Your church should care about other churches because the people watching from outside do not keep separate files. When someone is deciding whether Christ is worth following, a congregation that ignored its neighbors counts against the one down the street that fed them. Dr. Nicole Massie Martin, a senior mobilizer with American Bible Society, states the observation plainly: “they don’t see just one church. They see the church as a whole.” Cooperation between congregations is already part of what the church tells its city, whether the church intends it or not.
A healthy congregation will not welcome that claim, so it deserves examination before anyone accepts it. Who exactly is doing the generalizing? Is the generalization fair? And if it is unfair, why should a faithful church change how it operates because of it?
What are outsiders actually concluding?
Martin is describing people deciding whether God is worth their trust, and how they read the evidence in front of them. Her conclusion: “So when one church doesn’t engage in the community, they see all churches that way.”
Lisa Fields confirms the pattern from a different vantage point. Her work puts her in front of college students, and she reports that when students describe a bad church experience, “it’s the whole church that becomes the problem for them.” A student hurt in one congregation rarely concludes that one pastor failed. The student concludes that church, as a category, failed. Fields draws the consequence: “we represent each other as we go out.” In practice, your congregation’s reputation is partly held by people you have never met, and theirs is partly held by you.
Martin names the mechanism behind this. In her words, “there’s a narrative within the church that just carries your church name. But then there’s a narrative outside of the church.” Members tend to live in the first story. Skeptics, seekers and the recently hurt tend to live in the second. A congregation can win its internal story and still lose the external one, because every church in town is writing the external one at the same time.
Where does the “church only takes” story come from?
The outside narrative has specific versions. Fields names one: the claim, circulated by some voices in conscious-community spaces, that the church takes money out of the community and puts nothing back. She is blunt about it: “so many of the conscious community have put this false narrative out.” She also describes the follow-up objection she hears when someone points to the historic contributions of the Black church. People answer that churches did that kind of work back then and are not doing it now.
That objection deserves respect, because it is partly built from real experience. Some churches have taken from their neighborhoods and given little back. Some leaders have treated a congregation as a revenue source. A person who grew up under that kind of leadership did not invent the pattern. They generalized from evidence that was really in front of them.
The generalization is also partly fair for a reason churches rarely admit. Christians claim to be one body. Martin uses that language herself. An outsider who judges all churches by one is, in a sense, taking the church at its own word. If the body is one, a wound in one part is a wound in the body.
Where the generalization goes wrong, Fields locates the error carefully. Speaking to people who have left, she says: “And maybe the church you were involved in wasn’t doing anything, but that’s not the case for every church.” Her answer leaves the person’s experience standing. What she refuses is the step from one institution’s conduct to a verdict on every congregation, and from there to a verdict on the faith that institution claimed to represent. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Holding both halves of that sentence protects the person who was wounded and the integrity of the gospel at once. It also hands other churches a job. If one church’s failure is not Christ’s failure, the difference has to become visible, and a hurt person whose evidence is personal is rarely persuaded by argument alone.
Why did Martin stop thinking in terms of her church’s brand?
Martin did not start with this view. She spent about twelve years in church ministry, and she is candid about her assumption during that time: “when I was on staff, I really did believe that my church was responsible for our church brand.” The word brand is revealing. A brand belongs to a competitor in a market. It is protected, set apart from rivals and measured against them.
Working across churches changed her frame. When congregations show care together for the people they serve, she says, “we shift the narrative for the whole church, not just our church brand.” She then gives the alternative identity: “We’re not just one church. We are the Church of Charlotte, the Church of Kansas City.”
The shift has a practical edge. If each congregation is a brand, another church’s success is a threat and another church’s failure is an opportunity. If each congregation belongs to the church of a city, another church’s failure becomes your problem, and another church’s success strengthens your witness. Martin frames the public test as a question the city is asking: “are we only caring about ourselves or are we caring about really the things that God cares about.”
She heard the same verdict from someone with no stake in church growth. At a Movement Day panel of city leaders in Charlotte, someone asked what the church could do to support their work. The answer came from the panelist Martin believes was the city’s police chief: “what the church can do to help the police is to collaborate and not compete.” A civic leader looking at the church from outside saw competition as the problem. That is the external narrative speaking for itself.
What does Jesus’ prayer in John 17 actually ask for?
Martin roots the case in Scripture as well as observation: “I think John 17 tells us we do this so that we can be a witness so that God can be glorified, so that we can embody what it means that we are one body manifested in different ways.”
The passage supports the connection she makes. John 17 is Jesus’ prayer on the night before his death. At verse 20 he widens the prayer beyond the disciples in the room to those “which shall believe on me through their word,” which includes every later generation of believers. Then John 17:21 gives the request: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”
Three observations follow from the text. First, the unity has a pattern. It is modeled on the relationship between the Father and the Son, so it is relational before it is organizational. Jesus is praying for something deeper than a merged denomination. Second, the unity has an audience. The world is watching, and what it sees bears on whether it believes. John 17:23 repeats the point: “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” Third, the unity has content. What the world is meant to believe is that the Father sent the Son.
