The Origins of a Portable Faith

"The church?" The middle-aged woman behind the desk at the local bond office asked incredulously, tucking a stray strand of silvering-brown hair behind her ear. "I don't see how 'the church' would change anything about a community. There have been churches here since before the city was chartered."

The woman, although saying things that felt inflammatory to my seasoned religious ears, was difficult to dislike given her gentle-flowing tone and the weathered, mom-of-many smile lines that framed her eyes. I could imagine her bustling about a kitchen in a flour-covered apron, basting a turkey and offering me a tall glass of milk on Thanksgiving.

"There's at least a dozen churches within a four-block radius of here and that doesn't change anything." She gestured at the surrounding area almost sympathetically. "The city is the same as it's always been. Same problems, same hardship, same cycles. Churches hold weekly services for anyone who wants to come, but I don't think there's any reason to believe they impact people beyond their own buildings."

This was the comment, offered as nothing more than matter-of-fact observation, that set the course for the next five years of my life and influenced the way I would look at the world and faith for many years to come.

It was 1999.

I was a bold-to-a-fault, save-the-world twenty-something raised on a diet of communion and Sunday potlucks. And I was the wrong person ... or maybe I was exactly the right person ... to offer this comment to because it instantly and deeply offended me in a way that changed my life.

As I drove home from that day's round of interviews, which aimed to collect suggestions about how local churches could serve our city, tears stung the corners of my eyes. Not because I believed the woman's words to be purposefully assaulting or antagonistic, but for exactly the opposite reason. I could see on the woman's face, in her eyes, that she believed what she was saying in the deepest places of her being.

She assessed the church to be empty and void ... dead.

And she was okay, even disturbingly at peace, with that.

But I was not.

The muscle-less, impact-less church secluded behind four brick walls this woman depicted was not the church I knew. It was not the community of believers envisioned by the Jesus I knew, or the one championed by the first-century followers of God I read about, either.

The most infuriating thing about the woman's commentary was that it was not wholly without merit.

Certainly, the faith community impacted our city in ways she didn't observe. I knew this for a fact. I'd seen the hearts of some churches melt for our community.

But it wasn't a mystery how the woman came to this conclusion. Most churches in our community had adopted a model that seemed, at least from outside appearance, to be based on "coming"—coming to Sunday services, Wednesday night services, small groups, vacation Bible schools, even softball games. And that meant the city residents most likely to be directly impacted by these churches were the people inside the church buildings.

Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open up and see all the people.

Despite the popular children's rhyme and despite growing up as a pastor's kid and logging hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours in church pews, I knew in the sinking, what-is-true part of my gut that "coming" was not the verb Jesus had used in his parting shot to the disciples. "Come join us" was a decidedly different invitation than "go into all the world." And "inviting ones" was almost the polar opposite identity as "sent ones," the term attached to those first believing "apostles" who bore the message of Jesus.

The more I thought about the verbiage we lived out as churches, the more intensely I squinted at one of the core values of my own local church, which proclaimed "All People Matter to God."

All people. Inside the church, outside the church. People like the majority, people unlike the majority. All of them.

I was sure in my soul this was right. That all people mattered to God. Though I wasn't sure churches always knew exactly how to demonstrate how much we, and our God, valued the residents of our communities.

In my own small city, estimates claimed one out of six people were "churched." That meant about 16 percent of residents were thought to have a regular connection to a local Christian congregation. Churches, of course, knew how to demonstrate this 16 percent mattered. We spent all week crafting sermon series, designing graphics, churning out bulletins, creating children's programming, and hosting events for the one out of six people who would be inside our buildings each week.

But was this 16 percent supposed to be the only or even main group we intentionally built relationship with? And what was the best way to divide our focus between the one out of six people who showed up on Sundays wanting to know Jesus and the five-sixths of our local "world" whom we were specifically told to "go" and reach?

This of course is part of the timeless challenge the church or any institution faces. How do you rotate multiple priorities—church and community, coming and going, infrastructure and vitality—around the burners with enough regularity to keep every pan warm? Nevertheless, this challenge of learning to practice a more portable faith, individually and as a church, gripped me.

As I drove home from the day of interviews, I determined in the way messily passionate twenty-somethings do, that this goal of going to the "all" in "all people" would be one I would stake my life in. Thus, I set out to imagine new models. To figure out what it meant for me to live and be church in our community, first alongside the local church where I worked, and eventually by getting the chance to speak into many congregations beyond it.

As my determination to serve our surrounding community grew, my lead pastor and the board of elders invited me to develop our church's first-ever full-time staff position designed to build relationships with people outside our building's four walls.

This job was a blatant gift—perhaps one of the most important and generous of my life—and an ideal proving ground to test my hypotheses about living and being church. It provided a steady laboratory for learning how to practice faith again as a going community. That is not to say it was easy to inspire cultural and priority shifts in an already established church. Some days it wasn't. But in the everyday gains and setbacks attached to this new role, I developed a striking sense of confidence that the challenge of going to society's margins was not one that would or should be localized to only our church or our community.

And so, as our church forayed into new territory on the home front, I quietly began writing articles about "finding the all...