Transform Dallas: A real chance to show real love to your city

Many are abandoning hope that what they care about will be addressed by anyone and their frustration is escalating. I believe God-adoring, people-loving, people-serving, proactive churches offer a remedy for the disillusionment people feel.

Wil McCall, Dallas Leadership Foundation President

Churches can help preempt troubled community networks in Dallas from becoming impassable schisms and prevent complicated problems from hardening into intractable issues. In other words, the work of faithful churches can affect generation after generation.

The Transform Dallas citywide community service workday on April 16, 2016 will demonstrate how local churches are willing to serve Dallas residents with humility and compassion in big and small ways. More than 5,000 volunteers are being recruited to work on over 100 day-long projects. Volunteers will serve meals to the homeless, make improvements to elementary school buildings, assemble and deliver care packages to hospitals, host carnivals and block parties for children, assist formerly incarcerated women, and paint houses for seniors and low-income families.

TransformDallas will represent the first time that Concord Church, Fellowship Bible Church, Friendship-West Baptist Church, Highland Park Presbyterian Church and Park Cities Baptist Church together with Dallas Leadership Foundation have teamed up to launch a community service event. Over 100 churches, corporations and community organizations also back this campaign. Our hope is that Transform Dallas will be the springboard to serving Dallas year-round and that it will become an annual event.

Churches are ready to tackle unyielding problems, such as the staggering murder rate in Dallas, which jumped 71 percent this year compared to 2015. This crisis provides an opportune moment for churches to serve as neighborhood partners with community leaders and law enforcement.

During Dallas Leadership Foundation’s 21-year history, we’ve learned that crime drops when committed partners work alongside neighborhood leaders. We’ve witnessed how building one-on-one relationships with love from doorstep to doorstep carry the power of transformation. For instance, in a three-year study we learned that from 2011 to 2014, the crime rate dropped by 41 percent in neighborhoods where DLF had been serving.

Transform Dallas will be an opportunity for churches to reach across racial, class and doctrinal lines with fresh diligence. When churches intentionally seek to eradicate, once and for all, false and wicked boundaries like race and class, the church operates as the solution source – the light – it’s called to be.

My hope is that the extensive workday opportunities on April 16 will encourage congregations to use their gifts creatively for the good of their neighbors. My prayer is that churches grasp the mind-blowing truth that they’re commissioned and empowered to do so.

If churches hammer away at the silos in communities, strongholds of hopelessness will shatter. Long-term, diverse community service efforts could transform our city for decades to come. With every breakthrough, the problems Dallas faces won’t appear as impossible to defeat, and churches will fulfill their sacred job description to express irresistible love from the inexhaustible heart of Jesus.

Wil McCall is the president of Dallas Leadership Foundation. To learn more about Transform Dallas, visit transformdallas.org.