Church By the Bridge at Kirribilli recently ran an Art competition for depictions of the suburb. They offered a $1000 prize to the winner. It was a huge success at raising the profile of the church and engaging with the local community.
That made me wonder about how should a church fit into a community. After all, our efforts in Connect 09 revolve around contacting our community.
Gary Bully is a denominational church planting theorist from the USA.
Martin Morgan gave me one of his papers called Developing a Contextualized Church Planting Strategy . In it he says there are four possible relationships between a church and the community, two corporate and two personal. They are:
My thoughts on this are that the first two are not necessarily alternatives to the second two; they may feed each other. A much more important reality however would be that God is at the centre of the community. Bully is insightful though, because he helps us to see that people identified as Christians, and Christians as a group being known and appreciated is very helpful as we work toward God being the centre of our community.
So a couple of questions come to mind about my congregation. They are:
The difference between the answers to questions 1 and 2 compared to questions 3 and 4 will keep us honest. I have found Peter Bolt’ Mission Minded book a great help in thinking through how to better place ourselves and our church in the community. 
This article is made available courtesy of Sydneyanglicans.net