This morning we started the day by debriefing about the previous day's experiences. We talked for a while about the concept of mission drift, which occurs when people involved in missional activity begin to lose their focus because the needs in communities become so overwhelming. It could also happen when organizations pursue funding that might not be related to their mission, but they go after it anyway because they need the resources so desperately. Collaboration with other organizations helps us to avoid mission draft. Partnerships are also important because often silos develop in Christian ministry. It happens because a passionate leader builds an organization around a cause, they begin to compete with other organizations for resources, and suddenly all of those organizations isolate themselves from others in order to survive. The silo philosophy is unhealthy in organizations and churches.
The issue of desperation came up multiple times today. The basic thinking there is that in cities, the problems are often hidden to people. City and church leaders are often unwilling to act until they have reached a point of desperation, which generates the passion needed to mobilize help. For instance, the issue of urban blight is not an issue to many business owners until the blight starts moving toward their businesses. Suddenly, they have a new interest in how to deal with complex urban issues. For people like me who are charged with coming alongside Christians to encourage them to get involved in the city, a big part of my role involves helping people to see how desperate things are in Homewood and in other parts of the city. Our hearts must break before we can act.
We spent some time today with the director of planning and revitalization of the city of Fresno, Keith Bergthold, a pastor named Eli Loera who heads up a pastors cluster that organizes nearly 200 pastors, the F.U.N.D. organization that works on housing in Fresno, and Hope Now For Youth which is an organization that reaches out to youth gangs to provide jobs. We also stopped by the house of H Spees, vice president of Leadership Foundations of America, who lectured for a little while and shared a lot from his experiences regarding why, when, and how Fresno has made positive changes.
All of the site visits today were valuable. I was probably most impacted by the visit to Hope Now For Youth. We heard several testimonies of staff members working there about how they were able to escape the gang life and join mainstream society as productive workers with solid family lives. I would have liked to have stayed there to learn more about what they are doing, but perhaps I will have to contact them at some point down the road.
The time spent with Keith Bergthold was extremely insightful. He spoke a lot about how much the world is changing, and how Christians should be prepared to respond to the new complexities associated with a urbanization and globalization. He feels that most of the systems, or institutions, in America have become too big and slow moving, so they are less and less able to meet peoples' needs. If we would have had some more time there, I would have asked him to unpack that statement a little bit. For instance, many parts of the federal, state, and local governments have experienced financial distress recently and they are having to cut services. How can the church step in effectively to fill in where the government services were cut? Is that an opportunity for the church, or will people view those issues as burdens that churches who are struggling themselves might not be able to have the capacity to take on?
I have seen how mission drift has impacted my work in Homewood. Our central focus should be on mentoring, but the kids and families have so many needs sometimes that I often end up getting pulled into many different unexpected directions. While a certain degree of flexibility is probably to be admired in urban ministry, it should not take us off of the mission that we have been called to.
When I return to Pittsburgh, I need to learn more about what networks of Christian leaders are gathering together regularly so that I could possibly join in with them. I know that there is a legacy of pastors and Christian leaders gathering together through organizations such as Serving Leaders and Pittsburgh Youth Network. I'm sure I'll be able to find some leads. One thing that the leader of the pastors clusters shared with us today was that they don't just pray and socialize when they gather together. They all have issues that they bring to the table, and they work hard at taking on those issues together. I've been to "collaborative" gatherings of leaders in Pittsburgh before where I basically showed up and the person who organized the meeting talked for the whole time while we all sat and listened to their vision. Those types of meetings are not really sustainable over a very long period of time. For that matter, I need to examine how I structure collaborative gatherings when I pull leaders together. There is a fine line between between providing solid leadership and bogging people down with my own agenda.
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