MOVE: What 1,000 Churches Reveal About Spiritual Growth

Pastor the Local Community

“You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. ... In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father.” Matthew 5:14, 16 NLT

“I don’t pastor a church; I pastor a community.”

This somewhat unconventional statement guides the ministry of Terry Inman, senior pastor of Harbor Light Church in Fremont, Calif. Note his use of the word pastor as a verb; he uses it instead of the word serve as a way to describe his relationship to the community. To serve—the term most often associated with how a church interacts with its community—means to be useful or to render assistance in some way. To pastor, on the other hand, is a broader concept. Derived from its original Latin roots with the meaning “to shepherd,” to pastor means to take on the role of guiding, watching over, and protecting an entire flock.

We tend to associate the word pastor with the role and tasks of leading a church. The pastor’s flock is his or her congregation. In Terry’s view, however, his flock is not the church; it’s the community. This view came to define Terry’s ministry calling twenty years ago, after a week of fasting and praying this prayer: “Lord, where is the church going and what do we need to be doing?”

Do what you will be judged for.

That’s the directive that came to Terry as a strong divine impression. This led him to the Matthew 25 passage that describes what will happen when Christ returns. In that passage Jesus says that, like a shepherd who separates the goats from the sheep, he will divide us into two groups based on how well we fulfilled this expectation: “For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me. … I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!” (Matthew 25:35–36, 40 NLT).

Terry structured the ministry resources at Harbor Light to respond to this clear and detailed command. As a result, Harbor Light has become a powerful voice and influence in its community. The church became a vital part of a coalition of forty other churches that now serves as the primary volunteer force for nonprofit organizations in three California cities.

That’s how best-practice churches see their roles: pastors of their communities—people of God who not only serve their communities, but also step up to try to resolve problems like homelessness and addiction that plague their neighborhoods. They are plugged into community networks and are deeply involved in local issues. That’s because they believe they are called to be shepherds—to guide, watch over, and protect, not just the people who walk through their doors, but all the people who walk the streets where they live.

To pastor the local community requires having skin in the game—not just to care about the community’s pressing concerns, but to come to the table prepared to work with others in an effort to do something about those issues. This activist mindset sees things like the blight of poverty and injustice as affronts to Jesus and lives out the spirit of Matthew 25 to do whatever can be done to eradicate them.

The “Pastor the Local Community” Paradigm Shift

Hold on, you may be thinking. Aren’t most church leaders committed to local service and impact? Isn’t supporting the community a common goal in most ministry plans?

The goal may be common, but this best practice most certainly reflects a paradigm shift for many churches. You find it in the words of Jesus: “When you did it to one of the least of these … you were doing it to me!” The clear implication is that Christ wants more than a simple mental expansion of a church’s ministry field to include others in the larger community. He is asking us to look into the eyes of every man, woman, and child who needs food, water, shelter, or companionship. Then he asks us to serve them as though we were serving him. To dry tears because they are his; to feed and clothe the homeless because their needs are his; to care for the sick and dying because their pain is his. This is a paradigm shift, or at least a big step up, from a simple pledge to serve the local community. The magnitude of the Matthew 25 commitment is much greater—it asks us to serve anyone who is hurt or struggling as though we are directly serving Christ.

The degree of focus and intensity required to respond to this commitment is apparent in best-practice churches. You see it in their decisions about how to spend church resources, how to manage their personal calendars, and how to choose those who sit in the inner circle of church leadership. At these churches, it’s clear that they get it—that Matthew 25 really does describe what’s going to sort the sheep from the goats when Christ returns.

Best-practice churches pastor their local communities by bringing the same inspirational energy—and the same sense of high-priority ministry importance—to outreach strategies and initiatives that they bring to designing and executing weekend services. In practical terms, this approach is implemented using three key strategies, each one representing a shift to a new way to think about how to lead a church.

Three Key Strategies to Pastor the Local Community

The numbers back up the reality of the outreach culture in best-practice churches. In the REVEAL database of 1,000 churches, the percentage of people serving those in need through their church at least once a month ranges from a low of 6 percent to a high of 61 percent. The average for all churches is 26 percent. At the top-5 percent best-practice churches, however, the average percentage is significantly higher, at 41 percent.

