Loving Your Community: Stephen Viars

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You can sign up in the show notes or on familylife.com slash coming soon. Hope you'll join us. So what would you say the best thing a church could be known for in a community? And by the way, you know, as I think about this, I think a family. A church or a family could be known for in their local community.

The first thing that comes to my mind, which would probably come to everyone's mind... Preaching, of course. No, I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of loving people.

Oh, why would you say that today? Well, I mean, isn't that what we should be known for? The way we love each other? Yeah, and the real question, do you think that's what most churches or families are known for? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com.

This is Family Life Today. We've got Dr. Steve Vires with us, who's been here before, a pastor from Lafayette, Indiana. Welcome to Orlando, Florida, Steve. Hey, it's so good to be with you guys.

I don't know how long it's been. The last time you were with us, we were in Little Rock. The building was under construction. I don't even know if we had air conditioning flowing that day. It was a wild day, there's no doubt about that. But that had to be three years ago, maybe? Something like that, yeah.

It was a great time, but we were in an active construction zone, so kind of an unusual place to be recording anything. Yeah, and then you came in, a book you wrote called, was it called Overcoming Bitterness? Yep, that's right. Yeah, and it became one of the, I don't know if you know this, one of the most listened to shows in Family Life Today that year. No, I didn't know that.

Yeah, you're famous. Well, praise the Lord. But now you're back in a totally different aspect of a book you wrote called Loving Your Community. Obviously, we just talked about that with the church. Proven Practices for Community-Based Outreach Ministry. And I'll tell you what, if there's a picture in the dictionary of outreach-based ministry, it's you. Well, thank the Lord for that.

Yeah. If that's true to whatever degree, that's Jesus living in and through me. And we just all had lunch together, and some of the stories you shared, we were all inspired. But I think as a listener, like, this is inspiring not only for your church, this is for your family. It is. Just to have that view of what could God do in and through us as a family in our community.

Absolutely. So tell our listeners some of the stuff we talked about at lunch. Like, as you've helped lead this church for 30-plus years, what is your mission?

What is, what is it you're all about? Well, we want to see as many people in our town come to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. We say it often that we're in Tippecanoe County.

We want Tippecanoe County to be a really hard place to get the hell from. And what we mean by that is we want every person in our town to have had a meaningful, loving interaction with an authentic follower of Jesus Christ, followed by a clear presentation of the gospel. Now, what that person from our community does with that, that's between them and the Lord.

But whether we love people enough to want to make that happen, that's between us and the Lord. And so we don't want to be a church where it's very insular, where we're a country club, we just care about us. We really want to be out there loving our community and not loving our community if you come in and do our thing. We want to get out in our community in many ways as we possibly can and just love the fire out of them. So you're not just saying to the people in your congregation, hey, go tell your neighbor to come to our church. No.

It's different. No, it's go love your neighbor where they are right now. Go find a need and then just see how you can meet that need together wherever they are. And then often they're gonna ask, why do you love me like that? In fact, we want our neighbors to constantly have reason to ask, why did you do that for us? Well, because we love you. Why did you make that available for us? Well, because we love you.

Why did you build that for us? Because we love you. We love you.

We love you. At some point we want our neighbors to have a legitimate reason to ask the question, well, why do you love me? And I honestly believe that a neighbor can get to that point logically.

They're halfway to the kingdom. Because then we can say, well, because Jesus loves you. And I'd love to be able to talk with you about how he demonstrated that most supremely by dying on the cross for your sin.

But you know, that conversation doesn't start first. It starts first by just loving our neighbors every way we possibly can and building an interest that then opens their heart up to more spiritual conversation. Where'd that passion come from? Because, like, even when you talk about building your church, it just wasn't for you. It wasn't for just your congregation.

Like, did that start young in you? Like, I want to do something in my community, not just something for the believers here? Well, I think part of it came to me as a pastor when I started seeing some issues on our community on a social level that really concerned me. Some things that our community was doing, some positions that they were taking that concerned me. But I'm not sure community leaders really cared what the church had to say about those sorts of things. And I started asking myself the question, are those relationships in place with the mayors, with county commissioners, with judges, with leaders in our community?

