More and more the 21st-century church is striving to reach into the local community. Scan the job pages in the Christian press and you will find advertisements for youth workers and community workers abounding. Look carefully at the job descriptions and you will uncover a real desire among Christians to get out to where people are on a day-to-day basis: shopping centres, hospitals, schools, youth centres, sports clubs…
Pastoral workers and lay people alike are being encouraged to join the visiting teams of local hospitals and hospices, to set up after school clubs, to get involved in crèches in large shopping centres. This is all about the local church reaching out.
It would be hard to criticise such a strategy, as Christ certainly went to where the people were, often to what were seen as the ‘wrong kind of people.’ And of course, the more Christians are able to bring gospel values into places where there are large numbers of people the better, but is the church as an institution always aware that the salt and light are already out there?
