Impacting a community for the sake of the gospel

Here is the story of one group of believers in Seattle who took advantage of a small service grant provided by their church and transformed a portion of their neighborhood. This and other similar stories can be viewed here.Some of the values that undergird this church’s provision of these funds are as follows.

• Relationships. Serve who you know; know who you serve (Mk 12:31).
• Compassion. Concern for both the spiritual and physical well-being of all beneficiaries (Mt 25:40).
• Sacrifice. Demonstrate commitment, accountability, and sincerity through tangible contributions of time, money, and effort (2 Cor 8:8).
• Humility. Those meeting needs are also being served as they serve, growing closer to Jesus, cultivating greater compassion for people, and bringing him glory in the process (Mt 9:13).

Jason, a community group leader for less than three months, lives in the Rainier district. He has a love for the people in his neighborhood and deeply desires to care for them. This community is mired in gang violence and marred with graffiti. He knows that Jesus has removed the stench from his past and he desires to symbolically do the same in his neighborhood by physically cleaning it up.

He is building a community group dedicated to cleaning graffiti and the neighborhood they live in. Last week they took MicroMission funds and funded a cleanup of four traffic circles. He chose this project because he was involving women and children on this project. (Jason believes that when they clean up graffiti there are some risks, so he plans to do that just with the men.) Little did he know that this was not quite as safe as he thought.

They set out removing trash, weeds, and anything that distorted the beauty of the area. They clothed the newly cleaned ground with fresh bark that they paid for. As they were cleaning up one of the traffic circles, one of the members found a gun hidden in the bushes. One does have to wonder what that gun was used for if it was disposed of. Coincidentally, there was a gun fight in the area just days before. It is a blessing that it was discovered by Jason’s team before a child found it.

As they removed the last of the garbage and carefully placed the last of the bark, they gazed upon how much the area was transformed. As Jesus is in the business restoring each of us despite our brokenness, Jason’s group reflects this truth by cleaning up their neighborhood. Afterward, they celebrated with several other teams in the park enjoying Vietnamese sandwiches–pondering what the next project would be like.

In the following days, the city sent them a letter thanking them and giving them an award “The Best Road Rage Killer” for their hard and persistent work.

There are likely thousands of opportunities like this to show the love of Jesus in our neighborhoods. How could we learn from Jason’s example to allow God to use us in such restorative way?