LEAWOOD - When Rudy Rasmus and his wife, Juanita, arrived at St. John’s United Methodist Church in downtown Houston in 1992, their mission was really clear.
“We had to step over our mission to get into the room,” Rasmus told the Kansas East Conference June 11. “We’re in downtown Houston, surrounded by a homeless community. The mission for us was right at the front door. Instead of repeatedly stepping over our mission to get into the sanctuary, we invited our mission into the room.”
Rasmus was one of two plenary speakers who addressed the conference theme, “The Church United: Eradicating Poverty,” at the 2010 Annual Conference session. Rasmus has served St. John UMC for 18 years, growing the congregation from 9 in 1992 to more than 9,000 people today.
“Everywhere I go, what I find everywhere I go, there is poverty,” Rasmus said. “All poverty isn’t financial. Some poverty is spiritual. The pandemic of impoverishment, either physical, material poverty or spiritual poverty, but the key is the church has been uniquely placed here on earth to eradicate poverty.”
Rasmus referenced two books, his own book, “Touch,” and “7 Myths of the United Methodist Church” by Craig Miller, during his presentations.
The first step to eradicating poverty is to make a risk covenant, Rasmus said. Anytime a new effort is taken on, the congregation should declare its readiness to risk. The covenant declares your readiness to let go of livelihood and lifestyle, stretch your imagination and consider the impossible, love somebody for Jesus and let God move in any way that God asks you.
“You have already signed on to take some risks when you decided to take on poverty in your communities,” Rasmus said. “Whenever we walk with God, God is with us. When we look at scripture, we see men and women who have already taken those challenging steps. God was always there to support them.”\
In response to the questions he received about how other congregations could do what he’s done at St. John’s, Rasmus devised a methodology to help faith communities eradicate poverty in their own communities. The acronym is TOUCH, the title of his book.
T stands for truth.
“When we think about truth, we realize that truth is the only tool that we really have at our disposal,” Rasmus said. “The word of God is truth. Whenever we share this truth with others, we literally are releasing ourselves to relationship with others. Truth also leads to transparency. I’m allowing people to see into my life so we can establish this working relationship that ultimately gets us on the same path to eradicate poverty.”
O stands for others-focused.
Too often, we stop reading the Bible at John 3:16 and forget John 3:17, “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but that through him, the world might be saved.”
“The only way I found to do so was to become an others-focused faith community,” Rasmus said. “That means whoever lives around the church, whoever comes in the doors, has a place in this community. Is that hard to do? Absolutely. We all come to this faith with our ‘stuff.’ God loves people regardless.”
The first nine members at St. John UMC were white and the average age was about 70 years old, but they were the most unconditionally accepting people Rasmus said he has met in his whole life.
“I walked in the door, and they said, ‘Rudy, if God is telling you that we need to do this, let’s do it.’ Every step of the way, they were there with me and my wife.”
With every 100 new people who join the church, the church changes.
“Every time I walk in the room, I look out and wonder, ‘Who are these people?’ You have to be flexible enough to go where God is taking the faith community,” Rasmus said.
People do get uncomfortable with this constant change. There’s several thousand people out there who used to be members of St. John’s, he said.
U stands for unconditionally loving others.
“If we’re going to make any impact for Christ in this world, it’s going to be through unconditional love,” Rasmus said. “An outgrowth of love is compassion. And it’s through compassion that others can experience the love we have for them and each other.”
Unconditional love puts the attention on the person and not on their differences. When you meet a new person, Rasmus challenged everyone to repeat to themselves, “With attention on the person, just like me, this person has known sadness and loneliness and despair in his or her life. With attention on the person, this person is seeking to fulfill the needs in his or her life. With attention on the person, just like me, this person is learning about life.”
“Doesn’t that create equality across the entire human spectrum?” he asked. “What if our response is love and, in the midst of that response, we say, ‘Just like me, that person is attempting to find meaning and purpose in life.’ In that moment, fear subsides because, in that moment, you realize that person is just like you.”
Rasmus said he gets asked how St. John’s grew so quickly. When you ask people who come to St. John’s why they come and they keep coming back, the overwhelming answer is because they can feel the love, he said.
“Isn’t that a good reason to go to church?” he asked. “When we think about the power of unconditional love not only in our relationships with people we know, but in relationships with people we are meeting for the first time, I’ll tell you, it’s a powerful experience.”
C is for community.
Rasmus described two kinds of churches. The first are churches to the community. The well-meaning churches to the community decide in committee what the community needs without ever meeting anyone from the community to ask what they need.
The rest of the churches to the community are filled with people who drive in from the suburbs or who are all related to one another, and everything is fine as long as no one new tries to come in.
The second kind of church, churches with the community, have the best chance for eradicating poverty.
“You are literally making Christ incarnate in the fabric of that community by including the people in the community in the work of mission, blending in that moment people from different experiences,” Rasmus said. “It’s the hardest thing we do, to create an environment where everyone can play a part in the ministry of the church. We always find at the end of the week that it was well worth the effort.”
H is for hope.
“The H in TOUCH is hope for this world,” Rasmus said. “And you represent hope. Without your hands, your feet, your heart, yes, the world won’t change. And we’re all lost if you don’t do it.”
