With today’s economic climate, we want and need to know how our money is being spent.Mortgage and tuition? Health insurance, food and clothing? And how are charities spending the dollars we donate to them? Under close scrutiny, churches, nonprofits, businesses and organizations are feeling the demand for accountability. 
 

Breaking Ground

Cherry Hills Community Church belongs to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), which is dedicated to helping Christian nonprofits comply with biblical standards of financial accountability. That includes transparency, integrity in fund-raising and the proper use of resources. Collectively, the ECFA members represent more than $18 billion in annual revenue. Cherry Hills is reviewed annually.

To see how our tithes and offerings are spent, we need only look around us: at the maintenance of a state-of-the-art facility that hosts over 30,000 events a year, relevant classes and programs for children and adults, and the support of a dynamic and dedicated staff. The Missions & Outreach department is nationally known for its short-term mission trips and the partnerships it fosters right here in the inner city. And more than 1,100 students attend Cherry Hills Christian Schools.

Building the Blessing

Over the last decade, many of us contributed to the Building on Blessing Stewardship Campaign at Cherry Hills, but how was that money spent? In this age of financial accountability, let’s take a look.

On February 13, 2000, the members of Cherry Hills approved the campaign of $9,000,000 to finish the balcony, remodel the downstairs bathrooms and to fund the Atrium Project. Two months later the congregation agreed to increase those funds to $9,450,000 in order to give $50,000 of each $1,000,000 raised to our urban church partners.

After the balcony and bathrooms were complete, construction of the Atrium began in June 2005. We watched the temporary wall go up in the Main Lobby, wrote prayers on construction sticks that were planted at the groundbreaking ceremony and celebrated the opening of the Atrium with an elegant candle-lit gathering.

 

Denver Skyline

The money designated for our urban partners grew to $500,000, which went to churches and ministries including: Anchor of Hope Church, New Life in Christ Church, Joshua Station, His Love Fellowship Church, Denver Street School, Denver Youth for Christ, Victory Ventures, Streets Hope, Prodigal Gatherings, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Camp Id Ra Ha Je, Angel Tree Prison Ministry, and the list goes on.

Those dollars also purchased the copies of Rick Warren's 40 Days of Purpose for our joint book study with our urban partners, they supported the health and emotional care of their pastors, and they helped a new ministry get women in the sex-for-sale trade off the streets. They built the foundation of a Thanksgiving Dinner outreach, bought school supplies for children, and purchased grocery gift cards for inner city ministry staff during lean times.

Scum of the Earth

If we scrutinize even more, we see that the Building on Blessing money brought significant change to one other ministry – one originally directed toward "punks" identified by their spiked-hair, black clothing and make-up, and the dog collars they wear around their necks. They are the Scum of the Earth, a church affectionately called “Scum" by the people who worship there. These days the "punks" worship alongside college kids, college professors and a variety of other people.

This congregation comes with its challenges: drug-addiction, alcoholism, abuse and the belief that God just isn’t going to be there for the likes of them. Drifting from church to church, they'd been rejected because their pierced noses, cheeks, lips and tongues didn’t fit in with regular Sunday morning attire. Eventually the kids found Mike Sares, who was pastoring singles at a suburban church. "These kids are the left-out and the right-brained," Mike says of his congregation, which affectionately calls him Scum Daddy. “The church is led by young people,” he says, “I’m merely the shepherd.” The young co-pastors raise their own support while serving at Scum, which has no members. The kids feel this practice excludes and offends their peers.

 

Scum of the Earth

Coming from a subculture that is rarely recognized for its Christian practices, the kids wanted to remain separate from mainstream houses of worship. They wanted to call their church Scum of the Earth. “But I was uncomfortable with that,” Mike says, “I kept telling myself, ‘don’t let them do it.’ I made them pray about it. I told them to find something from Scripture, and they came back to me with I Corinthians 4:11-13,”

To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. (NIV)

Old Guys

Infused with unconditional love, Scum appeals to kids living on the fringes of society, but not everyone who attends Scum is young. There are a few middle-class, middle-aged Christians worshiping alongside these kids who are trying to find Jesus Christ somewhere in their world.