That third observation raises the stakes of Martin’s argument. Read quickly, her point could sound like reputation management on a citywide scale. John 17 ties the church’s visible unity to whether people believe in Jesus himself. Earlier in the same prayer, at John 17:17, Jesus asks the Father to “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” The unity he prays for is unity among people being shaped by the same word, which already sets a limit on what cooperation can ask of anyone.
Doesn’t cooperation mean pretending differences don’t matter?
This is the strongest objection, and Martin treats it as a real cost. In Charlotte, she says, the dividing lines are doctrinal and sometimes political. Her approach with American Bible Society is to find partners willing, at least for a particular issue, to set aside divisive matters for the sake of what unites them. In one project on building racial trust through Scripture engagement, participants had to check some political views at the door. For some people the issue was guilt, and for others it was “some anger that doesn’t need to be dismissed.” It only had to be suspended long enough to begin the conversation.
She is honest that this has limits in both directions. On one side, “there are times when my view is strong enough that it needs to be brought out and it needs to be discussed, and maybe we’ll see some change there.” On the other, deferring an issue has consequences. When Movement Day began, some leaders insisted that their issue be addressed in the first year. The organizers judged it too divisive for that stage, and some leaders left, unwilling to stay in at all if their issue went unaddressed. Martin’s summary: “unity work always comes with a cost.”
Some readers will see a danger here. Deferring a hard issue can become a polite way of never addressing it, and the people asked to wait are often those with the most at stake. Martin offers no formula for deciding which issues wait and which cannot. She offers an admission that the judgment is costly and that people of good faith will sometimes walk away over it.
Fields supplies the boundary that keeps the judgment from collapsing into indifference. She holds that some non-essential issues should not divide believers, and she also says, “I know there’s some things we have to hold onto as essentials.” On the essentials, the church speaks with one voice: the authority of Scripture, the deity and humanity of Jesus, the Trinity, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith. On secondary matters, faithful Christians have always disagreed, and that is no crisis. Cooperation across congregations surrenders nothing on the first list. It asks only that differences on the second should not stop a Baptist congregation and a Methodist one from building something together for their neighbors.
Does cooperation change the story, or just the publicity?
Martin’s evidence comes from her own city and her own work, and it should be read that way: a participant’s reports, not a citywide study. Two of her examples still answer the objection Fields raised, that churches did community work in the past but not now.
The first is a seniors community center being built by three churches in the same neighborhood, one Presbyterian, one Baptist and one United Methodist, who decided to pool their resources instead of each trying to figure it out alone. For the outside narrative, that is the opposite of the church taking from the community. It is three institutions that might have competed for the same families putting money into a building that serves people who may never join any of them.
The second is smaller. Fifteen churches read the same New Testament passages on the same days. One woman who missed her own church’s Bible study found another church within five miles reading the same text, joined them and told Martin she had never seen churches in one area on the same page like that. Her reaction is the external narrative changing in real time. She had expected separate congregations and found one church of a city.
The partnerships Martin describes also cross lines a skeptic might not expect, including an AME Zion church working with a Lutheran one. The Black church is not a single body with a single history. It spans several denominations and a range of theological positions, and it partners with churches outside its own traditions. A skeptic who treats every church as one undifferentiated institution is working with a thinner picture than the actual city provides.
Martin does not overstate the case: “In fact, no church is perfect, but when we put the narratives together, we see that churches are coming together to build buildings in Charlotte.” That is the right size of claim. Cooperation cannot erase what a particular church did wrong, and it should never be used to talk a hurt person out of what happened to them. What it can do is add evidence to the public record, so the story outsiders tell is built on more than the church’s worst examples. She is realistic about failure as well: “you might collaborate on one area and fail in another.” Then she asks the question that decides whether cooperation lasts: “But how often will we get back up and try the collaboration again?”
Where does a congregation start?
Martin’s advice is to start with relationships a pastor already has. She borrows an image from Exodus 4:2, where the LORD asks Moses, “What is that in thine hand?” The passage concerns Moses’ staff and God’s commission to him, so applying it to church partnerships is an analogy rather than the text’s own meaning. The analogy fits her point. Most pastors already know the pastor across the street, a friend from seminary, someone in their network. The partnerships she describes began when one pastor suggested lunch.
The deeper change is in the question a congregation asks about itself. A church concerned only with its own name asks whether people think well of it. A church that reads John 17 has to ask whether the churches of its city, taken together, give a watching neighbor any reason to believe that the Father sent the Son. No congregation can answer that one alone.