Church in Hard Places (eBook)

Introduction

I (Mez) was fifteen years old when two things happened to me: one of my friends was stabbed to death in the street, and I became aware of the church for the first time. A local church hosted the funeral for my friend.

The church building was big, imposing almost, and built from bricks as red as my friend’s blood as he choked to death on the way to the hospital. I’ll never forget that church. It had arched wooden doors and reinforced steel protectors over stain-glassed windows. Its steeple loomed overhead. And it sat proudly in the middle of our council estate (Americans call them “housing projects”), surrounded by a sea of drab, gray, pebble-dashed terraced housing.

The church was open only when somebody died. Now somebody had died. I recall standing outside that building in the pouring rain as people carried my friend’s coffin inside and committed him to a God none of us believed in. After that time, I associated churches with dead people.

Sometimes we would see the local minister walk up to the shops. We would usually throw stones and flick cigarette butts at him. Of course he always smiled. That’s what ministers did, didn’t they? Turning the other cheek and all that? Religion and that church in particular were irrelevant to us. We would talk about it only to mock it. The only thing that a church was good for was as shelter if you wanted to have a smoke out of the rain.

As I got older, our little estate got worse. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, drugs began to take a serious hold on all of our lives. Lifelong friendships turned sour as greed took over. Houses grew steadily more derelict as decent people looked for a way to escape. Flowers and shrubs were replaced with motorbikes and car parts. Rows of houses were boarded up, with litter, weeds, and dog muck strewn about as a symbol of a deeper degeneration.

But I always remember that church building—red and proud with beautifully manicured grass, seemingly untouched by the disintegration of our lives. It was always empty and as dead to us as the graves surrounding it, but it was also a place of mystery to my friends and me. Years later when I was living in a crack den, dealing drugs and getting into trouble, I would stare out of my eighth-story window and look out at that building. Through my drug-induced haze I would wonder about God: Did he even exist? Did he care about people like me? I would wonder why the building was there with nobody in it. Maybe it was just there to tease us about how pathetic our lives were. I pondered on why they would build a place like that just for the dead. If you had told me then that the local church would save my life in years to come, I would have laughed at you. I was sure that the only time I would find myself in a church would be in a coffin. Thankfully, I was wrong.

Who Are We?

This is a book written by two men who genuinely believe that the Scriptures teach that the gospel is good news for the poor and needy, and that the church is for all people in all places whatever their status in life. Yes, many churches are dead, like the one that held the funeral for my friend. This is tragic. How critical it is, then, for those churches who are alive to the gospel to pursue the poor, the down-and-out, the hard-pressed! We write this in the hope that the Western church will get better at bringing light to the dark and neglected places too often found in their own backyards.

These are my own roots. I was abandoned at age two and raised in the foster system. By age sixteen I was on the streets full time. But God smashed my hard heart through the persistent witness of several Christians who visited me in prison, and he saved me. Since 1999, I have been a pastor/planter involved in full-time church ministry. In that time I have been an associate minister of a middle-class Baptist church, served as a youth pastor for an inner-city evangelical church, founded a street children’s charity and planted a church for street children in one of northern Brazil’s poorest cities, and overseen the revitalization of a church in one of Scotland’s most deprived housing schemes, Niddrie Community Church. I am short, opinionated, passionate, and desperate to see this kind of work modeled and magnified throughout Scotland’s housing schemes and the rest of the United Kingdom. I am more than happily married to Miriam and have two young girls.

Mike McKinley is the lead pastor at a Sterling Park Baptist Church, a church revitalization in Virginia. Unlike me, Mike is tall and not really all that opinionated (except for matters relating to American football and punk rock music). He has written several books and is a member of the board for Radstock Ministries, an international network of church-planting churches. Mike and his wife, Karen, have five unusually good-looking kids (or so he tells me).

The great thing about writing this book together is that we come from completely different backgrounds and ministry experiences. Mike’s church is in a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC, but Sterling Park Baptist has found fruitful ministry inroads among their neighborhood’s homeless, the working poor, and illegal immigrants. I am presently pastoring a church in one of my country’s toughest schemes and overseeing work in several others through 20schemes, the church planting ministry of our church. 20schemes exists to revitalize and plant gospel churches in Scotland’s poorest communities. If everything goes according to plan, my group will plant churches in twenty other housing schemes in the next decade.

Our contexts are different. Mike works in a multicultural context, whereas I work in a comparatively monocultural context (although that is changing). Couple that with the cultural differences between Americans and Europeans, and we are an interesting mix.

However, both of us are committed to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as the good news for a dying world. Both of us are committed to the local church as the platform and voice from which that news is proclaimed, where converts are discipled, and where we practice all the elements of church discipline and membership. We not only believe in their importance but we also assert their necessity for our work.

What Is a “Hard Place”?

We have decided to call this book Church in Hard Places, but recognize that we’re using the term “hard” advisedly. In Brazil, I worked with children as young as five years old who sold chewing gum to make ends meet. When that failed—and it did—they were pushed into prostitution by unscrupulous adults. It was a horrendous life, and still is for untold millions. In some ways, yes, this is a “hard” place to minister.

But that’s a one-dimensional assessment. I notice that when I tell stories like these to other pastors, they often pat me on the back and say something like, “Well done, mate. I couldn’t do what you do. It sounds so hard.” Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the sentiment, and it’s nice to get a pat on the back once in a while. But here’s my dilemma. In some ways, it is not hard at all. I would even say living and working among the poor can be very easy. Sometimes I feel like I need to come out officially as a pastoral fraud, and say to my friends pastoring in wealthier areas, “Well done to you, mate! Yours is the harder ministry.”

When I listen to pastors battling away around Europe and the States in well-off areas, I break out in a cold sweat. How do you evangelize in an area where everybody has a decent paying job, a nice place to live, and possibly a car (or two) in the driveway? How do you break through the intellectual pride of a worldview that thinks religion is beneath them and that science has all the answers? How do you witness in an area where the average house price is more than $400,000? How do you talk to a guy who feels no need for Christ because he is distracted by his materialism? How do you make it work in an area filled with nice, law-abiding citizens, who don’t cheat on their wives, beat their kids, and spend their evenings stoned on the sofa watching reality television? Now that’s hard. In some ways, it’s harder. Brutal even!

In the Scottish housing schemes where I now pastor, I can have a conversation about Jesus any day of the week. I can call a man a sinner, and he will probably agree. I rarely meet atheists among the poor. People also have more time to stop and chat. They have more of a sense of community, because they all live in close proximity. It is not a commuter culture. If you take the time to show an interest in them, they will come to an event even knowing you will preach at them. Of course, there are many who don’t. But my point is that I operate within a culture that is comparatively open to the gospel. Any hostility here in Scotland is to the church as an institution because it is seen as a posh person’s club. The hardest part of ministry comes in discipleship and discipline. In effect, you might say it is easier to get people in the front door. The real...