Do we have a relationship with them so that when we do have a concern there's some sort of a platform of credibility? And regrettably, at that point in my life, the answer to that was really no. Then I started going back theologically and asking, now, if that's the case, if we don't know our neighbors, if we're not loving our neighbors, then there's something off here biblically. Let your light so shine among men, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, let your light so shine among men that they may see your, not your anger, not your pride, not even your Bible verse, right? Let your light so shine among men that they may see your your good works and then glorify your Father who's in heaven.

You know, we all have to decide what we think that word glorify means, but I think it means give the right opinion of God. I do wonder how many people in our neighborhoods think that God is either dead or he's really mad at them. And I wonder if that's not because the church nearest that person is either dead or really mad at them.

That there's something bad wrong with that. That's a question that I ask our church and I ask churches anywhere that would ask me to speak is, and it's a tough question but I think we need to face it, if God removed your church from the face of his earth, would your neighbors notice and would your neighbors care? And what I want our community leaders to say is if faith church in Lafayette disappeared, we'd have to raise taxes because there's all sorts of ways that they are serving and meeting needs in this community for free just because of their love for Christ, that if that was somehow removed, we would have to figure out some way to fill in that gap. Now that's what a church should be known for. Well Dave, I was just thinking of this.

It's so convicting. I just thought if Dave and I would leave our cul-de-sac, would we be missed? Yeah. Not just because Dave and Ann are gone, but because the way we loved people. Our snow blew their driveways. They'd miss that. They would miss that. No, but it is true.

I mean I'm being facetious, but are we loving them in such a way that they would mourn us being gone? And you know, you mentioned in your book, I've been in the same meeting you're talking about when you're sitting. We sat in a room 20-some years ago and said we need a bigger building. It's gonna cost 23 million dollars. Here's the design. And we asked a similar question.

I want to hear your story, but our question was like, is this a good use of money? We're gonna go to our congregation and ask for 23 million. And here's what we decided.

I'm embarrassed to say this. We're like, no we shouldn't build a bigger building. We should start a campus.

Yeah. And so there were no campuses back in those days. We didn't know what to call it. We didn't call it a campus.

We called it Kensington North or whatever when we went to a high school. But we saved money that way. You answered that question in a totally different way, and I wish we would have answered it that way. Tell our listeners what happened in your meeting. Yeah, it was 17 years ago, and at that time we had three worship services, and you know, praise the Lord that he was blessing the church numerically and seeing people come to Christ and that sort of thing. And so we were just getting ready to build a new auditorium. That's what we assumed we ought to do. And so we had the architectural renderings there, and so we had all of our pastors and deacons, a group of about 60 or 70 people looking at this plan, and we were getting ready to start that project. And then one of our deacons said, is that the best use of this money to spend nine million dollars on an auditorium that's gonna sit vacant six and a half days a week?

And we're not asking that question for anybody else, so we don't want to judge anybody else. We were just asking that question for us. And one of our other guys then said, well, if we didn't use it to build a new auditorium, what would we use it for? And somebody else, and I'm so thankful for the man's openness to say this, he said, well, how about if we used it to show love to our neighbors? And then somebody else said, well, how would we do that?

And then I was so glad for the humility of this person when he said, I'm not sure we even know. Let's ask our neighbors. So not let's ask our neighbors what they want us to believe or what they want us to preach on Sunday.

That wasn't the question. We were saying, and I hope humbly, let's go to our neighbors and ask them to educate us about what are the greatest needs that exist in our community, this part of our town, and then let's use this money just to show love to meet those needs. And so we surveyed our neighbors. And you know, sometimes people don't respond to surveys well, but I'll tell you, this time they did. Hundreds and hundreds of our neighbors.

They absolutely want, they were glad somebody asked. How did you survey them? The first time we did, believe it or not, we did it just with paper surveys. We mailed them out and we got the word out through the newspaper and that sort of thing. And we asked people, now we do it electronically, because we do this ongoing as part of our strategic ministry planning process.

But that first time we did it through paper surveys and we got hundreds and hundreds of them back. And our neighbors were more than happy to talk with us about that. And what they said, they said, we're glad for all the residential development. We're glad for all the commercial growth. We're glad for the infrastructure. But who cares about the social needs of people living in this part of town?

And they had a whole list. So who cares about single moms? That's a great question. Who cares about at-risk children? Who cares about teens who are struggling? Who cares about community recreation? They wanted to know if anybody cared about the skateboarders.