Equally important is that these numbers reflect an outreach culture that is ongoing. In other words, it is not something that happens twice a year around the Christmas and Easter holidays. Outreach activities are once-a-month-or-more occurrences for two out of five congregants in these churches, according to the numbers above. Not surprisingly, almost three out of four also serve in a church ministry once a month or more, and the same number strongly agree with the statement: “God calls me to be involved in the lives of the poor.”

Given the clarity of Christ’s command in Matthew 25, we know why these
churches place such a premium on community outreach. But how do they fit that into the daily demands of ministry? And how do they then inspire their people to make it such a high priority in the midst of their busy lives? Three strategies emerge as the ones that make this work.

—Set a high bar for serving the church and the community. Best-practice churches make it clear early and often that they count on congregants to serve the needs of both the church and the community. The senior pastor sets the tone and pace for this commitment because—according to senior pastor Steve Gallimore of Tennessee Valley Community Church—“your people will care no more than you do; go no farther than you will. It’s that simple.”

—Build a bridge into your local community. Most best-practice churches establish strong relationships, and often partnerships, with other churches, nonprofits, and community leaders. They do this for two reasons: to stay in touch and involved with the most pressing community needs, and to generate the greatest possible impact by working
shoulder-to-shoulder with others to address those needs.

—Make serving a platform for the gospel. “It’s a no-brainer,” says Barbara Sullivan, who co-pastors Spirit of God Fellowship in South Holland, Illinois, with her husband, John. Her comment acknowledges that best-practice pastors see a natural affinity between evangelizing and serving those who are struggling and broken—because people who feel hopeless have hearts that are fertile ground for Christ’s message of grace and redemption.

Now let’s unpack the practical ways these churches pastor the local community by executing these three key strategies so effectively.

Strategy 1: Set a High Bar for Serving the Church and the Community

The people attending Tennessee Valley Community Church (TVCC) are in the thick of their community—sitting on the Chamber of Commerce, canvassing economically depressed neighborhoods to identify and serve needs, and going into corners where you wouldn’t normally find the church. Senior pastor Steve Gallimore is the number one champion for these efforts, saying he doesn’t worry about community service distracting or compromising his people’s commitment to serve the church because he keeps his foot on the gas pedal for all serving needs. This is his advice for church leaders:

—Be a high-expectation church. If people come to TVCC expecting to sit passively in the pews, they’ve come to the wrong place. Regular ministry serving is nonnegotiable and part of the membership covenant.

—Preach the announcements. Every weekend Steve brings the highest priority church needs to everyone’s attention, connecting the dots between opportunities to serve and spiritual growth and responsibility to the church. Then he tells them to go to a central location called “Connection Point” after services, showing up there himself to shake hands so it’s clear these needs are important to him.

—Constantly monitor serving activity. TVCC keeps tabs on how often and in what way people are serving, mostly to make sure they don’t overextend themselves and burn out. Steve says he has encouraged a number of people to take a break from serving for a season because they were exhausting their energy and enthusiasm. Monitoring volunteer participation also helps ensure that people don’t stay uninvolved.

—Make it easy. A volunteer strategy called “Try it for 20” teams up a serving rookie with a seasoned volunteer for a twenty-minute experience on the weekend. This encourages trial-and-error participation by offering people a temporary and convenient way to sample different serving ministries—and it ultimately results in more stable long-term volunteer commitments.

An additional way to make sure church needs aren’t left behind as people take on demanding community obligations is to integrate serving within other church activities. Harvey Carey’s Citadel of Faith Church in Detroit gets creative by occasionally incorporating surprise community outreach projects within weekend services. His multicultural congregation is put on notice to come to weekend services packing their gym shoes in their car, because they never know when Harvey will preempt the service and send them out for a community-based outreach activity.

