Spirit On The Margins

I had a delightful meeting this week with Ben McEachern, Senior Pastor at Northridge Fellowship Church in Rogers Minnesota. Along with the pastoral team at Church of the Open Door they are the most open evangelical pastors I have met.  I’m sure there are many more that I just have not yet had the chance to meet.

Northridge Fellowship

In my opinion, the media tends to portray all Christians as members of the Christian right and all members of the Christian right as evangelicals. Hence, all Christians must be evangelical. Then the media has tended to go on to portray people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as representative of all evangelicals, hence representative of all Christians.

What has been so refreshing to me is meeting and listening to some very faithful and bright evangelical pastors like Ben, who are clear about what they believe and not afraid to say it, but who are open to listening with respect to others with differing theologies and points of view.

Pastor McEachern described in depth his passion for overseas mission work with which he has been personally engaged.  He talked with confidence about his congregation’s readiness for reaching out to the poor in the Roger’s area.  I could hear the yearning in his voice as he described his hope for that to happen soon.

We discussed the difficulty of reaching out to the poor - the tendency for all of us to start out with the attitude that “we” are going to help “them” that need us. It is natural and quite human.  But, it is a place of power and privilege from which we come which turns off the poor and creates mistrust.

We talked about the particular challenge of being evangelical in reaching out to the poor. Within that tradition, the focus is on bringing souls to Christ.  It can create a challenge to building trust with the poor when they sense that one has an agenda like this. And yet, one has to be true to one’s faith tradition.

We both acknowledged the need for humilty when congregations reach out to the poor.  One must go to them before expecting the poor to come to us.  And, if one goes in with the attitude that this is a child of God and that in some ways they too are a gift to us, it goes a long ways towards breaking down those barriers of mistrust.

I like Ben a lot. I hope God has something in mind for his congregation and City House to work on together.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Congregations, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.