Whatever happened to outreach?

Whatever happened to outreach?

That question has been weighing on my mind lately. As I said in the blog post below, we did just explore another church for the first time. There were a number of reasons why after more than 5 years we decided to leave our church.

The church has a series of classes it offers. The 3rd in the series is the one I spoke about earlier in this blog that has left me bothered about hospital visitation etc. (The main leader in the church teaches during the class that if someone is in the hospital for 48 hours or more, church members should make it a priority to visit the person.) I wondered why after more than a dozen hospital trips did he only come once, and that time required a phone call to get him to come. Only one church member has always been there.

That leads me to the question, Whatever happened to outreach? Have they completely forgotten those who are homebound? The leader of the church counsels people, but does not force people into it. He lets people come to him in their own time. That is fine and dandy. But what about those who rarely have the ability to go to church, to rarely leave the home, to rarely get in their own shower for the pain and exhaustion for that matter?

Is it possible leaders can learn to set aside their firm belief in not going to others/in having others come to them, but instead learning how to incorporate outreach into the church, because the few years it has been lacking.

Sorely lacking. It is why we are no longer there. Every day they go about their lives, coming and going from their homes, and all of us that are homebound live a thousand years for every one of those days, silence echoes off the walls, glaring reminders of how the majority of the world, including those who claim to know us, still have no idea what goes on here.

It's not just about me, those with chronic or progressive disease. It's also about the elderly who can't get around; it's about the young who have surgery and need a hand, like my husband after his 4th knee surgery last week.

Put simply, ignoring us seems status quo.