Sometimes that involves an initiative called “Prayer on the Porch.” Harvey dispatches congregants to homes already touched by the church’s outreach—for instance, by receiving a free Bible (one of the eight thousand distributed in a single ministry year) or a school backpack. Congregants are commissioned to connect with the families and pray for their needs on the front stoop. Another out-of-the-box activity is “urban camping.” Men and boys from Citadel grill hot dogs and s’mores on street corners known for drug deals, successfully disrupting drug traffic at a number of locations. These efforts reflect the heart of Citadel of Faith. Not accidentally, the word citadel refers to watching over the community—a crucial role for this church located in the poorest zip code in the poorest large US city and an apt descriptor for a church that aspires to be a city on the hill (Matthew 5:14–16).

A number of best-practice churches make serving an expectation for small groups. Bruce Sofia’s Gloucester County Community Church (Sewell, New Jersey), for example, requires its Circle of Friends to take on two serving projects every ministry season—one within and one beyond the church walls. Other churches—like Christian Gospel Center Church of God in Christ (Detroit, Michigan), Faith Chapel Christian (Birmingham, Alabama), and East Valley Foursquare (East Helena, Montana)—make serving the church and the community the primary purpose of small-group life.

The mental shift required to make sure all needs are met when a church truly pastors the local community is best captured in Steve Gallimore’s advice: Be a church of high expectations. Set a high bar. That’s the spirit of the best-practice churches. “If you’re breathing, you’re serving,” says Jeff Richards of East Valley Foursquare. “We’re going to get you out of a bib and into an apron,” says David Uth of First Baptist of Orlando. (And they pass out the aprons to make sure people don’t miss the point!)

As you’re ramping up such pastoring initiatives in your community, don’t assume that higher demands to serve beyond the church will diminish your congregants’ desire and will to serve within the church. Trust the Spirit to grab their hearts—and inspire them to rise to the occasion to meet whatever challenges you put in their path.

Strategy 2: Build a Bridge into Your Local Community

It started with a monthly gathering of forty evangelical churches southeast of San Francisco, gathering to pray for the unique needs of their community. They prayed for the many lost people living in their neighborhoods where a mere 4 percent attend church. And they prayed for ethnic and cultural bridges to be built in a community known as the most diverse for its size in America. (Their public school system reports that its students speak 136 languages.) Terry Inman and his fellow pastors felt the time had come to move from simply praying about community needs to taking the steps necessary to address them. They also decided that proclamation alone—and one church alone—wasn’t going to create the wave of change that was required. So they joined forces. Here’s what happened:

• They met with the mayor and local officials, who said the best way to serve the city was to partner with the nonprofits—organizations that were always in need of volunteers.

• They formed Compassion Network and pooled resources to fund an office in the city’s Family Resource center, which already housed twenty-five other private and government agencies.

• Monthly donations from each participating church were used to fund a full-time administrator and four or five unpaid interns. Their job is to network the church congregations toward meeting the needs of people within the community.

• Today, all churches receive weekly emails posting volunteer opportunities—opportunities that are typically filled within hours. In 2008, Compassion Network received the local government’s Nonprofit of the Year Award. Compassion Network is only one channel for Terry’s very serious response to Matthew 25. He could give you multiple examples of actions taken to address each one of Christ’s six commands. Especially compelling is his perspective on visiting those in prison. “We have traditional prison ministries,” he says, “but it dawned on me that most people without Christ are in some kind of prison—could be a prison of doubt or fear. The only way we’ll reach them is to go to them in their prison.” That’s his broader view of Matthew 25—that “all those six things talk about getting out, getting out, getting out; I’ve been communicating that message from the pulpit and by example for twenty years.”

While best-practice churches may not always be as organized or multifaceted as Compassion Network, many do partner with other community organizations, including other churches. Nick Honerkamp’s New Covenant Church in Clyde, North Carolina (a recent best-practice addition), joined with thirty other churches to tackle their community’s homeless problem, starting a shelter and supporting it completely with church funds and volunteers. This same group of churches, realizing that public school budgets were tight, pitched in to clean up school properties before the academic year began. Since this church partnership effort to support the schools in 2008, sixty-eight churches have joined together to adopt all the public schools in the county—a formal agreement that’s the first of its kind in North Carolina. The churches have also partnered on ministry initiatives, like mission trips and pooling resources for a shared Vacation Bible School format and curriculum.

