What does Public Church look like?
Public Church looks like its context
What Public Church looks like depends on your context because what you bring the Gospel to bear on depends on what the needs and the assets in your context are. My context is North Hollywood, a multi-ethnic arts-oriented neighborhood of Los Angeles with a metro hub, and mix of apartments, single family homes, and retail and restaurants geared toward a young adult population. The local public concerns we bring the Gospel to bear on most readily are: homelessness, the need for housing of all kinds, economic inequalities, racism, LGBTQ+ rights, especially now trans protections, access and rights of persons with disabilities, migration, public transportation expansion, access to medical, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, violence and methods of public safety, and more recently access to COVID-19 testing.
The Tools of Public Church
The tools I use to do Public Church include the traditional avenues of being Church such as worship—especially now live streamed and increasingly broadly public worship, service ministries such as food pantries and schools, and making space available for community groups (when COVID-19 abates).
But the most effective tools for Public Church I use are what I call the “levers of democracy”—those pathways and opportunities for civic engagement open to the majority of residents and organizations including people of faith and most non-profits: advocacy through public comment, engagement with electeds and their staff, and public gatherings on-line and in person (house meetings, educational sessions, street gatherings); running for and participating in citizen advisory boards such as Neighborhood Councils, Community Police Advisory Boards, oversight boards, State commissions and more.
A critical vehicle for my Public Church work and that of my congregation is the separate, secular non-profit we founded, NoHo Home Alliance, a 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation that has a broadly defined mission for advocacy, education and service: “Our mission is to solve local challenges through advocacy and programs that empower individuals in need to cultivate lives of dignity and that build a healthy community.” The non-profit enables us to interact with potential partners, fellow residents and funders who would be less inclined to join with a Church in public benefit work.
Public Church and Asset Based Community Development
A critical aspect of doing Public Church is to recognize that every faith community—however small—consists of human and material assets that can have a huge impact on the community in which you find yourself. Asset Based Community Development is a praxis that seeks to identify existing assets in a community that can be put to work addressing needs in the community for the sake of building a healthier community for all. For example, my congregation became a leader in providing homeless services in our neighborhood because we remembered we had a shower. The shower was in the old pastor’s office tucked behind the chancel area. It hadn’t been used in decades—since the AC had been put in—except to store our signs announcing Christmas and Easter worship and beer for our Reformation Sunday Oktoberfests. When I asked “did the shower work?,” no one knew. But one faithful member emptied the shower, and put in a new shower head. The nephew of another faithful member donated a new hot water heater. We now could use the asset of a shower to meet the need for hygiene in the exponentially growing population of people experiencing homelessness in our area. Our drop-in access center for people experiencing homelessness, one of the most effective programs in LA, was born.
The challenge for each faith community is to discern what assets you have in terms of people, skills and property, analyze the needs in your community, and then see where you can align your assets with the needs. That alignment might be new types of services you can provide, but it could very well be the impulse for education and advocacy. The possibilities are manifold.