The Northwest Mission
My wife and I moved to Seattle in September 2019. As we began to settle in, Elizabeth and I spent time mainly raising support. Seattle has one of the highest cost-of-living in the United States, and with that in mind we met with many brotherhood congregations in the surrounding area. They were a support system for us. So if I have any advice for ministers and missionaries alike, it’s to have a support system. You need it. God said himself that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” I know the primary context of that verse is marriage, but the broader context is that God did not make us to live without community. That, at least for me, is the core of why I even live out ministry.
Community is the reason for our mission to seek, serve, and disciple the lost. The seeking portion was proposed largely by the Clearmans, who thought outside the box and began promoting and pouring money into a Facebook page they created. They called it West Seattle Bible Study, where they paid for ads in the surrounding community. After a month of running ads and playing “buffer” for much of the anti-Christian feedback, those who were curious began to ask questions. Our first Bible study took place roughly two-and-a-half months after we arrived. What started out with two people on the first night, grew to about 10 in a month.
Where we really started to see change is when we began to serve those people. Service, by the way, doesn’t have to be what we are typically used to. Service at its core is when you give of yourself to help another. Some might call that love. You can serve others by just being present in their lives. There is something precious about a steady presence, especially when we live in such uncertain times. It’s funny to me that just about everyone I know has struggled in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. Yet, if not for that struggle and the perseverance to lean and trust on God, we wouldn’t have had those who chose to walk through the door of baptism to meet Christ on the other side. One of the first women we met through the Bible study gave her life to Christ and was baptized in the cold salt water of Puget Sound. We had onlookers curious and hateful of our actions. Some who gazed with interest, others who videoed out of spite, and still some who cursed up a storm. The thing that mattered most to us, even through our discomfort, is that God was glorified, and we gained a sister.
The discipling part is my favorite; I personally love to see the lights turn on. I know the value of what it is to know God through his word seeding deep in one's heart. During the outbreak, we utilized conference room software to keep in touch with those we had been ministering to. We decided on something rather radical to me – to stop preaching in the normal sense, at least for a time. Instead we took from what Paul wrote in 1 Tim. 4:13, “to give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” In that, preaching is understood, but today it seems like we get more of a commentary of what Scripture says, or don’t respect God’s word. As a small congregation, we spend at least half of the week studying God’s word. On Sundays we’ve been reading together the book of Genesis, and through that we keep in touch with the point of Genesis. We don’t read just to read; we read to understand and grow.
Something we have heard time and time again from those we minister to, is that the Bible is no longer taught, even among groups that identify as Christian. By contrast, we decided to push to understand the more difficult portions of Scripture. We do this because we believe in the authority that God places on his word. We believe and teach that in order to disciple one must lay their life alongside Scripture to see what matches up. They must start matching up what doesn’t, laying their life and Scripture next to those they are growing with, in order to help them along. This description is an oversimplification, but the core is that it requires us to be sincere and transparent.
In order to build up the community of Christ, you don’t need a catchy phrase or tagline. You don’t need to have the latest and greatest. What you need is to be actively looking for those who don’t have a relationship with God; don’t wait for others to do that for you. What you need is to be present in the lives of others, because quality time comes from quantity time. What you need is to be committed to the truth of God’s word and walk alongside those who need someone steady to lean on.
