One fact that is overwhelmingly clear in Burlington and throughout Vermont is that people are not interested in church. Check out the stats:

*According to a 2008 Gallup Poll, Vermont is the least religious state in the US.

*A 2009 Pew Forum study ranked Vermont last in areas such as “importance of religion” and “belief in God,” while being tied for second to last in “worship attendance.”

*According to the to the North American Religion Atlas less than 3% of the state’s population are “evangelical adherents.”

*Even Men’s Health magazine rated Burlington as the least religious US city.

If you’re a Christian living in Burlington or a similar community, you’ve probably tried to invite a friend to attend a church worship service.   You’ve also probably had the experience of watching your friend respond with awkwardness, discomfort, and possibly disdain.  Based on their response you might as well have asked do you want a rash?

I recognize the general approach of most churches is to  focus on the worship service as the “front door” to the church, but how many nonChristians in a post-Christian culture are really interested in attending a worship service? We can have a rocking band, challenging teaching, excellent ministry teams, and engaging people but the bottom line is nonChristians just are not interested and therefore will not experience those elements.  Why? Because inviting a nonChristian friend to a Sunday worship service is like asking them if they want a “Jesus rash.”  We may be promoting how the church is contemporary, relevant, missional, authentic, etc., but all our friends are hearing is rash, rash, rash… would you like to catch the same rash I have. They’re thinking why would I want something that will make me feel uncomfortable and cause people to look at me funny?

I am not ignorant of the fact that there are still places where you can draw significant numbers of people in with an innovative gospel centered worship service. In the college town of Tuscaloosa near the University of Alabama, you can draw in 1000 college students on a Wednesday night using this methodology.  In suburban Atlanta, GA, you can rent out a school, assemble the band, do the mass mailing, put a cross out front, and expect a crowd on the first Sunday.  In a post-Christian community like Burlington you’d be wasting your time, energy, and resources.

SO what should we do then?  Maybe we could go back to two very simple approaches we see in scripture:

1) Authentic Relationships. Throughout the New Testament we see relationships as the primary conduit for discipleship and the spread of the gospel. Look in the gospels at how Jesus invested in the lives of twelve men.  Scan through the book of Acts where the early Christian movement goes viral, moving from household to household through friends, family members, and coworkers.  The same principle is at work today.  The Institute for American Church Growth did a survey of 14,000 people of a wide variety of church and denomination backgrounds.  They asked what or who was responsible for people coming to saving faith in Christ and connecting to a church.  Here are some of their findings:

1% – Special need
5%- Pastoral relationship
4%- Sunday School or Sunday morning Bible study
1%- Evangelistic Crusade
2%- Church Program
84% – relationship through friend or relative

2) Sacrificial Service. This is Jesus 101. Jesus stated with incredible clarity in Luke 20:28, the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. Jesus always sent out his disciples with a two pronged approach to ministry: heal and proclaim the kingdom (Luke 9 and 10).  The way Jesus led his disciples to share the gospel involved serving and speaking, works and words.  God uses our sacrificial service to soften people’s heart to His message.  The problem for us is that we cannot truly serve others from a safe distance.  Serving others will lead to messiness and sometimes even pain in our own lives.

This leads to several ways you can pray for us:

*On Sunday, March 13, we kick off our initial Home Fellowship.  Please pray that we will quickly cultivate authentic relationships with each other and grow into a real spiritual family.

*As people join our Home Fellowship, pray that we’d all sense how God wants to work through our relationships with friends, family, and co-workers.  Pray that we’d be sensitive to opportunities to share the gospel through serving and speaking.

*God is opening a door for our Home Fellowship to teach English in a predominately Somalian apartment community.  Pray for wisdom in bridging the language barrier, the Muslim-Christian barrier, and learning how to best serve the refugee community.

*The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program has asked Christin and I to be “family friends” to a Bhutanese family which has recently immigrated from Nepal.  Pray for wisdom concerning how to best serve this family as they adjust to life in America.

*Pray that God would show us how to best represent Jesus to a community that is disinterested in church, resistant to the gospel, and has misguided ideas about who Jesus is and what he is about.

As always, thank you for your prayers.

 

In less than two weeks my family,  a small group of friends, and I will travel to Burlington, VT to scope out the city.  A few of us are already 100% sold out to moving our lives and a few others are prayerfully considering whether God is leading them to do the same.  All of us desire to walk away with a clearer picture of what God is doing in Burlington,  what God wants to do, and how we individually fit in His plans.

Recently, I reread 1 Corinthians 9- a scripture that God has used repeatedly in my life:
19 For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.

Paul obviously had a passion to serve the Corinthians and see them understand the Gospel.  He also makes it clear that just as we strive to exegete (critically examine, explain, interpret) scripture, we must exegete the local culture to effectively communicate the gospel.

One thing we know for sure is God wants us to serve the city of Burlington in the name of Jesus.  We also realize to effectively serve this city we must first get to know this complex city.  We must be willing to learn the flow of culture, the hopes, the fears, the tensions, both the obvious and beneath the surface issues, the spiritual climate, and within all of that learn how to communicate the gospel within this context.  I realize that to truly know the city requires “doing life” in the city- working in the city, raising our families in the city, living our lives in the midst of the city- but my hope is that God will help us to take some initial steps in knowing Burlington.

Below are a few ways you can pray for us this week:

*Ask God to help us to accurately identify the unique groups that make up this complex city and to understand their world views, hopes, needs, and struggles.

*Ask God to give us favor with each of the groups we already know exist within the Burlington community: young families, artist, refugees, university students, environmental activists, the homeless, and Wiccan adherents (some of these groups obviously overlap).

*Ask God to show us how to best serve these individual groups, the city as a whole, and to see how the Gospel intersects with their lives.

*Ask God to continue to lead the right people to join our core team to connect with these unique groups in Burlington.

*Ask God to lead us to “people of peace” who can serve as relational bridges as we seek to to serve and share the Gospel.