach these folks? We know the church must reach beyond its walls to seek the lost like Jesus did. And that”s what we”re trying to do through our new church plant, Velocity Christian Church in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

SERVING HAD TO BE FIRST

Velocity began with the intention to reach out to people who weren”t looking for church. In order for us to reach the east side of Cleveland””definitely not the epicenter of Christianity””I knew serving the city had to be first and foremost.

I love the way Jesus put it: “If you want to be first you have to be last and if you want to be great you have to serve people with no strings attached” (my translation). To me Jesus” words meant that regular advertising and marketing campaigns wouldn”t work for us. We needed some way to show the people who Jesus is so they wouldn”t write us off.

Along the way, we met an important guide for the process. Ask Dave Mills and he”ll tell you effective service must be part of the very DNA of a church. Mills is a church planter and founder of Compassion by Design (www.compassionbydesign.com), a Virginia-based ministry coaching churches that desire to grow new congregations rooted in service.

Our process was different from that of some church plants in two big ways””its emphasis on lots of service in our community and conducting a community needs assessment to give us insight into the real needs of our community. Mills provided the needs assessment process and guidance, and members from Velocity and networking churches provided the manpower.

We worked to complete more than 18 service activities over the past year even before we had our first church service””for example, setting up for the Relay for Life, painting kids faces, and providing free pictures with Santa. We met more than 3,000 community members as we became a fixture of service in our community by raking leaves, holding drive-in family movie nights, and giving away Frisbees at our city”s Fourth of July fireworks celebration.

The needs assessment taught us a lot about the values and priorities in our community, but we came to know the hearts of people through service. And through our service, people came to know us. We gained trust by serving the city. We have done our best to be living, breathing, and hard-working people who demonstrated their love by giving, serving, and being there.

 

SERVING CREATED POWERFUL IMPACTS

By “being Jesus” in the community, we discovered we could impact people in powerful ways. Here are some of the impacts of this serving approach:

“¢ Relationships develop with community members who aren”t even looking for church. We catch them with surprising kindness””they don”t know what to say when someone who isn”t paid to help offers real encouragement.

“¢ We understand the community in a much deeper way. It”s not uncommon for pastors to take years to get to know a community, but we have not just studied this community, we have experienced it from the bottom up. It”s not just a claim we make, it”s an experience our entire team shares.

“¢ Community members join us! It”s amazing how community members will join us in serving. Not only do we get to know those on the receiving end of service, but we begin to know and build trusting relationships with others who want to make a difference. And many of them don”t know Jesus””yet.

“¢ We started with credibility. Before we were even close to launching, we were asked to participate in community councils and trusted with major projects. People realized quickly we were people they could trust.

“¢ We are growing a new church with missional DNA in its core. Every staff member spends time every week in a serving setting. All of our staff volunteers one hour a week tutoring elementary school students. Not only do we keep our word to those we commit to help, we are stretching team members into a new missional shape in the process.

 

SERVING BROUGHT AMAZING RESULTS

Some amazing things have happened. Who would have thought we would be trusted by our city to provide major community festivals and to help rebuild one of our city parks?

The partnerships with community organizations have opened doors for service and relationships. But we”ve been careful to serve without any strings attached. There is no marketing hook in our service, only loving and caring. We have joined others in their projects, and that has introduced them to a kind of people, Christian people, they hadn”t met before.

The city”s needs have become our interest and the welfare of schools and neighborhoods our concern. Our goal has been to extend extravagant love and kindness to people, especially to people who are wounded and skeptical.

But allow me to emphasize that this was NOT easy. Because we are a new church plant we did not have the horsepower to pull this off by ourselves. We never could have done this without our partnering churches. We relied on them, along with the support of networks, good coaching, and the willingness to get dirty in the process. We”ve been stretched beyond anything they or we could have imagined.

The framework for this process, provided by Compassion by Design, served as a road map that fit with our gut intuition that we needed to show people Jesus before we could tell them about Jesus.

I now believe it isn”t merely optional, but necessary to serve in a big way if we are going to lay the foundation for a new church the community can trust. Like any other builder, we will do whatever it takes to set this stone of service in place at the very beginning of our church life.

Not only are we showing others the character of Jesus; we are learning it ourselves””working out our own salvation by serving others as much as we can.

 

 


Scott Pugh is a church planter and lead pastor with Velocity Christian Church in Cleveland, Ohio.

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