Most congregations answer the question of economic ministry before they ask it. We’re too small. We don’t have the money. That’s for megachurches. This guide asks you to set that answer aside long enough to check it. Its central practice is an asset walk: a slow, specific inventory of what your church already holds, set beside what your neighbors actually need. You can do it alone with a notebook, or as a small group or leadership team over two or three meetings. By the end, you should be able to name at least one thing your church has, one need it could meet, and one honest next step.
The model comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation in which Lisa Fields sat down with Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin, founder and pastor of The Potter’s House International Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida. By his own account, his church now owns a mall, a school and restaurants. None of that is where he began. He described the start this way: “My wife and I started our food and clothing ministry out of the trunk of our car. We would buy some groceries.” This guide begins where he began.
Start with your guess
Before you walk anything or read anything else, write down what you believe your church has to offer its neighborhood economically. Give yourself three minutes. Don’t edit. If your honest answer is “nothing,” write that.
Then write a second, shorter list: what you believe the people within a mile of your building need most. Fold the paper and set it aside. You’ll come back to it at the end. In a group, people can keep their lists private. The point is to have a record of your starting assumptions so you can see later whether the walk changed them.
Count what is actually there
Read Mark 6:34-44 slowly. A crowd is hungry in a remote place. The disciples want Jesus to send people away to buy food. Jesus answers with a command they don’t expect, and then a question: “How many loaves have ye? go and see. And when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes” (Mark 6:38).
Notice three things before you draw any lesson. First, the disciples had already decided the problem was beyond them. Second, Jesus does not ask them to imagine resources. He sends them to count what is actually there. Third, the count was small, and Jesus did not treat it as a reason to stop.
This is narrative. It describes a miracle; it doesn’t hand churches a method or promise that your five loaves will multiply. Read it as a picture of the posture Jesus asked of his disciples, not as a guarantee. What the passage does show plainly is that the first step was finding out.
Now read two passages Bishop McLaughlin named as the ground of his ministry.
Matthew 25:31-46 is the scene of judgment where the Son of Man identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner: “Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36). McLaughlin told Lisa Fields his church “used Matthew 25 as our basis,” and his advice to small churches followed the passage’s list: start with the hungry, start with the jail. Christians read “the least of these my brethren” in verse 40 in more than one way, some as Jesus’s needy disciples and some as anyone in need. Either way, the passage won’t let faith stay indifferent to bodies.
Luke 10:1-9 records Jesus sending out the seventy. Read verses 5-9 and mark the order of what they are told to do. They bless the house, stay and eat what is set before them, heal the sick, and then say, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you” (Luke 10:9). McLaughlin reads a sequence here and draws out the middle step especially: “You find out what the needs are, you find out where the pain is, you find out where the trouble is.” That is an application of a specific mission to the church’s ongoing life, and it’s a reasonable one. The messengers listened at someone’s table before they announced anything.
Observation prompt: In Mark 6 the disciples count their own supply. In Luke 10 the messengers learn what their hosts need. Which of those two steps does your church tend to skip?
What the trunk of a car actually teaches
The easy lesson from McLaughlin’s story is “start small.” The more useful lesson is in how he described what came next. “So what you do is you assess the needs of your community,” he said. His church did free auto repairs, free home repairs and lawn services. “We would assess the needs of our community and physically just go out and do what we could until we befriended the community.”
Look at the order. The groceries weren’t a business plan. They were a way of meeting people, and meeting people produced the knowledge that later shaped bigger decisions. Lisa Fields named the principle underneath it: “you work with the community to gain their trust because you have to have the trust of the community.” An inventory of assets that never meets an inventory of needs is just a list of furniture.
McLaughlin also said something about himself that bears directly on the guess you wrote down. He didn’t enter a church until he was 26. “So I didn’t know what I couldn’t do.” Many congregations carry an inherited sense of limits that no one has examined. The asset walk is partly a way of testing those limits against what is really in the building.
Finally, he insisted the starting point is a neighborhood, not a vacancy. Warning against planting a church wherever a building is available, he said, “Because you need to have a burden for a community.” And again: “You can’t serve within the community and not serve the community.” The walk below has two halves for that reason.
The asset walk
Set aside an hour for the first half and a week for the second. If you’re in a group, pair people up so no one walks alone and so two sets of eyes see different things.
- Walk the property with a clipboard. Go room by room, including the places nobody visits. Write down every space and when it sits empty: a kitchen used twice a month, classrooms empty Monday through Saturday, a parking lot unused on weekdays, a fellowship hall, a van. Note condition honestly. A space that needs repair is still a space.
