Marks of Mission: Loving service

In our series looking at the Five Marks of Mission, Thomas Baldwin considers the third: to respond to human need by loving service

IF any of the Marks of Mission can be said to stand alone, it is the third one.

While the first two marks focus on evangelism and creating new believers, and the last two are mostly about campaigning for the kind of world that we wish to live in, the third is a practical call: to respond to human need by loving service.

To which the immediate response is ‘where to start’?

An exhaustive list could fill this magazine, but would have to include numerous church-based foodbanks, the Church’s work supporting Scotland’s poorest communities through the Priority Areas list, breakfast clubs and holiday clubs for children, youth projects, lunch clubs for isolated elderly people, drop-ins for people living with homelessness or addiction, and far too many other projects to count.

Even in the past two years, in the midst of pandemic, financial stress and organisational upheaval, new projects have sprung up. Just in the past six months Life and Work has reported on a new partnership supporting people with addiction and mental health problems in Wishaw, and a project supplying school uniforms and other necessities to hardpressed families in Falkirk.

Then there is the Church of Scotland Guild raising hundreds of thousands of pounds every three years for its partner projects, the response to appeals like the Let Us Build a House Campaign following the Nepal earthquake, and congregations’ support for organisations like Christian Aid, Tearfund and Mission Aviation Fellowship as well as smaller charities.

And the now-independent charities that started life as Church projects, such as the Vine Trust.

Taken altogether, surely no-one could argue with the Church of Scotland’s record when it comes to responding to human need, either at home or abroad, throughout its history.

But probably the most significant manifestation of the Church’s commitment to loving service is its own social care provider, now called CrossReach. Arising from the work of the same committee that would later begin Life and Work, CrossReach has been providing care in Christ’s name for over 150 years.

It is the largest non-statutory care provider in Scotland, and over 2000 people are helped through its various services every year.

That includes the care homes for the elderly, for which the organisation is

probably best known, but also a school for children who have dropped out of regular education; support for people coming out of prison; drug and alcohol rehabilitation services; counselling services for children and families; postnatal depression services; services for adults with learning disabilities, and much more.

The Rev Thom Riddell is the convener of the Social Care Council, which oversees CrossReach. He says that its work is ‘vital’ to the mission of the Church of Scotland:

“You could almost say it’s how the church demonstrates its faith in action. It’s very easy for us to become comfortable in our own skin when we’re ministering to those of us in our church or even in our parish, but [with CrossReach] we are reaching out to some of the most vulnerable people in society.

“We do an annual ‘volunteer recovery graduation’ where those that have been through our drug and alcohol rehabilitation service in Glasgow then get the opportunity to train up to be part of the support we give to others. They’ve lived through it, they’ve got lived experience, and they can then go through some training that we offer and then they graduate and some of them will go on to volunteer their services, and to me that’s such a powerful thing.

“We just had the graduation a couple of weeks ago, and the Moderator of the General Assembly put something on Facebook about how moved he was about the experience of seeing people saying things like ‘if I hadn’t come to Rainbow House I wouldn’t be here today, I’ve got my family back, I’ve got my life back’.

These are people right at the end of their expectations to whom we are able to offer loving, caring, non-judgemental service.”

Like the rest of the Church, CrossReach has come under increasing financial pressures over recent years, particularly during the pandemic which brought additional costs and restricted fundraising. However, Thom says it is vital that its work continues.

“We’ve been trying to get to break even for a few years now, but when things like Covid hit you that just knocks things into a cocked hat. We seek to be self-sustaining in our services, and the vast majority of our funding doesn’t come from the Church, it comes from those who commission our services -although we’re very grateful for the Church’s support, particularly during the last couple of years.”

However, Thom does say he would like CrossReach to have a higher profile among the Church: “If you ask most Church of Scotland people about CrossReach, they wouldn’t know a lot about it. I guess a lot of people would say we do the care homes, which is important but not the only thing we do.

“Taken altogether, surely no-one could argue with the Church of Scotland’s record when it comes to responding to human need, either at home or abroad, throughout its history.

“It’s one of the things we do wrestle with. CrossReach is the church’s charity in terms of its social work, and it doesn’t get the profile we would like it to have –I won’t say that it deserves, because it’s always difficult to say you deserve anything – but we believe if we’re working on behalf of the Church that that Church should be more aware of us.”

While CrossReach services are offered to people of all faiths and none, senior staff must have a Christian faith, and those in other roles are required to support the organisation’s Christian ethos. Thom argues that this is what makes the organisation distinctive, and that many people who use its services do end up coming to faith.

“It’s not our purpose to try and preach to them,” he says, “But through the actions we take and what we offer, people come to faith. People regularly say when they come into a CrossReach service that there’s something different. They might not be able to pin down what it actually is, but we believe it’s because we have a Christian ethos. We don’t treat the problem, we care for the person and through that we give them the support to get back on their feet.” ¤