They wanted to know about senior citizens. What they were saying, as odd as it might sound, is if you want to make this neighborhood a better place, build a YMCA. And so that's essentially what we did.

We totally pivoted, no more new auditorium. And we built a separate building because we wanted our neighbors to feel very, very comfortable. We wanted it to feel like their community center.

So it's a separate building. And we want them, as soon as they walk in those doors, to just name a need in this community. And we can point to a place in the facility that proves Jesus cares about that need.

And what we found is, as soon as we tried to just provide services and ministries for our neighbors, that allowed us to have more interaction with our neighbors than ever before. So you've got rooms in there that are used for the church on Sunday, but you got, what, daycare for the, during the week? What, you have a gym?

Share all those different things that are going on. Yeah, at least one of them. And now, by God's grace, we have three of them. So we have one on the east side of town. We have one at the west side of town near the entrance to Purdue University. And then we have one in the inner city. Three buildings. Yes. That are providing needs for the community.

Right. Every one of them has meeting rooms because that's what our neighbors asked for. They said, listen, we need a place to have birthday parties. We need a place to have anniversary celebrations, homeowner association meetings. And by the way, most churches already have those kind of rooms. Yeah.

They just sit vacant. And so what we're saying is, no, if one of our neighbors wants to use one of our rooms, why wouldn't we do that? Is it free? Very low cost. Yeah. Just to kind of address some of the custodial issues. Right. But I'm talking about a couple of bucks.

And also, if anybody ever wanted to use one and they didn't have the money, we absolutely would let them use it for free. And it doesn't matter what they believe. Doesn't matter how they're dressed.

Doesn't matter about anything. They're welcome to use these buildings. And you know, one Saturday I walked through one of our community centers and there was a group of Muslims having a birthday party. And it kind of gave me pause just because of the way they were dressed. And I asked myself, is that a good thing?

And I thought, absolutely. I mean, how else are we ever gonna have an opportunity to have a privilege of talking with them about the gospel unless we first don't just love on them. Share what we have with them. They all have child care facilities because it's amazing how many people are struggling with finding safe, affordable child care. And here's one of the big pieces of it is infant care.

In our community, people really struggle. And many of these times, it's a single mom and maybe she got pregnant outside of wedlock. We're not gonna judge her. We're gonna love her because she's in a position right now. Why does she need child care?

Because she needs to go get her education or she needs to go find a job. That's what we tell them. And yet they can't find safe, affordable child care. How is it that our communities have dozens, in many cases, hundreds and hundreds of church buildings, all of them having a nursery that sits vacant all week long and we can't figure out that we can provide safe, affordable infant care for single moms?

And so we make child care available. And then we just flip that and we use that for our children's ministries on Sunday. All of our community centers have gymnasiums, but we don't have church leagues. I don't believe in church leagues. I think church leagues are of the devil. And that might be a bit strong, but it's all community leagues. And so last Saturday, if you had come to our Faith East site, there was a youth soccer program for the community.

600 kids that were just packed with grandmas and aunts and uncles and all. And we're just trying to love on them. It's a need in the community, so we make that available. So you're saying in terms of, you know, I'm an athlete guy, so I'm saying no church league. So you're saying the guys or the gals at our church that want to play in a basketball league are gonna play in a community league and be the light of Jesus on that team rather than let's separate ourselves and only play with Christians, right?

We practice separation on steroids. How many followers of Jesus Christ? They don't know any unbelievers. That's one of the reasons we're not seeing more people come to know the Lord.

We're not building relationships with folks. And so here's another one. We have an elevated walking track around our gymnasiums. Well, what's that about? Well, I'm from the Midwest. It gets cold in the wintertime.

Here was the paradigm, although anybody can use it, but that was especially built for widows. And what happens is you have a woman who raises her family, kids grow up, move away, husband often passes away first, and there she is lonely. And it's winter in the Midwest. What's she gonna do? Well, we have a walking track.

She can come to the community center, walk for free, and the way it works, she's walking around. And, you know, there's some ladies from our church. They're, you know, just organic relationships, and pretty soon they're walking together. And by about lap three, the woman from the neighborhood is saying, you know, I'm really lonely.

I might even be depressed. To which the woman from our church says, well, did you know our church has a counseling center? And then that takes another lap or two to sink in, and then she's, the neighbor says, well, I couldn't afford counseling. And then the woman from our church says, well, but it's free. And then that takes a couple more laps to sink in, and then the woman, the neighbor says, but I'd be afraid to go to counseling by myself. To which the woman from our church says, well, I'll be more than happy to go with you.

