Who are ‘everyday people’?
/Twenty-five years ago, in the Christmas school holidays, I joined a Scripture Union Family Mission (SUFM) travelling to the small regional town of Gunnedah, in Central New South Wales, Australia.
If you’ve been to Central New South Wales in January, you’ll know it can be incredibly hot – regularly over 40°C (more than 100°F). Those who are able to travel seek relief on the coast where they can enjoy a pleasant sea breeze.
The Family Mission gave us a wonderful opportunity to run holiday activities for those left behind in the Gunnedah heat. More importantly, it gave us the opportunity to share our hope in Jesus with them.
As it always does, the gospel bore fruit. People gave their lives to Jesus.
But there was a problem.
Despite all our efforts, some of these families really struggled to integrate into a local church. Why did this happen? People in the churches were friendly and welcoming. It just didn’t make sense.
Many years later, one of the SUFM team leaders married a Christian truck driver. They visited one of the families that had struggled to become part of a local church in Gunnedah. The family expressed surprise when they met him, saying, ‘He’s just like us!’
He was possibly the first Christian they had met who was ‘just like them’.
A blind spot revealed
When I heard this story, the penny dropped. This family had struggled to join a church because there was no one else like them there.
And as I looked around at other churches in Sydney and beyond, I suddenly found myself seeing what I had never seen before. Most of the people in church were ‘just like me’. They’d been to university. They were what our world calls ‘professionals’.
God had begun the process of opening my eyes to a blind spot. Our churches are missing a significant group of people in our community – a group of people whom the Family Mission in Gunnedah was reaching, but the churches were struggling to welcome and disciple.
Everyday people
Who are these people whom we’ve failed to see and who are largely missing from our churches?
I use the phrase ‘everyday people’ to refer to the ordinary men and women in our community who, unlike many in our churches, went straight into the workforce from school.
They are a large and diverse group of people. They might be hairdressers, plumbers, truck drivers, factory workers or sales assistants.
They are a group primarily categorised not by their socio-economic status but by their education. They don’t have a university degree.
Some have formal qualifications obtained through TAFE (vocational tertiary education) and can be very wealthy, like some builders or concreters.
Others have no formal qualifications and have learned their skills on the job – for example, truck drivers and factory workers.
Some might be working two or three jobs and still struggling to pay the bills. Some may not have a full-time job, or may be unemployed.
How many people are we talking about?
When a group in our society has been overlooked or missed, we might expect to find that it is a relatively small group. But this is not the case.
In fact, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, everyday people make up 74% of the Australian population 15 years and older.
But they are far from making up 74% of people in our Reformed evangelical churches – both in Australia and around the world.
It is shocking to consider that we may have been blind to such a large unreached people group living in our midst.
A first step: investigate the problem
I have devoted the past 14 years to understanding how we’ve got here and what we can do to change this trend. May I encourage you also to give this some thought?
There are many things that Reformed evangelical churches do very well: preaching the gospel, teaching the Bible and refuting heresy, to name a few.
But there is a great weakness in reaching and discipling the ordinary, everyday person. And it’s not a new problem.
It’s a problem that led men like Wilson Carlile (founder of the Church Army) and William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army) to start their own missions to reach the many lost everyday people missing from their Reformed churches in England in the late 1800s.
I am grieved that today, many everyday people still feel like second-class citizens in Reformed evangelical churches, resulting in many of them sitting on the fringes of our church communities or dropping out of them altogether.
I am convinced that this is not God’s intention.
God loves all people equally. He does not show favouritism. He has given every believer gifts for the growth and strengthening of the church.
And if we are to honour God in our lives and glorify him in our churches, we must make time to investigate this problem.
This article is one of a series that I’ve written about making disciples of ‘everyday people’.
It can be read on its own, but if you’d like to gain a greater understanding of how my thoughts around this important topic have developed, you may wish to read the full series of articles in order.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™