Challenging Church

The Shaftesbury Society Report "Challenging Church" offers loads of encouragement for churches to engage with their local community, but stresses how that engagement will be weakened if we do not so engage in partnership. We need to work together. Near its end, the Report says: "The church is facing a challenge. We are failing to tackle the real and often desperate needs of our neighbours with strategic, sustainable solutions. It’s not that we’re under-resourced – although in some local churches it may often feel like that. And Christians are not short on innovation, passion and commitment. The barrier hindering us from really making a difference is our reluctance to work together for the sake of our communities, our towns and cities and our nation. Duplication and competition have a detrimental effect on church-based community work right across the country. In order to be able to challenge the inequalities at the heart of our neediest communities, the church itself first needs to be challenged: as local congregations, are we guilty of putting our own agendas ahead of our mission? If we want to see God’s transformation come to our neighbourhoods, we must address the duplication and competition that exists between churches in local communities. These issues not only reduce our impact, but our disunity brings dishonour to God. It is only when we start to pray, plan and work together, as the body we are designed to be, that the church will be in a position to make a creative, radical and prophetic impact on the deep-rooted issues facing our society today." There's a lot of good stuff to think about there.