I recently sat down with Matt Freeman, Spiritual Director for Mobile Loaves & Fishes Community First! Village, to discuss the challenges of building his ministry.
CC: So, tell me what’s going on right now with your ministry?
MF: God has called me to provide spiritual direction at Community First, which is a 27-acre master plan community that will ultimately lift about 250 people off the streets that are disabled and chronically homeless. My role is to create a mission that is Christ-centered that provides opportunities in environments for our friends who live here to know Christ personally, to grow spiritually and to serve passionately. For the last two years we’ve been laying the foundation, getting to know people. Currently, we have about 120 people living here. We’re right at 50% occupancy. Every person moving in here comes from, I shouldn’t say they come from, but they’re transitioning from the catastrophic loss of family. They’re dealing with the incredible hell of living on the streets without any sense of safety or security. They come here, and it’s a great opportunity to help them connect with God and Jesus on a very intimate, personal level.
CC: I may be wrong about a lot of things I ask you about, but it seems like there’s two common things with homelessness. One is being isolated, like you said, and the second is that many of the people you serve have or had drug and alcohol addictions. Is that fair?
MF: It is fair. I think one thing that we are very adamant about is that the solution to homelessness is not building a home, it’s creating a community. It’s what we all want. We all want to be known, we all want to be in a place where we are loved, cared for, accepted. Where our needs are being met, where there is a sense of safety and security. At Community First, I think the thing that I am continually seeing is people are hungry for being loved and being accepted because we’re talking about people who have been despised and rejected for years and years and years. The atmosphere out here is to accept people as Christ has accepted us, lavish love upon them, invite them into these environments that are safe and that are incredibly accepting and give them an opportunity to come face-to-face with this God that they know about but maybe don’t know personally. That’s the radical difference. We’re creating a community out here, not a housing movement.
The community, obviously, has to be Christ-centered. Because you can lift someone off the streets, give them every resource they need — a home, medical, dental, job opportunities — but if you don’t give them what is eternally significant, which is an opportunity to hear about Christ and be invited into this life-giving relationship with him, then I think we have not done our role in providing this sense of community.
CC: There’s going to be two hundred and something people living out here. Probably not all of them are believers, right? Do you get any resistance to the mission?
MF: Most people have heard the gospel. Most people would actually say, “I’ve heard about this God.” I think what I’m picking up on is people that are coming out of this environment where they have lost their family whether by their own doing or by the doing of family members who have rejected them or abandoned them, they come with a lot of baggage. I think most of the baggage is not against Christ, it’s against Christ followers. Being overlooked, being marginalized, being rejected and being oppressed and overlooked is the biggest thing that we deal with out here. To engage and to see them as Christ sees them, and to look at someone who smells bad and is dealing with all kinds of sorrow and hurt and loneliness and pain that sometimes they push you away, to see that as the bouquet of Christ and to be attracted to that, I think that represents the heart of Jesus. I think you asked a question earlier about addiction.
CC: Yeah and maybe a question about mental health would have been more appropriate.
MF: If we can reframe the paradigm to realize that it doesn’t matter if we’re resourced and we’re living in abundance or we’re under resourced and we’re lacking abundance. Every single one of us deal with either mental health issues or some form of addiction that we’re hiding behind, some façade that we’re presenting so that we can be accepted.
Out here, one of the things I absolutely love is just the utter transparency of our friends. They come and some of them don’t want to engage and it takes time. A lot of the transformation is over a period of time. We call it the slow work of God. Emphasis on slow. What you see is what you get. People will speak out. People will tell you if they don’t believe the Gospel. People will tell you they have questions about particular passages that you’re communicating or things you’re trying to teach.
I find that absolutely refreshing.
CC: You can’t fake it.
MF: You can’t fake it, man. There’s no façade out here. Sometimes people (volunteers, church members) come into this environment and step back and go, “Holy cow, I don’t think I’m worshiping in an authentic environment because I can’t speak out and ask those questions.” It causes people to assess where they are and how they’re processing their relationship with God.
There’s something beautiful. We like to say that Community First is a mission trip in the back yard of Austin because it gives people the opportunity to come into what really is a unique, missional environment. It’s holistic and it’s meeting lots of needs, but to confront the realities of how they’re living. We all know that the way we live sometimes is not real. It’s not transparent. We put up an image so that people will accept us. What I love about being out here is there’s no sense of image or identity we’re trying to protect.
CC: You’re saying the slow work of God with the emphasis on slow, but it sounds like you’re still seeing transformation happening.
MF: Yeah. It’s hard to assess. It’s hard to quantify but yeah, we’re seeing people respond and people come. We have environments again that are for large groups. We have environments that are more discipleship-oriented. We do events out here. I think that the challenge is to get people to come out because they’re not very trusting.
