By Tom Bandy
You can use MissionInsite to make this Christmas especially meaningful for distinct lifestyle mosaics that live in your reach. This is particularly useful for urban churches experiencing growing lifestyle diversity that is transforming their surrounding neighborhoods.
Centralization is what happens as urbanization moves along major transportation corridors, isolating rural areas, and forcing people to relocate into small towns or small cities. This is because health, education, food distribution, and affordable housing have all retreated from the countryside to “central” locations. All the retail and social services once available in the country have disappeared.
Consider, for example, population shifts in small towns and city centers. Some of the fastest growing lifestyle segments include people like M45 Growing and Expanding and R67 Passionate Parents. These are young single parents with low incomes, working multiple jobs, trying to raise a family. They often feel rootless and out of place and may be forced to relocate in search of affordable housing or employment.
The same neighborhoods often include displaced senior singles and couples (like Q65 Mature and Wise or N48 Rural Southern Bliss) who have moved into the city seeking health care and social services. They, too, have left family residences and long-term friendships behind. All of these vulnerable households have a sense of low esteem. They often feel they have been forced from their original homes, separated from lifelong friends, embarrassed by their poverty and helplessness, shamed by addictions or health concerns or disabilities, and outsiders in the eyes of the long-term residents that are the majority of local congregations.
Create separate Opportunity Scans to identify the precise streets or neighborhoods with high population densities for these people. Communicate with seniors via mail (obtaining mailing lists from MissionInsite.) Communicate with the younger households via social media, or placing posters or flyers in parks, gyms, restaurants and bars, food banks, doctor’s offices, and anywhere in the neighborhood they hang out. However, just inviting them to church is not enough.
Church people often boast about their friendliness, and there is lots of talk about “radical hospitality”, but these migrating lifestyle segments caught up in the flow of “centralization” do not see it that way. What they really need is not “radical hospitality” (extra coffee and cookies), but “radical empathy” (new friends and welcome into the kitchen). Hospitality is not about better tactics, but deeper intimacy. Churches need to go the extra mile to meet their needs: accessibility for their disabilities, childcare for their children, assistance for the rent, transportation to the clinic, and more. But most of all church people must be ready and eager to step away from their comfort zones and friendship circles and risk personal discomfort to make new friends.
Ironically, feelings of alienation are even more severe at Christmas. For many central city churches, Christmas is like a family reunion. Members who have moved away, or who attend only irregularly, return to renew friendships and recapture memories. They bring their children and grandchildren to connect with their roots. Nostalgic Christmas decorations, musical favorites, treasured communion ware, remembered liturgies, and many other symbols remind old friends of former fellowship. Unfortunately, the joyful reunion of former members can make a “blue Christmas” even “bluer” for these transplanted rural and small-town households.
What to do? Read, study, and pray over the lifestyle descriptions for each mosaic for whom God is opening your heart. Read the commentaries for each mosaic in the MissionImpact Guide. Spend time during Advent prayer walking the streets where there are high population densities of these people. Linger and listen wherever they eat, play, or shop. Try to set aside your expectations of Christmas and discern the longings of their expectations for Christmas.
Here are some Christmas suggestions based on what I have seen as a consultant that have worked well … not only to reach and bless these lifestyle groups migrating into the city at Christmas, but to encourage later long term participation in the church.
- Assemble a Santa Claus parade from a nearby neighborhood and into the church.
- Celebrate Santa-sized generosity. Create a festive, family friendly even and give away free unused toys and new clothing.
- Pile on the refreshments and prepare extra good for take-out.
- Double the number of greeters, deploy volunteers as “minglers”.
- Bring the servers out from the kitchen and behind the table to bring the food to the people.
- Invite strangers to spontaneously join the choir in popular carols.
- Encourage visitors to decorate the church with their own things.
- Provide games and supervised activities for children.
- Create healing spaces where confidences can be shared with spiritual mentors.
- Give children’s bible to everyone no matter what their age.
- Invite newcomers to dinner in your home the day after Christmas.
Christmas is often a time when worship and hospitality leaders take a holiday. Choir members, and greeters, ushers, and servers, Sunday school teachers and nursery volunteers take time off to visit their families over the holidays. When the Christmas Eve service is over, long-serving members often leave quickly to get home for their grandchildren, open presents, and enjoy the warmth of home. Just when the more vulnerable lifestyle segments moving into the urban core need it the most, our members are absent.
If you really want to welcome new lifestyle segments moving into the urban core, Christmas is the time to sacrifice family reunion for cross cultural reconciliation. Now is the time to go over the top with both eat-in and take-out refreshments. Now is the time for veteran church members to come earlier and linger longer to befriend strangers who enter by the side door, or stand apart in the fellowship hall, or carry home a few extra things to bring more cheer to cold Christmas mornings.
Christmas is a unique opportunity to connect with displaced people moving into the urban core. Instead of preserving old memories, these new lifestyle segments migrating into the city bring new wisdom, different spiritualities, and fresh traditions that can create new memories. When empathy deepens, and self-esteem rises, urban churches grow.