Just an organic relationship while we're doing things together. We're just loving them at their point of need, and it's amazing how open people become to something that's much more significant. It's the gospel on the ground. It absolutely, it's the gospel hitting the streets. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm over here tearing up because it's so beautiful. And again, I pastored for 30-plus years. That's not how the church typically is known. Now I'll tell you what, Steve, since I've been done pastoring, and it's interesting when you step away and then look, you have different eyes.

And I'm not saying what we did was God honored it and God reached a lot of people for Christ, but if I did it all over again, I'd do it completely different. But here's one of the things that's really interesting, is our youngest son has a ministry that meets on Sunday afternoons. It's much like a church, but it's not a church. It's a prayer house, and it's a worship thing. And anyway, here's the saddest thing that I've seen in my area, is he needs a bigger building because people are coming and there's not enough room. So we go to these churches, and I go and I'm known in the area, hey, could we rent your space?

No. You know why? They're scared we're gonna take their people.

That building sits empty. And then there's the whole business side of it as, well, you know, you got to pay this, we got to hire this. And I get it, but it's like, wow, what is it? I just didn't think that would be the typical reaction of, and that's most churches, I'm sure I'm not the only one experiences that, that's how we're known. I don't mean just our churches.

I think that's how the church is sort of known in communities. Well, you start your book out with a story. Yeah, that story. Share that story. Yeah, well, and it drives around the philosophy that I think many churches seem to have of, say no unless you have to say yes.

I believe the opposite. Say yes unless you have to say no. I mean, you could always come up with a reason to say no.

You can talk about liability, you can talk about maintenance, you can talk about all kinds of things. You can always come up, but I think that means that we miss all sorts of opportunities. So yeah, I was riding my bike with our chairman of Deacons, it's called the rain ride right across Indiana. So you start in Illinois at the Illinois line in the morning and you ride straight across to Ohio.

So it's 167 miles or something like that. Part of the charm of that rain ride is the stops. And so they're big-time community events and communities take pride. If they're a rain ride stop, they're gonna have great snacks, cold drinks, and I mean if you're a rider you need it big time. So you're looking forward to those stops. But a lot of the riders also have family members who are tracking with them and so they're driving from stop to stop to see their friend, their family member, and just encourage them. Well, so you got a lot of traffic that comes into these towns and needing a place to park. So we were coming to one of the the final stops that day and we were really tired.

Everybody was really tired by that point in the ride. And I was tracking, I knew we were about a couple of miles from the stop, and there's this beautiful church on a hill at a gorgeous parking lot and driveway and all this sort of thing. And I see this apparent leader from the church, member of the church, some guy dragging the sawhorse with enthusiasm down to the entrance to the parking lot and I'm thinking, oh I hope not, I hope not, I hope not.

And sure enough when I got there the guy had erected this sign on a sawhorse that said, no parking allowed, just to be absolutely certain that nobody from the community, no riders, no family members dared use their parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. And I'm thinking that's the exact opposite of what the church ought to be doing. You ought to be inviting everybody, please use our parking lot, how can we give you cold water, how can we give you snacks, how can we be volunteering down at the stop, I mean all those sorts of things. But yet that's the way the church often functions, that's the way, and I don't get it, it's almost like we don't want to get dirty by interacting with those people or they might use our restroom and make it dirty for Sunday or something like that. And shame on the church for not sharing everything we have with the community every time we have the opportunity. I mean you mentioned in your book, you know, soon after that story that there's a feeling you think among a lot of us church members that we're better than them. And that illustrates, yeah, we're better and we don't, it's almost like we're Pharisees. But we don't want our things messed up. We don't want to be around those kind of people. We don't want those kind of people to be in here. And that's when we were building our first community center, one of our members said, hey what about the skateboarders?

We did not have one professional-grade skate park anywhere in our county. And is that a big thing in Indiana? It is. Like skateboarding? It is. And it probably really was too.

Well it still is, but what many businesses and certainly churches do, they get a sign up right away. No skateboarding allowed. We don't want the skateboarders anywhere on our property. So I said to our church family, look we're spending all this money on this new community center, how about if we raise a couple hundred thousand more dollars and let's build the first professional-grade skate park anywhere in our community and see what happens. We're not going to design it because we had messed it up.

