Relational outreach: The courage to try something new
Blair Henderson with his Youth Kitchen team at St. George's of the Blue Mountains
GROWING BEYOND THE DOORS
By Rev. Canon Grayhame Bowcott
At the heart of Christian outreach is a desire for congregations to do two things: 1) to share the love of God with others, often in the form of personal support or community service, and 2) to foster new relationships between the worshipping community and the wider neighbourhood.
Some congregations are naturally gifted in this! They find themselves regularly asking themselves, or praying over, who they should seek out and serve in the people around them. When they arrive at an answer, they go out and make it happen.
However, other congregations may find relationship building to be a daunting task. The challenge is found in the courage to try something new and to seek out relationships with people that you don’t already know.
If you find yourself in a congregation that seems to have all the same people attending worship every Sunday without any changes or new faces, it’s likely that relational outreach should be at the top of your priority list in discerning new actions to be taken by your church.
Sometimes there is a generational gap between the congregational membership and the new potential community partnership.
This September, our congregation, St. George’s, the Blue Mountains, is desiring to deliberately reach out to young families and children in our community. Prior to the pandemic, our church had a lively youth group and regularly hosted Messy Church gatherings (worship services with Christian teaching deliberately focused on inviting and embracing young families). The pandemic completely disrupted these vital ministries, both in the cancellation of our patterns of gathering and in the sense that our children grew up in those years, many to ‘age out’ of the activities that we were prepared to host.
Desiring to rebuild relationships with a younger demographic in our neighbourhood, our congregational leadership prayed over how we might try something new in serving young families. In answer to our prayers, we decided to move forward with two new approaches to fostering relationships with youth.
The first approach was to support an already existing youth organization that had also struggled during the pandemic, and, as a result of these struggles had been forced to disband. This organization is the Apple Valley Youth Chorus, a youth choir that had been previously funded by the local Rotary Club. In 2019, this choir hosted upwards of 40 members, but the pandemic had fractured both relationships and the funding required to make this youth outreach possible. So, recognizing the importance of music to young children, St. George’s voted to sponsor the choir and to commit to relaunching it as a new outreach project for this upcoming September.
This new relationship will allow us to host young families on a weekly basis, offering up our church facilities as their home base, and allowing St. George’s volunteers to be of support to the operations of the choir. This new partnership has delighted the program’s Choral Director, who has been invited to join St. George’s leadership team. We will be prayerfully (and financially) supporting the resurrection of this important youth outreach in the weeks and months ahead.
The second relationship project that we will be launching in support of youth is an idea that was brought to our Parish Council by a new member of our church, Blair Henderson. Before moving to the Blue Mountains, Blair had been involved with a youth initiative called “Youth Kitchen” at his former church, St. Matthew’s, Anglican, in Burlington.
The concept of Youth Kitchen is to provide mentorship, life lessons, and instruction to small groups of Grade 10-12 students. This project requires a partnership with the local school to have teachers suggest student participants who would benefit from a supportive social group that takes place over six weeks at a time and enables the participants to learn important cooking skills, while also making new friendships in a safe and supportive environment.
Our congregation voted to create a volunteer support group for Blair, in his leadership, and to seek out a local nutritionist to help lead the cooking instructions. Youth Kitchen will take place in our St. George’s Kitchen facility and will allow for students to learn skills that they can then take home to share with their families.
Now, it could be asked of both of these new relational projects: where is the Christian content to be found? Where is the Gospel being proclaimed? Will any new members result from our actions? These are all important questions. In answering them, our congregational leadership would say that Christian outreach is, first and foremost, about building new relationships.
Once new relationships have been fostered, the hope of our actions is that our guests and partners experience the hospitality that we offer them because of our Christian faith. We offer this hospitality without strings attached, yet we do so from the perspective of our Christian identity. If you were to ask our newest church members, like Blair Henderson, and others, why they decided to become members of St. George’s, they would tell you: that it was because of the way that we made them feel ‘at home’ in our community.
This is the confidence that underlies our Christian outreach – that in caring for others in the neighbourhood, they will come to realize that our actions are truly God’s caring for them. We pray that should they come to this realization, they may choose to take a step closer, in belonging, to a community that places God at the center of all our generosity and our outreach.
So, may these examples of relational outreach perhaps inspire others to pray for the courage to seek out some new relationships of their own. I promise to keep you posted on the fruits of these two initiatives in the months ahead.
Rev. Canon Dr. Grayhame Bowcott is passionate about fostering congregational relationships and sharing our Anglican vocation with others. He serves as Rector of St. George’s, The Parish of The Blue Mountains, and as Program Director for the Licentiate in Theology program at Huron University.