Again, a lot of that is the perceptions they have about Christ followers. Yeah, we’re seeing transformation. They’ve heard the Gospel a jillion times. They’ve heard about God but, generally speaking, what I’m seeing out here is that people really need to understand the nature and the character and the truth of God as it’s presented through the scriptures.
To be able to teach God’s Word in relevant ways and authentic ways and to be able to enter into that slow work of God requires a significant amount of patience. It requires just being willing to partner and develop relationships and friendship. That’s the game changer. When you have a friendship with people out here, you no longer see them as an individual who has an addiction. You don’t see the cause. You see them as family.
CC: I see what you’re saying. I know your personal story, but did you ever imagine yourself doing something like this? It feels like God totally rerouted you.
MF: Yeah, He did all that. I don’t think it’s a proverb but it probably should be: If you want to make God laugh, you just tell him your plan.
CC: Yeah, I’ve heard something like that before.
MF: Yeah, this is not scripted, man. It was just finding out where God’s working and joining Him in that work. I don’t think I could have written the script to say, “Wow, I envision myself doing something like this.” It’s entrepreneurship on steroids. I would call it Kingdom entrepreneurship on steroids. I think we’re engaged in a very, very, very unique expression of the Body of Christ and that jazzes me. That pumps me up.
CC: I think you’re the kind of person who gets bored when things are easy.
MF: Yeah.
CC: You draw towards what’s going to be almost impossible.
MF: Well, nothing is impossible with God but there are two types of people in ministry. There’s movers and there’s maintainers. I am definitely not a maintainer. I want to move with what God’s doing.
CC: You need both.
MF: Yeah, you do. That’s the beauty, man. The Body of Christ is so dynamic and it’s a tapestry. What’s ended up happening is the marginalized and oppressed, the people standing on the street corners that we look away from, I think those are the people that God is using to help us see the hypocrisy in some of the ways that we tend to operate.
I think when it gets down to it, if you look at the narrative in Luke, chapter 15, of the two sons, we as the church tend to identify, if we’re honest, with the older son. We think we’re deserving and we do all the right stuff and we’re the moral people who have our lives together. I think that’s where we miss out on the celebration.
If we see ourselves truly as broken and in desperate need of the Gospel and in desperate need of connecting with the Father, that I think is the real hero in that story. That’s again where the transformation takes place.
CC: Do you think pursuing that authenticity has made you more skeptical of ‘church’ as we normally do it? Do you feel like you’re more distanced from the typical brick and mortar church?
MF: I don’t even know, because if you look at the church globally, it’s again so unique and so diverse.
CC: What about a church like, say, Austin Ridge?
MF: I read this recently and I think it’s true. Jesus said, “Follow me,” not “Follow my people.” If we’re following Christ and we’re walking in the power of His spirit with a sense of humility and understanding our desperate need for the greatness of Jesus, I think we can’t help but appreciate the church in spite of the fact that every facet of the church is flawed because every single person who walks in the doors of the church is flawed, including the leaders.
I think one thing that’s helped me out here, and I think helped others out here that are serving and engaging, is people are hungry for authenticity. If we can share our stories of brokenness and communicate them with a genuine sense of concern as part of this relationship and the slow work of God, it tends to elevate the respect that people have for you. It has completely flipped the script for me and changed the paradigm of how I’ve done ministry.
CC: All right, last question. For our body, Austin Ridge, what are some ways that you’d like to see them be involved?
MF: Yeah. There’s a jillion opportunities at Community First. I won’t point them to the website that we have out here, but if people-
CC: Well, let me clarify. I see volunteers out here today planting bushes and whatever. I know there are lot of physical opportunities to serve. But what about some ways to invest spiritually?
MF: We have ongoing opportunities for the churches that have resources to come in and be willing to share with those who lack resources. Really, that’s the heartbeat of what we’re trying to mobilize out here. We meet every Sunday evening. We have small groups that are going on throughout the week. Really, most of the opportunities are ideal for small groups, for small groups to come out and bring food, for small groups to come out and help lead worship.
People that are engaged in community to participate with this community, not in a transactional way to check the box, but to say, “You know what? Man, this is a mission trip in the back yard of Austin and we need to engage here.” I think that’s what’s missing with a lot of small groups. It’s that missional outlet to realize that it’s not just about the community that’s developed inwardly but also outwardly.
People come out here and they get hooked. They realize, again, making that transition from transactional to relational, they start meeting the Bonnie’s and the Anthony’s and the Mike’s and the Danny’s and the Angie’s. They start meeting these people and getting to know them and hearing their stories.
CC: There’s something special out here.
MF: There’s something special going on, man. You can’t deny it. You sense it all around.
