Getting to know the community that your congregation will focus on is a critical step in defining your mission. To start, work on getting answers to several key questions: What are the primary issues in your community? How do the people in the community want the church to respond to those issues? And probably most important: do the people in your community actually want the ministry you are proposing? Your congregation will be most successful if you can answer yes to this question.

It is pretty easy to stay within the four walls of the church and make assumptions about the lives of the people in the broader community. It is more difficult to actually build relationships with community residents and grow in your understanding of their needs and desires. It takes more time, too.

There are tremendous advantages, however, to building your congregation's ministries on what the community says it wants. If you take the time to build these relationships, your congregation will focus its efforts on meeting unmet needs rather than duplicating what other groups are already doing. You will also have a strong foundation for sustaining your programs; strong relationships with your community make it easier to recruit participants and volunteers and raise money.

Sunny Kang, pastor of Woodland United Methodist Church in Duluth and a partnership advocate for the Self Development of People Committee (PCUSA), describes a process that one of his churches used to get to know the community:

A church I was pastor of did research for six months before we opened our doors to the
community. We talked to the kids at the high school next door to the church and asked
them, 'What is the problem in the community, what can we do to help, how can we serve
you?' They were real reticent at first, but eventually they did tell us 'there are a few things
you could do.'

We ended up opening the church to kids during lunch because there were 450 students in
two of the lunch periods and the school could only accommodate 200 of them. So 200 to
250 kids had to leave the school building every day for lunch, even in 20-below-zero weather
in the winter. So we opened our building and served lunch. It started slowly at first, but grew
so that we had 250 to 350 kids in the church building every day during the week. Too many
churches say, 'We think the people in the community need this,' and they impose their
value system on the people. Community residents often end up saying to the church, 'Who
asked you to do this?' You need to keep asking—is there a market for what we
say the community might need?

So how can you get to know the community? I am not necessarily defining community as a geographic area, though many congregations are focused on a neighborhood, town, or region. Your community might be a certain group of people—for example, people living with HIV/AIDS. Read more to learn some strategies to help you connect with the people your congregation aims to serve.

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