Meeting An Unreach Committee...

Today I had a lunch with a guy who is a student pastor in a near-by town. He's a nice guy who puts interesting messages in his IM status-line. From his status-line I discovered that he's having a bit of a difficult time with the church's "outreach committee." Let's summarize:

• His church has a summer VBS that the entire town attends. There were over 100 kids there this year.
• Looking at the registration cards he noticed that 20 of those kids have no "Church home."
• He figured that, as these folks have already started a bit of a relationship with the congregation, it woudl be a good thing for outreach committee to call these families and personally invite them to attend worship some Sunday (preferably for a "special" worship like Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve).
• When he suggested this to the "outreach committee" one person in-particular grew really flustered and started stammering about it being "the pastor's job."
• Sigh.

It's a story a pastor in just about any congregation has faced. People get so ingrained in a system of dependence on "the specialist" making sure that the work of ministry gets done that they resist being empowered to do the work of the Kingdom themselves. It's a system that depends on unaccountability, the cold shoulder, and intimidation to survive - a fact that was reinforced to me when my conversation with my new friend was briefly put on pause.

See, as we chatted a woman came up to our table, stood right next to me, and proceeded to have a conversation with my friend that went something like this,

"Hi, I was waving at you from the door, my husband is ordering for me so I came over to say hi. See you later."

As I had been ignored in this exchange I stuck out my hand and said, "Hi, I'm Wes."
[Looking startled] "Oh, Hi Les."
"Actually, it's Wes."
"Oh Wes, Les, close enough."
"Well, Les worked at WKRP and Wesley founded a religious movement - as I'm a pastor I'll stick with Wes."
[turning away and addressing my friend] "another pastor?" [walks away without looking at me].

I was chuckling to myself when my friend said, "That's the person from the Outreach Committee."


Welcome to the wonderful world of unreach.

Tags: unreach Church