Reaching the Unreached Beyond Comfortable Church Boundaries
Reaching the unreached often means moving beyond safe and familiar church relationships into places where people’s lives are messy and uncomfortable. Mark A. Taylor reflects on examples from youth ministry, LifeWay research, and Southland Christian Church’s Bruised Reed ministry to ask whether faith is strong enough to love sinners toward Christ.
- Reaching unreached people often requires Christians to move beyond comfortable relationships and familiar church settings.
- Research cited in the article raises concerns about Millennials disengaging from prayer, worship, Bible reading, and church participation.
- Examples from Rick Bundschuh and Southland Christian Church’s Bruised Reed ministry challenge believers to love people in messy places.
By Mark A. Taylor
In this, our second week of “Eats with Sinners” features, we’re reminded again that we may not always be comfortable getting close to folks untouched by the gospel. When we venture outside the predictability of safe relationships inside the church, we’ll probably bump into people whose lives are messy, whose choices have been bad, and whose language or appearance or habits make us ill at ease.
When Reaching the Unreached Gets Uncomfortable
That’s what happened when Rick Bundschuh took seriously the mandate from a church that hired him as youth minister. “Reach unreached teenagers,” they said. But they didn’t count on “unreached” looking so ragged and sounding so raw. When Rick saw he couldn’t overcome the forces resisting change, he left. The comfort of the status quo had trumped the call to love the lost.
We wonder how often this story has been repeated in churches across the land. Some who look at the state of faith among young people in America are deeply concerned. In his summary of a major research project among Millennials (18-29-year-olds), Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources, said in April, “The Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships” if current trends continue. Even among the 65 percent surveyed who call themselves Christians, the research found that 65 percent “rarely or never pray with others, and 38 percent almost never pray by themselves. . . . 65 percent rarely or never attend worship services. . . . 67 percent don’t read the Bible.”
A Faith That Changes People and the World
Three years earlier, LifeWay Research had polled a sampling from the same age group and found that 70 percent who went to church regularly in high school had quit by age 23. Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, concluded, “Too many youth groups are holding tanks with pizza. There’s no life transformation taking place. People are looking for a faith that can change them and to be a part of changing the world.”
That’s certainly the kind of faith demonstrated by workers in Southland Christian Church’s Bruised Reed ministry. They’ve discovered a reality unlike anything they’d known as they’ve ventured just a few miles beyond the church building’s doors. Their faith has changed them, and—one adult entertainment worker at a time—their faith is changing the world.
These stories this week prompt me to wonder: Is my faith strong enough to encounter sin and love the sinner until he or she will realize and respond to the Source of that love? I’m grateful to Arron Chambers (who wrote Eats With Sinners) and Rick and several hundred Christians in Lexington whose example won’t let me stay comfortable inside the tidy boundaries of church-as-we’ve-known-it.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
