Church Community Outreach: Practical Ways to Share the Gospel

There’s an overworn debate in the church about whether proclaiming the gospel or demonstrating the gospel through meeting needs is more important. For Efrem Smith, this is a false dichotomy. His church, Midtown Church in Sacramento, California, is creating opportunities for sharing the gospel through meeting their neighbors’ needs in very practical ways. In addition to pastoring Midtown, Smith is co-owner of Influential LLC and the author or co-author of several books including, most recently, Church for Everyone (IVP). He is a main stage speaker at the upcoming Amplify Conference, October 20–21 at Wheaton College, in partnership with Outreach magazine.

 

In the conversation below, Smith talks about how church churches can reach the community around them through engaging with culture and demonstrating the gospel through acts of service. He also talks about the importance of collaboration between churches in furthering the kingdom of God.

 

In Church for Everyone you talk about diversity kind of being one of the biggest reasons that’s driving young people to leave the church. So how can church leaders begin to change their culture to make it more receptive to diverse voices?

 

Becoming a multicultural church doesn’t necessarily mean you become a multiracial or multiethnic church. It could mean that, or it just could mean identifying that though you look at your surrounding community and at the surface level it just seems predominantly white-Anglo, or predominantly Latino-Latina, or predominantly African-American, within that there are still across generations, cultures, and within those groups, based on people’s foods that they grew up eating, the slang that words that they use, the the family traditions that they’ve become accustomed to, there are various cultures. We have to reclaim our surrounding community as a mission field, and we can’t just look at culture as the enemy that we’re at war against. We also can’t look at culture as something that we just fully embrace and wherever the culture goes, we just reengineer our ministries, ourselves fully around that. I think we have to live in the balance. Jesus looked at culture with deep compassion and love. And Jesus prayed that we be in the world and not of the world. 

 

So I think it’s about engaging culture. Culture is not the enemy. Culture is not to be fully embraced, to change the core mission of the church, but we have to, through compassion, love, engage culture. And I think if we become better listeners and if we build relationships, not just with the people that come on site at our church, but if we build relationships in coffee shops, at schools, at malls, at community centers, I believe that what Paul did in Athens still works. That we can go into the marketplace, we can go into the community of the arts and listen to the poets of today, engage the philosophers of today, the skeptics of today, and within their culture and their language find a way to present the gospel of Jesus.

 

So what are some of the ways that you’ve found effective to start that process as a church?

 

You know, one of the ways for us at Midtown Church in Sacramento is we adopted an elementary school in our community: Leataata Floyd Elementary School. We found through some data, through the Children’s Defense Fund and some other resources that we studied, that one of the ways that the prison industry and jails grow is based on the third through fifth grade math and English competency scores of kids in underresourced urban schools. If kids between the third and fifth grade are beneath grade level in math and reading, they are very likely to be incarcerated. But if they are at grade level in math and reading in underresourced urban schools between the third and fifth grade, they are more likely to go to college. 

 

So I figured one of the best ways we could engage our surrounding community is just to find people … and there’s a lot of people in my church, praise God, that can do math at the third or fifth grade level, and there’s a lot of folks at our church, praise God, that can read between the third and fifth grade level. So now you can start a tutoring program. Now you can build a relationship with the school and say we want to focus in on the kids that are struggling in third grade and make sure they come to school this fall with brand new backpacks and brand new school supplies. 

 

We partnered with the same elementary school because we found out that budgets were being cut and it impacted kids going on field trips. We raised resources [to] help stand in the gap so that kids could go on field trips and they could all wear polo shirts or hoodies that had the school logo on it and the school colors on it, and they could go to the science museum. Because for me, when I was a kid, going on a field trip to the science museum made me dream bigger dreams of who I could become. Going on a field trip to the children’s theater and seeing a musical or a play made me dream bigger dreams for my life. 

 

So that’s one suggestion: Is there a practical need in your surrounding community? What I found is that principals of schools are pleasantly surprised that the church would say, “We’re coming simply to start a tutoring program. We’re coming simply to come alongside teachers so children can succeed.” I think if you can meet a real practical need in your community, it gives you the relational credibility to present the greatest need of all, and that’s the need in our soul for Jesus. What I found is when we come alongside kids in tutoring programs, when we put on Christmas events at schools, somehow some of those families end up at our church on Sunday.

