Yoked in Grace: Becoming the Church With, Not For

In generations past, the local church was the center of social care in American communities. It wasn’t just a place for worship — it was the food bank, the shelter, the counselor, the advocate for the widow and the orphan. When people were hungry or alone or grieving, they didn’t call a hotline or file a form. They came to the church.

But over the past fifty years, as church attendance in America has steadily declined, something remarkable happened: the work of compassion didn’t disappear. It migrated.

The same decades that saw fewer people in pews saw the dramatic rise of the nonprofit sector. Organizations for low-income housing, food cooperatives, free clinics, and transitional housing programs blossomed — often rooted in faith-based ideals, yet increasingly secular in identity. These nonprofits stepped into the very spaces churches once filled: offering meals, dignity, and hope. In many cases, they became the new stewards of mercy.

This isn’t a story of failure. It’s a story of adaptation. Of a culture still hungry — sometimes desperately so — for justice, for healing, for belonging. And of churches, like ours, finding a new way forward.

The Mason Development Project was born in the fertile ground between grief and possibility. As a pastor in Tacoma, I heard stories of how our church building grew quiet even as the needs around us multiplied. But I also noticed something else: passionate neighbors, young activists, nonprofit workers, and weary parents showing up with questions that sounded a lot like the ones we ask in church. How do we house the unhoused? How do we break cycles of poverty? Who is my neighbor?

Rather than mourn the decline of the church’s public influence, we saw an invitation — to shift from performance to presence, from scarcity to stewardship, from separation to shared life. What if the nonprofit world wasn’t our competition but our congregation? What if we stopped trying to rescue, and started showing up to be restored — together?

I remember the first Sunday morning I woke up in our new parsonage at Mason. I had coffee in hand, boxes still unpacked, and I looked out the window at the church parking lot. It was 9:00 a.m. — and it was empty.

No cars. No people. No movement.

This was my new appointment. And I stood there, stunned, wondering, What did the Bishop do to me? But what felt like absence would become invitation. That silence was holy ground — the space where something new could take root.

It’s the space where I started to reimagine the church, not as a building trying to “bring people back,” but as a network of grace woven into the life of the city. Not the center of attention, but a yoked participant in the work of repair.

Jesus once said, “Take my yoke upon you…for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I used to picture myself as the ox, pulling hard while God steered from above. But a farmer told me, “Susan, most yokes aren’t made for one. They’re made for two.”

That changed everything. Because Jesus isn’t just giving us more work — he’s giving us shared work. Not isolation, but intimacy. Not hierarchy, but mutuality.

That’s the heart of the Mason Development Project: we all carry burdens, and we all carry one another. There is no “us and them.” Just neighbors. Just fellow travelers, yoked together in grace.

We’ve already begun to move into this vision. We’re in covenant with Mercy Housing to build affordable homes. We’re discerning partnerships with a childcare provider to serve local families. We’re dreaming with food justice networks like Good Roots. These aren’t transactions — they’re shared walks. Each one reaffirms that we are not landlords. We are stewards.

Last month, our church voted unanimously to open our sanctuary to musicians, rent-free. Not just to be generous — but to break the mindset of scarcity and claim abundance. It was a declaration: We are not building a community for others. We are building one with others.

This is what the gospel looks like when it wears work boots. It is signed in a lease, stirred into a soup pot, lived out on a Tuesday afternoon. It is what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Kingdom of God: not a throne of gold, but a table of welcome. A place where wagons are full not of shame, but of dignity. Not of judgment, but of belonging. Not of perfectionism, but of presence.

Housing needs. Mental health. Addiction recovery. Loneliness. These are the burdens people carry silently — until someone says, You don’t have to carry that alone.

At Mason, we’re not waiting for people to find their way back to church. We’re finding our way back to them. Not to reclaim power, but to practice presence. Not to rebuild the old model, but to embody something new — something rooted in a shared yoke, mutual support, and the belief that love still builds houses.

This is not the church as performance. This is not the church as brand. This is the church as communion. A gathering of the weary and the willing, carrying one another — in grace, in grit, in God.