We Love Our City

The subtitle of the book is an actual quote from one of our city councilmen. I was asked to make a presentation to the city council one evening on all the projects we, as a church, had partnered with the city on to provide social services to our community. One of the reasons for the report was to introduce the newest partnership in which we as a church would become the city’s official graffiti abatement team. After everyone on the city council took an opportunity to thank our church for the services we were providing to the community one of them said: “Because of all that The Father’s House is doing in our community, the city is a better place to live. This is how a church in the community became the community’s church”. The partnership between the church and the city was years in the making. There is a fair amount of distrust on both sides of the policies, protocols and practices of each side. After years of working on justice related issues I often spent much of my time being a liaison between faith-based, local, city, county, state, and federal organizations. The delicate, often exhausting dance between organizations is created by the inflexibility of the policies, protocols, and practices of the separate entities. The justice for those who need relief routinely becomes a journey into a maze that results from all the different organizations created to secure justice. Since every organization has it’s own policies, protocols and procedures that never seem to connect with other organizations, people who are in need of justice get lost in the maze. This is where it gets personal for me. Often the worst offender of too many policies, protocols and procedures and nonparticipation with other organizations, is the church and I say this as a pastor who loves the church that Christ died for and that I have faithfully served for over 30 years. When the “We Love Our City”, weloveourcity.org, community outreaches began at our church, we were serving several hundred under-resourced people in different ways. After years of learning how to partner with different organizations we now feed over 25,000 people every month in 3 different cities. Each one of these cities has a population of over 100,000 people. On a weekly basis we provide fresh produce to 5 underserved elementary schools in 2 cities with a total student population of over 5000. We work in 21 different high-risk neighborhoods representing 77 blocks on a weekly basis in 4 different cities, serve as the official graffiti abatement team for 2 cities and the Napa Valley, manage a community center that provides a free afterschool program and summer program in one of our at risk neighborhoods. We have a free mobile medical clinic and free bookmobiles that travel to those in need of these services. We recently converted what was known at city hall as the “Ghetto Trail” into a 1 acre community garden in the most violent area of the city. In all 4 cities our projects happened in partnership with federal, state, county and city organizations and in cooperation with other programs that churches typically will not include or support as part of their community outreach based on the overused and often misused phrase “separation between Church and State”. While the 1st amendment to the Constitution does provide some protection for churches from government, it was never meant to prohibit partnerships with government. For many churches, their form of social justice is so clearly designed around the same inflexible policies, protocols, and practices that governments have been accused of using that create a cycle of poverty. Meaning that churches often trap people in need in the same kind of bureaucratic maze and deny true justice for those who need it most. It has been my experience that many churches seem unwilling to accept help or to partner with organizations that don’t share their policies, protocols or procedures, which is behavior resembling the kind of religious rigidity that Jesus often spoke against. It makes the church that Jesus died for look sectarian, elitist, and uncooperative, all the while claiming to be “in the world but not of the world.” Of course there is plenty of finger-pointing we can do at other organizations as well. We have all heard the stories of government waste and systemic abuse of social programs: programs that by design were targeted to assist those in need, but are often over or under-administrated to the point of resources being squandered or mismanaged in such a way that those who need it don’t receive it. From the federal level down to local municipalities there is the need to reevaluate the programs, their target demographic, and the management systems in place. It shows up in this recent report from the Cato Institute, which argues that the federal government spends $668 billion dollars per year on 126 different welfare programs (spending by the state and local governments push that figure up to $1 trillion per year). Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report claiming to have identified $48 billion in what is termed as “improper payments.” That’s nearly 10 percent of the $500 billion in outlays for that year. However, others, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, suggest that there is an estimated $60 to $90 billion in Medicare fraud and a similar amount for Medicaid. The list goes on. But what if the government didn't have to spend so much money doing what the church was supposed to be doing in the first place? What if there was a way for all the interested parties to come together and each one do what that organization does well without the partisan political rhetoric and hypocritical holy rants about policy, protocols, procedures or religious rancor? What if the church in your city could really could be a Matthew 5:14 church: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden”. What if your church in your community became the community’s church?