Churches Heading Out to the Communities
By Al Levine / STAFF
It had to be a bit startling Tuesday at the intersection of Crossville and Crabapple roads, when motorists noticed the folks in bright blue t-shirts waving them into the QuikTrip while holding signs proclaiming: Gas Buydown Ahead.
Even more startling when they looked up at the QuikTrip sign at 2 p.m. to see the price of gas suddenly fall under three bucks a gallon, quicker than it had risen from $3.23 to $3.35 overnight last Wednesday.
This heaven-sent nearly-one-hour discount was courtesy of the good-natured people at Roswell United Methodist Church.
Yes, the Lord works in mysterious ways: spreading the good news by the gallon.
This was RUMC’s second annual gas buydown. Last year the church lowered the price of regular by 25 cents a gallon on Tax Day 2007.
The station pumped 2,842 gallons in an hour, well above its normal sales. The church chipped in the extra quarter, which amounted to a $710.50 love offering to the community.
No strings attached. Nothing else to buy. No advance notice, just a nice little surprise to motorists driving by.
Since this is being written on the Beacon’s Monday deadline, there are no figures to report on this year’s response or if the oil barons in the Middle East uprooted RUMC’s grand gesture by jerking the price of a barrel even higher.
This is more than a grand gesture, however. This is the modern form of church outreach, simply explained on the t-shirts worn by the RUMC gas ambassadors. The lettering reads: The Church Has Left The Building.
“We’re really trying to engage people where they are,” said Rev. Brett DeHart, the Associate Minister at Roswell United Methodist.
“In this day and age, it’s not a common thing in society to just show up at church,” DeHart said. “We’re trying to go out and break down some of the stereotypes of pounding people over the head with the Bible, really trying to just meet people where they are, do small acts of kindness as a way to share God’s love towards them and with them.”
It is the softest of sells. Included with the complimentary gas buydown came a card inviting the customers to drop by the church.
With regular church attendance down 20-40 percent since the 1980s [depending upon whose poll you believe], most every religious group has mobilized in one way or another to show the non-regular flock that God still loves them.
Certainly, every church and synagogue in North Fulton is doing exceptional work.
From the nine-week sermon series Growing Life’s Relationships beginning May 4 at Roswell Presbyterian Church, which will teach how self-control, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, kindness, patience, peace, joy and love can enhance marriages and other relationships.
To the Connection Cafe at First Baptist Church of Alpharetta where the women’s ministry engages in fellowship over coffee, appetizers and desserts on Friday evenings.
To the Worship & Arts Ministry at Alpharetta’s Bridgeway Church, where God is glorified by expression through music, dance, drama and the visual arts.
To Roswell’s Temple Kehillat Chaim, which means Community of Life, where the congregation participated in the Hunger Walk and helped raise more than $60,000 and where the benevolence extends to Rabbi Harvey J. Winokur. He will be arrested this Thursday as part of the Roswell Executive Lock-Up to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The MDA has set his bail at $2,600.
But there are a number of churches that are going the extra mile in outreach. It’s not so much the marketing of the mega-churches as it is a subtle yet determined effort to bridge the disconnect between churches and the lost flock.
Some are doing this in unconventional ways.
To interest potential participants in a marriage enrichment program called Married Life Live, comedian Jeff Foxworthy appears on a page of Alpharetta’s North Point Community Church’s website offering advice on the Top 10 Questions Husbands Should Never Answer.
His No. 1 question husbands should never answer is: Do you think these pants make my butt look fat? The Foxworthy answer is: I can barely see it in this light.
There is a national movement called Servant Evangelism that seems to be inspiring local congregations to random acts of kindness.
Roswell United Methodist, for example, will distribute free bottles of water at this week’s Alive After Five on Canton Street. In the past, RUMC has given out 1,394 free bottles of water at intersections and a total of 2,653 free bottles of water at the past two youth day parades.
