Hurting Healing Hoping Helping

New Relationships, new faces; sometimes it just feels like we need to do something right? After all, We are a welcoming congregation. A pleasant greeting, a smile, and help finding the coffee and the cookies are great places to start. We all get that. In fact, we do a fantastic job at meeting new people. But what happens next? We know that regularly coming to place where the majority of people have known each other for more than twenty years can feel like popping in on someone else's family reunion. We also know that people don’t need directions to the cookies fifteen weeks in a row. Suddenly we find ourselves at a loss.  We are at the stepping off place where we take a risk and offer relationship at another level.

In most cases, we find ourselves in this emotional stepping off place without ever planning to be there, training to be there, or even ever considering ahead of time how we might act in this space. Many of us have an action instinct – don’t just stand there, do something. Others have a deep spiritual peace about us – don’t just do something, be there. Either way, we are likely to take the next action based on the feelings within us that drive us. If we are the “do something” person, we feel like we haven’t really been welcoming to someone until we have invited them to take part and do something. If we are the “be there” person, we feel like real connection is simply providing space both physically and emotionally for people is all the connection needed. Even though nothing is this simple, people want to be decisive and find a path that feels right. So that is what we do. From some of us, the new face receives the prolonged calm silence that we believe they need. From others, the new face receives the immediate invitation to join a work group and give back to the community. In both scenarios, well-meaning people frequently create awkwardness in an effort to be loving.

Another way to approach the joy of welcoming these new faces to our community could be to start from the hope of acting on the feelings of the newcomer instead of responding to our own feelings. There are multiple reasons that cause people come into a church for the first time. But if I were to label this particular stage in a person life, I would probably label it “Hurting.” We can be hurting because we moved and are grieving the loss of our last church family. We can be hurting because our lives have taken a turn that we were not prepared for like the loss of a family member. We can be hurting because we feel incomplete – like there is a hole that only spirituality can fill. We can be hurting because our children are in crisis and we don’t know how to find peace when everything seems irretrievably out of control. You see, people don’t generally show up accidentally; and at the same time, nobody knows them well enough to address the deeper issues. Both quiet, calm space and action oriented discipleship seem to miss the actual need.

The next step for a person that arrives hurting is healing. We can’t really know what people need for the healing process to begin. Some of them need someone to talk to. Others need to examine the driving forces in their lives. In our efforts to be integrated people we try to live our lives in some relationship to our belief system. Sometimes we need to examine our belief system thoroughly and question whether or not the beliefs that we hold are either vehicles or obstacles to our relationship with God. Some of us need to hold our beliefs accountable just like we hold ourselves accountable to our beliefs. Healing happens when our lives and our relationships make more sense. Only after healing can we move to the next step.

Hoping is an ambitious goal; not to be taken lightly. When someone tells you that they are hopeless do you believe them? Can you imagine life progressing on a path of increasingly less hope? When we are living in this reality, we are certainly hurting. It is only after some healing that we can begin to start hoping again. This is when we can search for promises from God. These promises come in the form of community, scripture, prayer practices, and meaningful worship. It is a beautiful thing to see a new person begin to start hoping. This is the stage when God’s love becomes real to us. We begin to blossom in faith and experience depth in our joy and power in our prayer life. Hoping gives us energy for what is to come.

Helping is a place of gratitude and self-emptying. You can see that these are not really appropriate characteristics to expect from someone that comes off the street hurting. We aren’t really fed by helping unless our healing and hoping muscles are well exercised. We could feel more yoked with tasks, burdened by expectation, and used by getting into helping too early. Yet, when helping is embraced at the right time in our faith journey, we can truly appreciate the grace of God being showered upon us as God uses even us to embrace the world that God loves.

I imagine our church with a team of people intent on the goal of connections. We could have a group of 12-20 people that commit to being trained as a special task force. The task force is called “People Connecting People”. The mission is to find our newcomers (connection makers) and begin to walk the path of hurting, healing, hoping, and helping. The goal is not to simply increase membership but to increase the ability for people to connect with God and community. Our task force would have a training period and then an occasional active service commitment.

Active service happens when we have a group of 4-8 people to connect. We would try to find out when our group of connection makers want to gather. Then we would seek 2 members of our task force to walk with our connection makers. Meetings would be frequent at first during the hurting and healing stages. It will be hard to keep you away from watching and engaging in the hoping stage. The helping stage would only require some regular check in. You can see that this plan will create connections that feed the souls of both the members and the connection makers. You can see that if we plan to engage new faces and new relationships with the intent of meeting the needs of the other, our own needs are met as well. You can see that the active service has a limited window of commitment and only need come up occasionally in your life with the church.

If you see yourself as someone that could be on the “People Connecting People Task Force,” I want to know about it. I am excited to be involved with a church that has a well-developed plan to engage people when the need arises. We definitely have the right people for this work and that person could be you.

 

Enjoy God,

pg