This is the next instalment of the serialisation of my book – The Teeth of our Exertions – full details of which can be found here.

Give

Second, you can partner by sending money. This is a Biblical response to church needs that Paul promoted. In Romans 15:26 (cf. Acts 20:1-5), Paul was pleased to encourage the churches in Macedonia and Achaia to make a contribution towards the poorer church in Jerusalem. The fact is that churches in deprived communities tend to be both poorer and in greater need of funding to support their members. We tend to have less money coming in and more call on our resources to meet the financial and physical needs amongst our members than more affluent churches.

For example, whilst our church has seen good numbers of people coming to Christ, the majority of those have come amongst people drawn from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds. Most have been Iranian asylum seekers and others have come from the local white working-class communities nearby. Our membership is overwhelmingly made up of people who have relatively little they can give to the church. The reality is that we could see hundreds of asylum seekers coming to the Lord, but such people are never going to help us become financially self-sustaining. The same is true for those reaching the unemployed and those working in particularly low-paid jobs. Moreover, just as those people cannot give substantially to the work of the church, they also tend to need more money from the church.

All too often, however, we offer funding for set periods of time, expecting churches to become ‘viable’ within three to five years. We insist that we will offer an initial amount for funding and ratchet it down over subsequent years. The presumption is that as the church grows so will its financial sustainability. But churches reaching the poorest in society will not necessarily become sustainable even as they grow by conversion. This means that churches in deprived communities need partners who are willing to provide financial support for the long-term. It may be the case that we aren’t all called to go to deprived communities, but you can partner in the work of seeing disciples regularly coming to Christ by consistently sending financial support such that the work may continue.

There are several ways you may do this helpfully. You could make a partner church a regular recipient of your missions budget and send them a proportion of your monthly income. Alternatively, you could choose to hold a regular ‘gift day’ specifically for the purposes of sending support to a partner church in a deprived community. On a wider level, churches and organisations might set up a fund specifically for the purposes of supporting churches in deprived communities.

Send

Thirdly, you can partner with churches in deprived communities by actively encouraging the sending of your members to churches in hard places. Again, this would mirror the New Testament pattern of sharing resources. In Acts 13:1-3, Paul and Barnabas were sent from the church in Antioch to serve in other places. There is good warrant for sending our best people to other churches in need of workers. The question is not whether we should send our people, it is where will they make the biggest kingdom impact?

Sending our best people is the real sign that we love the Lord, his church and the lost. Sending people to deprived communities will inevitably mean we lose people who are giving money to the church and we will be sending those who are actively involved in gospel work (if they’re not, I’ll be honest, we don’t really want them!) Sending our people is harder than just sending money because it costs us in terms of evangelistic and ministry output in our own church as well as having a financial impact. At the very least, it will mean training up somebody else to take on the work that is left behind and this will cost us time. But if we are really concerned about seeing the lost won for Christ, and churches planted and revitalised in communities where he currently is not known, it will require a redistribution of our resources from our overwhelmingly middle-class, affluent churches to deprived places where the church is either non-existent or severely under resourced.

There are some good examples of churches already partnering together prayerfully, financially and in terms of sending people. We will increasingly need to do more of this together if we are going to see churches planted and resourced in areas of deep gospel need.