Nick, like several other best-practice pastors, requires all church staff to get involved with a community organization so the church can keep its fingers on the pulse of the greatest unmet needs in the area. That’s the real difference we see in churches that go beyond the idea of serving (being useful) and see themselves as their community’s pastor. They spend the time and resources to watch out for their flock—often by joining forces with others to deal with the greatest threats to public health and safety in their neighborhoods.

They see the needs. They own the issues. They join forces. Those three stepping-stones represent mental shifts for church leaders who currently define their flocks as the people sitting in the pews—and who currently confine their capacity to act on community issues to the resources of their individual churches.

Jesus modeled a different way when he fed the five thousand. First, he saw the need. Then he gathered the resources and asked God to bless them. He didn’t focus on limitations or impossibilities. Best-practice churches suggest that we shouldn’t either.

Strategy 3: Make Serving a Platform for the Gospel

The marginalized or the lost? Social justice or evangelism? That’s a classic tug-of-war for church leaders as they wrestle with how to allocate their resources, time, and attention. Both initiatives are important. But which is primary? Which is secondary? Spirit of God Fellowship in South Holland, Illinois, is a best-practice church that doesn’t see the two activities as independent choices. That’s because they believe serving is the best way to reach people for Christ.

The founders of the church, John and Barbara Sullivan, are unassuming, down-to-earth people. In the 1970s, God called John, a local dentist, and his wife Barbara to found a church in South Holland, a relatively affluent suburb near Chicago. In 1980, the church began ministering to inner-city drug addicts in a treatment center south of Chicago. In 1988, the church founded Restoration Ministries in Harvey, a neighboring community widely known for drug addictions, gang violence, murder, and corruption (it was recently recognized for having the most dangerous street in America). They formed an independent board of directors to enable other churches to participate in these inner-city ministries. In the intervening decades, Restoration Ministries has helped transform thousands of lives by serving as a beacon of hope for a place and population written off by many as too far gone to recover.

A city on the hill, indeed.

Restoration Ministries now includes two live-in facilities for recovering addicts and twenty-eight programs for kids to seniors, including:

• Boxing club. Ex-addicts coach eighty kids in boxing. Their motto is that it’s better to sweat in a gym than bleed on the streets.

• Project Intercept. This volunteer-led after-school program includes tutoring, art instruction, basketball, and a computer club. The gospel message is stressed in all activities.

• Mentoring. Former addicts provide mentoring at a local grammar school. This was the only school in Harvey to come off the state’s academic watch list, an achievement directly attributed to the after-school and mentoring programs.

Spirit of God is certainly not the only best-practice church having a powerful influence for Jesus through outreach to marginalized people. East Valley Foursquare in rural Montana brings seven busloads of two hundred to three hundred disadvantaged children to church every weekend. The 350 congregants of Christian Gospel Center Church of God in Detroit host an active food pantry with a signature annual event that feeds three thousand people. Full Gospel Tabernacle in Far Rockaway, New York, has a prominent community presence that includes job fairs, parenting seminars, and partnerships designed to address the most pressing needs of five housing projects. Senior pastor Jorge Vega says, “Even the gangs know this is a place that helps the community. There are no bars on our windows.”

Does this outreach to “the least of these” really spread the message of Jesus?

Do those who benefit from the food, counseling, and hope for a better future eventually decide to follow Christ?

Spirit of God is a test case that suggests it does. They say at least eight thousand people have given their lives to Jesus through their ministry. Cofounder Barbara Sullivan is firmly convinced that serving those who are the most discouraged—who have hit bottom, beaten up by life—is the best platform for the gospel message. That’s why she always sends nervous rookie evangelists to the drug rehabilitation house for their first attempts at a spiritual conversation with nonbelievers. There they will find people with uncritical spirits, hungry hearts, and listening ears for the promise of salvation and redemption.