So let's get the skateboarders in here and let's ask them to educate us about how do you design a skate park and then let's identify the company in this country that builds the best skate park ramps money can buy. Because if we were going to do it for us, we'd do it good. So if we're going to do it for them, we're going to do it with excellence too.

And that's what we did. And I wish you guys could have been there. The first day when the company was building the very first ramp, there were people pouring out of our neighborhoods that I had never seen before. It was a wild looking group of people. I mean they had tattoos everywhere. What do I care about that? They had piercings everywhere.

Again, what do I care about that? There were some young people that had their tongues pierced. I don't understand that.

I try not to bite my tongue. These are people who, but they were skating around that first piece of skate park equipment like sharks. They could not wait to get on. And now that we had the skate park built, it's amazing how many people come to our church property to skate on our skate park. Well wait, take us back to this meeting where you're asking the skateboarders to come in and help plan the park.

What did that look like? They were surprisingly respectful. And maybe it's wrong for me even to say that that I was surprised.

I didn't know. But you know we're so quick to judge. You know they don't look like us. They don't talk like us.

Shame on me for being so judgmental. But they were very, very respectful. They were very passionate about their sport. They were very, very knowledgeable. Were they surprised that you're doing this?

Totally surprised. And they wanted to know why. What'd you say? I said, because Jesus loves you. That's why we love you because Jesus loves you. And Jesus loved us.

The way he demonstrated that was by dying on the cross. And so we're a church. We're just all about being amazing. Right, we sing it.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. That's what we're all about. And so we just want to treat everybody in our community with grace.

We want to build a skate park for you because Jesus loves you. And this is your thing. But they asked. I wasn't gonna tell them that. That was not in my notes, right, for the meeting. They asked.

And that's kind of the point. Now here's the next thing you just have to ask yourself. Now wait, wait, wait. What if some of these kids come to know Christ?

And I know of at least 26 people who have come to know Christ at that skate park. But then you just have to stop saying, wait, wait, wait, wait. Here's the problem with that. They're gonna want to come to church. And they do. And you say, what's that like?

That's a hot mess. Because skateboarders, and if there's any skateboarders listening, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about all the rest of you, but skateboarders don't know how to walk. Skateboarders, they skate. We've had skateboarders on Sunday morning put their skateboard down in our church foyer and skate to the auditorium. I've told the ladies in our church, no more open-toed shoes.

It is too dangerous around here anymore. Now here's the next thing about it. No one has taught them to sit in the back. And so they'll come right up to the very front. Come right up to the front.

And so one day I'm preaching out of Habakkuk. And so I looked down and the front row of this section of our auditorium was filled with skateboarders. Everyone, one after another. And you say, what'd they look like? It was a hot mess. And what one guy had, he had a mohawk that was so tall that the people sitting behind him could not have possibly seen.

How he did that with his hair, I have no idea. So they're sitting there tattooed and pierced front row. They got their skateboards and their helmets under their chairs.

They're gonna go skating right after church. But you know what each one of them had on their laps? A Bible.

A copy of the Bible. Open to the book of Habakkuk, respectfully listening to the exposition I was giving. Here's what I said in my heart. I said, that's why I became a pastor. I don't want to pastor country club church. I don't want to pastor we're all that in a bag of chips church.

I want to pastor we made a mess church. You know, pretending to have it all together, all shined up and pretty on the outside, isn't real life. It isn't real ministry.

It isn't real anything. Stephen Viers wanted to pastor a mess of a church because people are a mess. And guess what? God loves people despite their messiness. So beautiful. I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Stephen Viers on Family Life Today. And Stephen has written a book called Loving Your Community, Proven Practices for Community-Based Outreach Ministry.

And we've heard a lot about how beautiful and messy that can be today. His book is gonna be our gift to you when you partner with us financially here at Family Life Today. You can go online to familylifetoday.com or give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329.

Again that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us something in the mail if you like. Our address is Family Life 100 Lake Hart Drive, Orlando, Florida 32832. You know meeting the needs of a community isn't just about the church and the community doing things separately. It's about working together in a joint effort to help reach the community. I love when churches do that. Well tomorrow Stephen Viers is gonna be back with Dave and Anne Wilson to talk about just that and give us some practical tips on how to do that. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.