By Mark Wingfield
Long before Ebola came to Dallas, our senior pastor became infamous among staff for this pithy response to the challenges of church work: “This is what we do.”
Typically, this response is given when someone has asked about the repetitive toils of church life and the crazy schedules and the sometimes odd people who walk through the door. The pastor will lift his hands in the air, shrug his shoulders and wearily declare, “This is what we do.”
Over the past month, our congregation has faced the unexpected opportunity to demonstrate to much of the world exactly what we do as a church. Not just what “we” do but what most Christian churches do, because they are churches.
This insight has come as a shocking revelation to some and a pleasant surprise to others. Too often, it seems, churches project an image of caustic language, harsh dogma, exclusion or greed. Based on these stereotypes, people who don’t go to church carry all kinds of assumptions about what churches do and believe. And we tend to make the news only when there’s a scandal.
For four weeks now, we have faced a never-ending media presence — on Sunday mornings, on weekdays, on weeknights, all the time — as our church has advocated for and supported Louise Troh, the fiancée of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan. And inevitably, the questioning turns to these themes: “Why are you doing this?” “How did a Liberian woman come to be part of a your mainly Anglo congregation?” “What motivates your congregation’s response?”
The opportunity to answer these questions is exactly why we have opened the church doors to TV cameras and reporters from around the globe. Colleagues in other churches and friends in the church and community have sometimes questioned our openness, because they begin with an assumption that all representatives of mass media have malicious intent against the church. What we have found in reality is exactly the opposite: Out of worldwide coverage quoting us, I can point to only one news report that got it completely wrong. One out of scores. And on top of that, many of the reporters we have encountered have demonstrated compassion and sensitivity beyond belief.
One of the things we’ve learned is that people outside the church are willing to believe there might be something good about the church, if only they could find it. As a result of this media coverage, we’ve heard from folks far and wide who have dropped out of church or never gone to church who believe they’d like to give church a try now — because they have seen what the church at its best can do. That’s not because our church is unique, but because we’ve had a moment to demonstrate what churches do.
The funny thing is that about 18 months ago, we began dreaming up a new strategic plan for our church, one that would carry us to the year 2020. One of our objectives is to begin a ministry of Christian advocacy, speaking out for the “least of these” among us. In one of those early meetings, someone spoke up and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could develop a signature ministry that everyone in Dallas would know was ours, would know to associate with our name?”
Looking back, we see now that we already had such a ministry. It’s being the church. Because this is what we do.