 

So let’s talk a little bit more about that. You’ve built a bridge to your community, and that’s kind of the demonstration part of the gospel. Then how do you get to that declaration part of sharing the gospel with your community?

 

Yes. So sometimes the fruit is hanging lower than we realize. There are some people that when they experience the church reaching into their daily struggles, their daily challenges and dilemmas, and they realize you’re the church, in some cases they will actually say, “You know what? I haven’t been to church in a while.” It’s almost like the guard comes down because your initial engagement with them was not … and I’m not trying to put down the people that go, “I’m gonna go into the mall and I’m gonna go up to somebody and start talking about Jesus. I know in some cases that has worked. But in my experience, when the soil is a little more challenging, what brings the guard down is not starting out by saying, “I want to talk to you about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I want to talk to you about the kingdom of God. I want to talk to you about John 3:16.” Sometimes [it’s] by talking about trauma, talking about meeting somebody at the [point of] need of, “I lost my job, and I’m trying to figure out how to pay rent this month,” and you connect them to resources that are in their community that can meet that need. They find out that it’s a pastor, it’s a Christian, it’s a member of a church that met that need. In some cases, their guard comes down and they go, “What church do you go to? This is a church that’s doing this? Wow. I didn’t know churches did that. I thought you just worshiped on Sunday.” So, in some cases, I do believe that meeting those practical needs can bring the guard down. In other cases, it’s literally just saying, “I’m going to build relationships over the long haul.” 

 

At Midtown we say the scorecard for the church has changed—should have changed a long time ago. The scorecard is no longer how many people are coming in on Sunday and sitting in the seats. The scorecard now is what kind of people are you releasing into the community after that Sunday service is over. Who are you releasing back into the marketplace, into the educational community, into the sectors and spheres of society? As pastors, we have to remind our congregations that the harvest is still plentiful, the laborers are still few—a lot of churchgoing people, but not as many laborers in the in the vineyard, not enough laborers in the harvest field that are coming with hearts of compassion, empathy, love, graciousness.

 

Another example of how we’re doing this is in California the unhoused issue is tremendous. So one of our members, a business guy, started a nonprofit called Be Encouraged, which is basically just to get our folks to volunteer to love and care for and even advocate on behalf of [unhoused people]. We have volunteers that meet on Tuesday nights, and we pack lunches that we then take out to the unhoused the next day. Through that effort, we have people that donate items so that we can give out clothes, hygiene kits. We’ve even partnered with other churches together because one church can’t do this alone. Sometimes one church doesn’t have the budget, the resources, but we partnered with a number of churches to purchase a private shower trailer that we take around the city—we do this in collaboration with Lutheran churches, Methodist churches, nondenominational churches—where the unhoused can take a private shower with dignity and we give them hygiene kits. We go out and we we get their dirty laundry, and we take them to the laundromat and we pay to wash their laundry. 

 

And then through those relationships, [we not only] share the gospel with them, but also figure out what are the real issues that are keeping them from a regular state of being sheltered. Is it a mental health issue? Is it a disconnect from the V.A. issue? Is it a substance dependency issue? What is the issue, and how can we advocate and how can we connect some of the dots? 

But we can’t do that alone. It’s important to do that in partnership with other churches. The first thing that’s needed in order to really engage the culture around us and to be missional and to have a resurgence of evangelism is to build networks in local communities of churches and put our Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Evangelical Free, Covenant, Converge to the side a little bit for a greater kingdom imagination of what could take place. I don’t want to do evangelism just isolated as Midtown Church. I want to do evangelism with Genesis Baptist Church and Saint John’s Lutheran Church. I wanna partner and do evangelism in a larger kingdom way.

 

Join Efrem Smith and many other dynamic Christian leaders at this year’s Amplify Conference, October 20–21 at Wheaton College, and learn to lead with gospel clarity, live authentically, and multiply faithfully in the real challenges of ministry today.