Seeing Before Believing

This is an excerpt from the new book In Real Time, by Mike Glenn. Mike is the Senior Pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church, a "mega-church" of several thousand members, just outside Nashville, Tennessee.

"As our critics have told us, we're so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good. We sing about heaven, and we talk about loving one another while we ignore the needs of our neighbours and fail to address the injustices that keep so many of our brothers and sisters enslaved. Our evangelistic fervour told us that the most important thing we could do was to reach the person with the message of Christ. The apocalyptic times we were living in, when the Cold War was at its hottest, meant we only had so much time. The preaching of the gospel was more important than programs to feed the hungry, alleviate substandard housing, prevent or treat disease, and improve education. As a result, churches were regarded as irrelevant to the real issues of people's lives. People stopped listening to the message because they saw no real ministry. This has been a major change in the work of the local church during my career. When I was beginning in ministry, you would open your Bible, and that's where the conversations began. Now no one will listen until they see the work you are doing. When someone see you putting a roof on a house, taking clothes to the homeless shelter, providing neighbourhood tutoring, they want to know what you are doing there. Only then can you tell them that your relationship with Christ compels you to show your love for others in real and tangible ways. This is counterintuitive to most churches I know and certainly feels backward to most preachers I know, including me. Our first inclination is to speak then act, but if we continue to do that and not recognize the change in the culture, we will be pushed farther and farther to the margins of the cultural conversation.

Let's be honest, who does this better than the church? In the aftermath of Katrina, churches responded faster and more effectively than the federal government. In many situations we are still engaged in a lot of different places that were affected. We feed the hungry and work with the homeless to restore to them the dignity of a working skill. We teach English as a second language and tutor at-risk kids. The list could literally go on and on. My point is not to provide a comprehensive list of mission and ministry opporunities but to help us undersand that what the culture is looking for is a natural strength of the local church. Where else can you find an organized group of volunteers with the necessary skills to povide the services required? Once churches grab hold of this strength, communities will respond...

For too long there has been a misleading gap between works and faith. While works certainly cannot earn salvation, too many of us took that doctrine to the erroneous conclusion that good works have nothing to do with an authentic faith. Good works are a natural consequence of an authentic faith the way an apple naturally grows on an apple tree. If the roots and trunk are healthy, the apple will grow. If the faith is healthy, the natural expression will be acts of love toward our neighbours. Without good works, the world has a good reason to doubt our faith."


(Mike Glenn, In Real Time: Authentic Young Adult Ministry as it Happens. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009, 144-145, EMPHASIS ADDED).