“Community Catalysts” Go Far to Learn About Community Ministry
When a group of Presbyterian pastors in San Antonio first looked for ways to connect their small congregations with surrounding communities, they were stumped. Most books and expert advice were aimed at large, well-off churches that could afford to build a youth center to draw in neighborhood teenagers or a new kitchen and fellowship hall to serve meals.
| Reflections on Community Ministry |
So they looked elsewhere for answers. Scattering across the country and around the world, they visited small churches that had created successful community ministry programs.
In Barcelona, Spain, the Rev. Rosario Batlle discovered that community ministry sometimes requires a pastor to be a maverick. Don’t wait for permission to act, she learned, push ahead to identify and address community needs. In Boston, the Rev. Monica Smith learned that small churches wanting to do community ministry must be willing to look beyond themselves for resources, whether grant money or partnerships with other congregations and organizations. In Uruguay, the Rev. Robert Mueller realized that congregations must understand they don’t have all the answers. They must involve and listen to neighborhood residents.
But wherever they visited, the pastors also learned two basic facts about successful community ministry: It is very difficult to do well and it is not about money. Even small churches can engage in community ministry.
“Community ministry is really, really hard,” said Mueller, pastor of Divine Redeemer Presbyterian Church, San Antonio. “It is a long-term commitment. And yes, it requires at least some money, but that is secondary. Vision and relationships and connectedness are far more important.”
The pastors, seven in all, are members of a peer group sponsored by the College of Pastoral Leaders, the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Though they had already been meeting as a support group under a local presbytery program, the pastors shifted their emphasis in 2004 when they received an SPE grant from the College of Pastoral Leaders.
Renaming themselves “Community Catalysts,” the new SPE peer group focused on exploring community ministry, which each pastor saw as vital to his or her congregation’s future.
Scattered across San Antonio, their congregations had more in common than just small numbers and being Presbyterian. Most had few members who lived in the neighborhood or knew anyone who did. Though they or their parents might have once lived nearby, most members had long ago moved to other parts of town, driving back every Sunday from miles away.
Some congregations were primarily Anglo, located in once-Anglo neighborhoods that were now predominately Hispanic. Others were historically Hispanic congregations, whose members were now mostly second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans who primarily spoke English. As they had moved out of the neighborhood, a new wave of immigrants moved in, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and others from throughout Latin America who spoke only Spanish.
In one way or another, all the congregations had become disconnected from their neighborhoods. And all were struggling to survive.
“For most of us, our congregations felt very insular,” Smith said. “They were happy to take care of themselves and to do things for the neighborhood and to the neighborhood, but there was no real connection with the community.”
As they read and talked about community ministry together, the pastors decided to find and visit comparable small churches that had created successful programs with only minimal resources. For nine months, they developed a common list of questions for the church visits.
They wanted, for example, to know how the pastors inspired their congregations to care about the neighborhood around them. They wanted to know how the churches started and sustained their community ministries. They wanted to know what role laity played in planning and carrying out the community ministry.
Collectively, they shadowed pastors in Russia, Spain, Boston, Cuba, Ireland, Honduras, Guatemala, Uruguay and San Francisco. In some cases, they already had relationships with the churches and knew first-hand of their success; others they knew about by reputation. Afterward, they sifted through their findings, looking for common themes and are hoping to produce a workbook for other pastors.
Janet Maykus, director of the College of Pastoral Leaders, praised the pastors’ effort, saying it was one of the most creative and innovative approaches taken by the program’s peer groups.
“I loved the fact that they started at their natural starting spot,” she said. “They didn’t try to be anything other than what they are. They used their natural skills and friendships with one another and turned it into something bigger. Rather than going to the ‘experts’ for the answers, the ones who have the most, they went to people with the least.”
On their trips, the Community Catalyst pastors saw community ministry programs ranging from day shelters for the homeless to day care centers and preschool classes for kids, food pantries and clothing closets to youth athletic teams. What interested the pastors wasn’t so much the specific ministries but how they got started and how they were sustained.
“We wanted to find out how to involve a congregation into caring about the neighborhood around them,” Batlle said.
One of the threshold challenges in community ministry is determining how truly willing a congregation is to open themselves and their congregation to the “other,” to people who aren’t currently part of the congregation. Before starting such programs, congregations must ask themselves if they are willing to let others come in and play a role in the church’s leadership and direction.
Since making the visits in 2006, the pastors and their congregations have had mixed success in their efforts at community ministry.
Mueller’s church has launched several neighborhood ministries. A program for local teenagers includes night basketball, after-school tutoring, and summer mission trips. They sponsor women’s dance and aerobic groups, GED and English-as-a-second-language classes, community worship services and retreats and campouts that bring together church members and neighborhood residents.
But the job is difficult, and others did not fare as well. Despite her best efforts, Batlle, for example, eventually concluded that her congregation was not interested in reaching out to the neighborhood and resigned as pastor.
“I got a letter from one vocal member who said she didn’t care about anything in the community,” Batlle said. “She just wanted me to bury the older members as they died and then close the door.”
That reaction is not unusual when congregations face change, Mueller said. Inevitably, some church members will oppose efforts to reach out to the community and start new ministries. Even at his church, some members left as the congregation began reaching out to the neighborhood.
“It’s working fine now, but some folks jumped ship along the way,” he said. “Either way, if you change or if you do nothing, you’re going to lose 25 percent of your people, but you’ll have 50 percent who will come along. You have to pick which position you’re going to lead from.”
As the Community Catalyst pastors worked through that process of leading their congregations into community ministry, their most important asset, they found, was each other.
“The single most important thing we learned was that it is essential to have friends we can be honest with about our struggles in ministry,” Mueller said. “The value of our peer relationships, the value of having a group of people you could talk and cry and pray was way more important than anything else we learned.”
