The Bible tells us repeatedly to love one another.
Jesus himself tells us that the world will know that we are his disciples if we love one another (John 13:34-35) and that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).
We know that we are instructed to love the Lord and the people around us, give to the poor, care for widows and orphans, and help the afflicted. Those things are very easy to say but often challenging in practice. We long to build a strong church community and connect with those around us, but outreach doesn’t always fall inside our comfort zones.
It comes naturally to love those who look like us and think like us, those who fall in the same tax brackets or live in the same neighborhoods. But the true test of our faith and our call to love our neighbors is loving those who we aren’t familiar with and who live differently than we do.
There are people in your community, both within your church and beyond your walls, who may feel unlovable due to their circumstances. They need to see the life-giving love of Jesus and find a connection within his Church.
So how do you love those in need in your church and in your community?
Step 1: Know Your Community
First, you have to identify those who are in need or may feel unlovable in your community. Does your city have a big homeless population or a large percentage of single-parent households? Do a significant portion of the people in your area live below the poverty line?
Using a tool like MissionInsite or other data-driven solutions, you can see real numbers related to your community. Knowing who you’re trying to love is half the battle, so find resources to help you see who needs to feel the love of Jesus through your church.
Outreach programs are only effective if they reach out to the right people. Developing a program to feed the homeless or creating a special needs ministry within your church are wonderful things, but they will only be effective if there are people in your community who will actually benefit from them.
Step 2: Determine What They Need to Feel Loved
Once you’ve identified the groups of people you want to connect with, you can better determine how your church can rally around them.
Sometimes, feeling loved does mean that you meet a physical need. But sometimes, it means sitting and having a meal with a shut-in and talking to them like a normal person. Sometimes, it’s sending an encouraging card to a single mom who feels like she’s not doing a good enough job with her kids.
Don’t discount physical needs if your church can meet them. The goal of outreach is to point people to Jesus, so make sure you’re showing love through whatever efforts you make. Meeting emotional and spiritual needs is often more challenging than providing for a physical need.
As you determine ways to love those you’ve identified, look carefully at what resources are already available in your community. If other groups or ministries are already working with those people, talk to them about what programs are already in place.
Successfully loving those in need may mean supporting something that’s already been developed rather than creating a new program. Outreach programs don’t have to be created by your ministry to be just as impacted by your congregation stepping out in faith to love the least of these.
Step 3: Don’t Stop There
Showing the love of Jesus to people in your community isn’t just a one-and-done kind of thing. Now that you know who those in need are and have determined the best way to connect with them, don’t stop there.
Building relationships with people is vital to the success of your outreach efforts. And more important than meeting needs is actually introducing people to their Savior. The best way to love is to point them to the God who loves them more deeply than they could ever imagine.
Church outreach isn’t just reaching out to the community around you. It’s drawing people into the community and fellowship of the Church and connecting them to the Body of Christ.
Living in a circumstance that makes someone feel unlovable can often be isolating and discouraging. So open the doors of your church wide and welcome them into a family that sees past a person’s circumstances and into the heart of someone dearly loved. After all, we love because he first loved us!
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