A church on every corner

It's been a while since my last post. That's because I've been travelling the last couple of weeks and just didn't take the time to blog. My travels included Jackson, Mississippi, a wonderful little city where I met some very earnest and dedicated people. I met folks who love their neighborhoods and are actively engaged in the process of trying to make a difference. I also ran into a phenomenon I've seen before. In one blighted neighborhood I visited there are 24 churches. Twenty-four! This isn't a total for the city, this is in one neighborhood. In this same neighborhood you'll find street after street of boarded up houses, abandonded shops and lost, crack smoking souls. While I was there the mayor told me that there are 86 properties in that neighborhood alone that he wants torn down.

This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thing. When I was in the Chicago area I used to take teams into the inner city to help different ministries. One neighborhood we worked in for a couple of seasons had over 100 churches crammed into one square mile of the city. One hundred! I keep repeating the number of churches because it blows my mind that there are that many organizations that claim to represent Christ right in the middle of desperate, hopeless, crime-ridden wastelands and very, very few of them seem to be making a difference. If a church is the gathering place for Christ followers and following Christ means living as he lived yet the neighborhoods filled by these churches are as close as one might come to hell on earth, what, in God's Name, are these churches doing?

Lest you think I'm going to let affluent suburban churches off the hook...I lived and worked near Wheaton, Illinois for many years. Wheaton is where Billy Graham went to college and there you'll find churches on every corner, too. Only these are enormous, multi-million dollar complexes with huge budgets and staff rosters bigger than the entire memberships of some inner-city churches. And I'm not exaggerating, they are right across the streets from each other. In many cases they have little or nothing to do with each other when it comes to sharing in ministry. Worse than that, well over 50% of the population surrounding these behemoths never sets foot in a church...ever!

What is the church doing? There is charitable work, and food pantries, and homeless shelters and overseas missions. There are a lot of good things that churches do from their bunkers. But I am amazed at how little impact the church appears to have on the lives of those just outside the doors of our buildings. I marvel at the number of people who sit in the seats on Sunday morning then do absolutely nothing to truly impact the communities they live in. I'm appalled at the ministers who fight to protect their pensions, their property and their position but won't lift a finger on behalf of the abused, lost and broken people wandering the streets right outside their doors. We are not here to be the guardians of God's truth and the "keepers of right practice". We are the hands and feet of Jesus to a lost and lonely world. What the hell is our problem?