- List the things. Tables, folding chairs, sound equipment, a commercial refrigerator, a copier, computers, a sewing machine someone donated years ago. Small items count.
- List the time. Which hours of the week is the building open and staffed? Which are dark? Unused hours are an asset too.
- List skills, by invitation only. Ask members, without pressure, what they know how to do: bookkeeping, plumbing, hair, cooking at volume, résumé writing, tutoring, driving, teaching, small-business experience. No one should feel obligated to volunteer anything. Record only what people offer.
- List relationships. Who in the congregation works at the school down the street, the hospital, the county office, a local business? Which other ministries nearby already run a food pantry or a jail ministry?
- Now walk the neighborhood. Over the following week, take the second half seriously. Eat at a local place. Talk with a shop owner, a school secretary, a neighbor on the block. Ask what is hard here and what is missing. Listen more than you explain. Write down what you hear in people’s own terms.
- Draw lines. Put your two lists side by side. For each need you heard, ask whether anything on the asset list could meet part of it this month, with no new money. Circle the strongest match.
Keep the result modest. One circled match is a good outcome. McLaughlin’s own summary fits here: “It has to start somewhere.”
Test the list before you act on it
A good inventory raises harder questions. Work through these before anyone announces a new ministry.
Is this charity, or does it change someone’s week?
McLaughlin drew a sharp line between giving things away and giving people work: “So employing our people, it’s not giving ’em a fish, it’s giving ’em a job.” He estimated that around a quarter of the staff at the bistro where he spoke with Lisa Fields had been formerly incarcerated, people other employers would not hire. Both kinds of help are good. They are different tools. Look at your circled match and ask which kind it is, and whether a later version could move from one toward the other. Then name the person in your neighborhood who would be hardest to hire, and ask honestly whether your church would hire them.
Are we competing or joining?
McLaughlin urged smaller churches not to build everything alone: “Don’t compete with the next person down the street,” and “You might need to hook up with somebody” who already has systems in place. If your neighborhood walk found a pantry or a reentry program already working, your best asset might be volunteers, a space or a van offered to them.
What could go wrong?
McLaughlin told a candid story about his church’s federal credit union, which he said was started to teach saving and money management. During the 2008 recession, people came to borrow instead. When borrowers couldn’t repay, he said, some stopped coming to church because they owed money, and the church closed it. The lesson isn’t that churches should avoid economic work. It’s that some forms of help change the relationship between a congregation and the people it serves. Ask of any idea: does this make us someone’s creditor, landlord or boss? If so, what protects the pastoral relationship?
Who benefits?
McLaughlin was emphatic that he draws only a church salary and that the enterprises exist for others. Whatever your church builds, the money and the credit should flow outward. If an idea mostly improves the church’s image or budget, test it again.
One more honest note: Scripture calls the church to material care for neighbors, but it doesn’t command every congregation to own businesses. Some churches will. Some will partner. Some will teach a budgeting class, which McLaughlin noted needs little money: “It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to do that.” Your inventory should point to what fits your church, not to his.
Questions for discussion
- What did the walk turn up that you had walked past for years? Why do you think it had been invisible?
- Which was harder for your group, counting assets or hearing needs? What does that tell you about how your church usually decides what to do?
- Read Luke 10:5-9 again. Where in your neighborhood could your church sit at someone else’s table before offering anything?
- Look at your circled match. Is it charity, employment, teaching or partnership? What would a next step toward something more lasting require, and from whom?
- The credit union story shows help changing a relationship. Which of your ideas carries that kind of risk, and how would you guard against it?
- What limit on your church had you accepted without testing? Does it still hold after the walk?
If you are leading this
Run the property walk and the neighborhood walk as separate meetings so the listening isn’t rushed. Keep the skills list strictly voluntary, and never ask anyone in the group to disclose their own finances, employment or past. Some members may carry debt, a record or a job loss they’d rather not discuss, and the guide works without that. When the neighborhood walk surfaces pain, resist the urge to solve it on the spot. Write it down, thank the person, and bring it to the group. Bring your one circled match to your pastor or leadership as a question, not a plan.
Back to your folded paper
Open the lists you wrote at the start. Compare your guess about your church’s resources with what the walk found, and your guess about your neighbors’ needs with what they told you. Where were you right? Where were you wrong, and in which direction?
Then carry one of McLaughlin’s questions into the week, because it measures a church by the neighborhood rather than the building: “What happens if you were to leave your community?” If the honest answer today is that few people would notice, the walk has shown you where to begin.