It’s unlikely that any church leader doubts the truth of Barbara’s observations. The difference for best-practice churches may be their intentionality in acting on that truth. And once that truth is internalized, it is amazing how creative these pastoring churches become in their efforts to get to know their community flocks. Some best-practice churches even build floats for local parades, in order to make people more inclined to give the church—and consequently, faith in Jesus—a try. In fact, Spirit of God actually won the best Memorial Day float award eight years running! As one pastor explains such efforts, “A step toward the unchurched is just showing up as a church that cares. Then they’ll at least be open to checking us out.”

Whether it’s building floats, distributing food, or running a boxing club for disadvantaged kids, best-practice churches would tell you it all works—eventually—to start people down a path toward growing a relationship with Christ.

The “Pastor the Local Community” Dilemma: It’s an Uphill Climb

“Acts of service, probably more than anything else, motivate people down the pathway of spiritual maturity,” says senior pastor Terry Inman. “What has hurt us is that we have overly trained people in classrooms and have not given them hands-on experience. Scripture tells us we should not just be hearers of the Word, but doers as well.”

The facts back him up. By all measures, the majority of Christ-followers fall far short in their others-oriented attitudes and behaviors. In earlier chapters, we’ve noted the gap between love of God and love of others; for example, in chapter 5 we observed that three out of four spiritually mature Christ-Centered people very strongly agree that they “love God more than anything,” but less than one-third of them very strongly agree that they “have tremendous love for those I know and those I don’t know.”

With regard to others-oriented behaviors, on average 57 percent of all church congregants serve their church, 26 percent serve those in need through their church, and 39 percent serve those in need on their own (not through the church) once a month or more. This means that, in any given month, over 40 percent of congregants don’t serve their church, almost 75 percent don’t serve those in need through their church, and over 60 percent don’t serve those in need on their own.

These facts must break a pastor’s heart (and God’s as well)—not only because it demonstrates the uphill climb to fulfilling Matthew 25, but also because serving the “least of these” is a tremendous catalyst of spiritual growth for all believers. This is especially true for those seriously pursuing a personal relationship with Christ and on the threshold of fully surrendering their lives to him. The disappointingly low numbers for people at all levels of spiritual maturity, when it comes to attitudes and behaviors related to “love of others,” is arguably the single biggest failure of the church.

On the other side of the “biggest failure” coin, however, awaits “greatest opportunity.” And best-practice churches are cheering the rest of us on with their encouragement and examples. The key difference is that these churches don’t let people off the hook. Because their vision goes well beyond serving—instead, they are intent on pastoring their local communities, and they do that with passion. And through this expanded view of what it means to pastor, hearts within the congregation grow as well.

Is such a transformation possible? Of course. Is it always easy? Of course not. Church leaders need the wisdom of Solomon to sort through all the serving possibilities for church congregants and then to decide which of these are the top priorities. Setting a high bar is a fine ideal, but we need to be realistic, right? If we put too many options out there, will people either take on too much and burn out—or feel so confused and overwhelmed they’ll stay on the sidelines?

As we ponder these questions, one of Solomon’s proverbs gives us food for thought: “Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones. Learn from their ways and become wise!” (Proverbs 6:6 NLT). If the ants are the congregants in best-practice churches—where 73 percent serve the church, 41 percent serve those in need through the church, and 51 percent serve those in need on their own every month—the lesson to “learn from their ways” is that there’s a lot of capacity in most congregations to step up and do more. So don’t shrink back from bringing the needs of the church, the community, and the world to the attention of your people. Like the ants, when we work together using the resources God gives us, all those needs can be met.


The executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., Greg L. Hawkins co-created REVEAL, which helps churches better gauge spiritual growth. Findings from the REVEAL survey administered to more than 280,000 people in more than 1,200 churches nationwide are the basis of the book MOVE. 

Formerly the director of communication services at Willow Creek Community Church, Cally Parkinson is the brand manager for REVEAL.

This excerpt is from MOVE: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth by Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson. Copyright © 2011 by Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson. Used by permission of Zondervan.

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Read more about REVEAL and three other new platforms churches are using to try to effectively measure spiritual growth in Outreach magazine's 2011 Outreach 100 special issue on the Largest and Fastest-Growing Churches in America.