The challenge for the first world church in the twenty-first century is to radically reform itself, such that people who are poor are not merely the subject of outreach efforts, but are found right at the heart of our worshipping communities, according to Greg Paul in his book The Twenty-Piece Shuffle: Why the Poor and Rich Need Each Other. Sadly, a great many churches have not even got to the point of doing the outreach. They’re too busy trying to figure out how to develop a more relevant and attractive worship style.
The book tells the fascinating stories of numerous characters from the author’s church community, Sanctuary, which serves the poor and marginalised in downtown Toronto. There are homeless people, drug addicts, sex workers, disabled people, office people and ordinary suburbanites all sharing together in the richly textured community.
Rather than adopting the triumphalist tone of an aid agency, spruiking the number of people served and saved and providing an address to send more donations, the author puts the failures and immense personal costs of street work front and centre. What began as a mission to serve the poor turned into a humbling journey in which the author learned how to accept friendship and ministry from the people he had set out to serve.
There are stories of amazing personal transformation, of people becoming followers of Jesus in the most unlikely ways, but these stories occur towards the end of the book, to avoid the impression that the author might be trying to claim credit for what God has been doing. This book definitely provides a compelling challenge to the prevailing concept of what a “church” should be.