It reduced the price of ice cream at a local Bruster’s for 50 customers. It gave out 96 one dollar bills to help pay for customers’ coffee at Chic-fil-A the morning after Daylight Savings Time went into effect. It has wrapped Christmas packages for free, fed breakfast to 198 Roswell police personnel and given gift bags to mall employees on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year.
Not be outdone, North Point Community Church’s “Be Rich” campaign before Christmas collected 16.5 tons of food for the North Fulton Community Charities and raised nearly $90,000 for the NFCC and the North Fulton Child Development Association.
North Point’s Buckhead branch collected six tons of food baskets for the Atlanta Union Mission and its Cumming congregation collected $41,153 to landscape and build a playground at a shelter in Gainesville.
Charitable endeavors, to be sure, but with an underlying purpose.
“Instead of preaching the word, we’re showing the word,” RUMC’s DeHart said.
“We’re trying to, in a lot of ways, change the tone and reputation of evangelism. We leave the results up to God through that. And we’ve had some neat stories. One woman who came through the Chic-fil-A line had had a relative die a couple days before and broke down crying when she called me later that day and said ‘it’s just powerful how God can use you all to meet me in my time of need.’
DeHart is quick to point out that this approach to outreach didn’t start at his church.
“This is kind of a national movement, it’s certainly not something we invented,” he said. “Some of the things we’ve taken off of that and catered some to our neighborhood and our community, but our hope in it is it will make people go: why in the world would somebody do this? Why are they standing on a street corner on a hot day and doing this? And through the card [they] connect that to wow, they must feel God’s love and want to share that. That’s really our hope in doing it.”
North Point’s “Be Rich” campaign, started around Christmas, has birthed an afterlife program called Intersect.
“The metaphor is that we want to be intersecting with our community at very strategic times and places,” said Jason Malec, Director of Starting Point ministry and Director of Strategic Export at North Point Church.
“Whether they have very distinct needs or not, we believe we can somehow impact them by God’s grace. The object of the Intersect as well as Be Rich is really quite simply to be a servant and service to our community, not so much to hand out cards – not that that’s a bad thing at all. But we believe the best form of evangelism comes person to person, not by somebody who’s paid by the church.
“If you come to North Point and have a great experience and connect with God in a way that maybe you haven’t before, by and large you’re going to go share that with people. And that has far greater impact than me kind of blindly inviting somebody to come to the church. Our hope is that folks who come here, to use business-speak, would invite others because they’re ‘satisfied customers.’”
There’s also a powerful Intersect-like program about to happen at Milton’s Birmingham United Methodist Church.
Intersection Ahead, May 2-4, will feature 25 homes set up as coffee houses to engage non-churchgoers with lay ministry. People from all walks of life will show up at these coffees to talk about their lives’ problems and challenges.
“The whole motif of it is when a person comes to faith in God it’s like an intersection. You’re headed in this direction and you have this intersection,” Senior Pastor John Wolfe said.
“For some people, it’s this traumatic, bells ringing event, but for most people it’s kind of like getting married. You say ‘I do,’ and then you start a journey. You had no idea what it’s like. I always tell people in pre-marital counseling the old phrase that says love is blind but marriage is a real eye opener.”
Birmingham, one of the fastest-growing Methodist churches in North Georgia, has blossomed from 22 people to nearly 1,200 in 15 years. But it is also aware it is surrounded by many who don’t attend a church.
Wolfe considers this his church’s gesture of reaching them.
Ask him if the program is a response to the nationwide attendance drop and he’ll give you a curveball answer. “One of my favorite corny phrases is do you ride to work or carry your lunch? Part of my answer is no, it’s not [a reaction to empty seats], but on the other hand it’s borne out of that.
“In other words the architecture wasn’t designed to answer how do we compete against this number drop,” Wolfe said. “People don’t attend a church because they’re tired of attending, it’s because they’re trying to find something that really works.”
And North Fulton’s houses of worship are eager to provide a potential fit.