Serving With People, Not at Them: How Churches Should Serve the Poor

Picture a church service project. A group shows up in matching T-shirts, hands out bags of groceries, takes a few photos, and drives home feeling good. The people who got the groceries go back inside feeling something else. They were grateful for the food, and they also felt like a project.

Everyone in that parking lot sensed the arrangement, and nobody said a word about it.

I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about how churches should serve the poor, mostly with grease on my hands. I direct the Garage at our church, Living Faith, where volunteers fix cars for neighbors who can’t afford the repair. The most important thing I’ve learned there has nothing to do with brakes or budgets. It’s about posture.

Charity from above

There’s a way of helping people that does them harm without anyone meaning it to. In our book we call it charity from above. The helper stands on higher ground, hands aid down to “the less fortunate,” and walks away feeling generous. The person he helped walks away feeling small.

That posture is not the gospel. And it’s more than a feelings problem, because it damages the relationship before it starts and it teaches the helpers something false about themselves.

So what’s the correction? Every Christian came to God bankrupt, with our bill paid by someone else. A Christian serving a neighbor isn’t a have helping a have-not. He’s one beggar showing another beggar where the bread is, or one patient walking another patient down a hallway he was carried down himself.

We serve with people, not at them. Their dignity isn’t some courtesy we extend; we’re just recognizing a fact.

Get the posture right and a lot becomes possible. Get it wrong and no amount of activity will cover it.

What “with” looks like on a work night

On a work night at the Garage, the car on the lift gets fixed for real. But the repair isn’t the main event.

The woman waiting on that car isn’t a case file. She’s at the table drinking coffee with a volunteer who’s learning her name, her kids’ names, and how things got this tight. Nobody has to sit through anything religious to get their brakes fixed. That would just be the old bad charity with a new coat of paint.

As trust grows, she’ll usually ask the question almost everyone gets around to: Why do you people do this?

One of our elders gets asked that a lot, and his honest answer goes something like this. He’s received a lot of grace in his own life. There were times he couldn’t pay his bills, and someone stepped in. “This isn’t really charity in the distant sense,” he says. “It’s what neighbors do. Someone helped me as a friend, so I want to help you as a friend.” And behind all of it, God started the whole chain by helping us in ways we could never help ourselves.

Look at what that answer does. It puts the helper and the helped on the same level, both of them receivers of grace, and that’s the posture I’m talking about.

Many people who’ve heard some version of that answer now volunteer at the Garage themselves.

Three spans of a bridge

If you’re a church leader trying to figure out outreach, this is the pattern we’ve seen hold up. The gospel travels across relational bridges, and a bridge has three spans.

Presence. You have to be somewhere, and keep being there. One event builds nothing. Showing up for months and years is what earns you the right to be heard.

Genuine care. People have sensitive radar for whether they’re a person or a project, and they’ll read you in a matter of minutes. You can’t fake this, so don’t try. Just care about them.

Honest faith. When the relationship is real, the gospel comes up on its own. It doesn’t come as a pitch or a condition of service. It comes as the true answer to a sincere question.

That’s why we don’t mainly invite unchurched neighbors to church events. We build spaces around something real, like cars or food or a garden, and the Christians in the room genuinely love the people they meet. Friendship comes first.

This is how the early church won the Roman Empire. In the 360s, the emperor Julian tried to revive the old pagan religion and couldn’t figure out why it kept losing. He wrote to one of his priests and complained that the Christians, whom he called Galileans, were out-loving his people.

Serving changes the servers, too

It took us years to see this part. Outreach isn’t only something the church does for the community. God is doing something in the church through it, too.

One of our elders admits that nothing shows him his own selfishness faster than a repair that takes way longer than it should, or work that stops being fun. In those moments he has to ask why he’s really serving. If he only serves when it’s easy or when he gets credit, his motives aren’t pure.

You can’t get that lesson from a sermon alone. You learn patience when the job goes sideways, and humility when you don’t know what you’re doing, and you learn to keep your word when staying late costs you something. James says to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22), and I think this is part of why.

There’s a lift in our Garage with a teenager’s handprint in the concrete. He started volunteering at twelve, holding flashlights. Six years later he was leading the pre-work devotions and recruiting his friends. No program discipled him. Serving real neighbors did, alongside mentors who took him seriously.

Questions to ask about your church’s serving

If you lead or serve in a church ministry, try these with your team:

• Do the people we serve know our names, and do we know theirs?
• Is anything about our help conditional, even subtly?
• Would the people we serve describe us as neighbors or as a program?
• Are we showing up consistently, or doing occasional events?
• Are the people we serve ever invited to serve alongside us?
• Are our volunteers growing, or just busy?

You don’t need a bigger budget for any of those. You need a different posture.

We tell the Garage story in full in Under the Hood. This piece comes from Living the Lord’s Prayer, where we put it inside the bigger picture of praying “give us this day our daily bread.”

If you want to start somewhere small, find a ministry that serves people you’d never otherwise meet. Go once. Hold the flashlight and learn one name, and then go back.