Mercy and Love: Collective and Distributed
I was recently asked in an interview with the Seattle Times what we do for the community. It got me thinking about our church’s approach to mercy ministry.
Our methods range from collective to fully distributed. To illustrate what I mean, here are some examples from the whole gamut:
Collective Efforts
Sending resources and support to Vision Nationals, helping local schools and community organizations, and building campus partnerships with established ministries like UGM and Bread of Life. Rather than creating our own service organizations, we prefer to partner with existing organizations that are already making a great impact in our community.
Hybrid Efforts
Examples here include MicroMissions (we provide much of the funding through micro-grants while community groups provide the vision, effort, and service to meet a need) and Redemption Groups (we’ve created this infrastructure in part to help people struggling with addiction, abuse, etc.). These are two great ways for small groups in the church to work together for the common good of the people in our communities.
Fully Distributed
Individuals within the church use their resources to love, bless, and serve those around them. We believe every Christian should be an ambassador of Jesus, bringing mercy to all their relationships and throughout the world.
We can track our collective and hybrid efforts fairly well. As for the distributed effort, we share some of these stories in our Changed By Jesus series and elsewhere, but community and life transformation on this grassroots level take place in many ways we’ll never fully know.
It’s exciting to think about the total impact of ten thousand people loving Jesus and serving others—an effect so great and diverse, I pray it remains lasting and immeasurable.
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