One such Christian is Craig Blomberg, scholar and distinguished professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary, and a frequent teacher at Cherry Hills’ Men of Adventure Bible Study. While at seminary, Scum Daddy had studied under Craig and knowing what a powerful teacher he was, asked him to work with Scum’s young leaders on their theological questions. He has also spoken to the congregation about the trustworthiness of Scripture. Craig’s Q and A sessions went on for several years, and he and his wife Fran have been mentors. Elizabeth Yoder and her husband Forrest, members of Cherry Hills, also attend services. It took a full year for her to gain their trust, but today Elizabeth hosts many of the young women in her home for Bible study.

Scum services can be unpredictable. After dinner there might be “story night,” when personal stories, often very painful, are shared within Scum’s safe walls. “We’re usually rated PG,” Mike says, “but sometimes we're rated R.”

 

Kitchen Floor

One example of unpredictability comes from a short series on Colossians. The Apostle Paul greets a variety of people and makes miscellaneous comments about his travel plans. “How in the world do you preach that?” Craig asks and then answers. “One of the younger staff started out with a clip from a movie about zombies. I don’t know much of anything about zombies," he says, "but a lot of the people there do. I learned that when a zombie attack on a community is impending, the only successful way to ward off the zombies is for the community to unite, and throw off its discord, and to stand in harmony against these creatures from the dead.”

Mike once preached on Joshua and the story of Rahab. In preparation, he googled the word prostitute and then told his congregation that he’d avoided all the bad sites, but did find one that, as far as he could tell, was absolutely serious. It was a how-to website. Twenty tips that a long time prostitute was giving young women first coming into the profession. Mike read selected tips and then said he knew there were a couple of women in the congregation with the same background, maybe even more, and then contrasted their lifestyle with Rehab’s.

Scum is blessed with many good musicians, vocal and instrumental, who provide a significant time of singing. They sing songs with powerful and challenging lyrics written by the kids, contemporary praise songs, traditional hymns, “We’ve even sung Victory in Jesus,” Craig says, “a good, down-home Southern gospel. So there really is a little something for everyone.”

But the centerpiece of the service continues to be the sermon. “Mike is very generous with his pulpit, or actually I should say music stand, for that is all we have, and I hope that is all we will keep,” says Craig.

 

Front Door

“The messages are solidly, scripturally based. But what really stand out are the illustrations, applications and creative uses of media. There's power point, art and music, and film clips such as the zombies, which that population knows and can relate to, but which I may need somebody to explain to me,” Craig laughs.

Growing Up

In its infancy, Scum of the Earth met at a coffee house and then moved to Sunday evening services at Church in the City near Colfax and Josephine. Eventually they needed to find a new location: a place of their own.

When they started searching for a church building to buy, they knew they were going to need financial help. Passing the Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets for Sunday offerings had brought in some money, but they would need much more.

Scum of the Earth and Cherry Hills originally connected in 2003, when we were brought together by Reese Roper, Scum's young, founding co-pastor, and his mother, Ruth White. Ruth was the director of the Discover the World missions program at Cherry Hills. Teamed up for the first of multiple short-term mission trips to Lame Deer, Montana, we prayed for the kids, for their health and success and acceptance on the reservation. And when they needed our financial help, they received $50,000 from our Building on Blessing campaign. Combined with contributions from several other suburban churches and organizations, they bought a 128-year-old church building located at 935 W. 11th Avenue in Denver.

The church is as colorful as the people who worship inside it. The previous owner, a premier Denver artist, hung motorized mobiles of spaceships and satellites from the ceiling, painted collages, and covered the walls with mosaics of fantastic landscapes. There is color everywhere, including the bathrooms, which are magical works of mosaic art. Paintings by the artists of Scum are beginning to appear in the sanctuary.

 

Scum Daddy Mike Sares

Do the Scum of the Earth know that suburban churches love them? Do they know that we pray for them and want to support them in their growing faith? “They do now,” Mike answers. “They are very aware of what happened,” Mike says, “and they don’t stereotype suburban churches much anymore.” Those who worship at Scum have been encouraged by our story, how open Cherry Hills is to the city.

Scum is open to the city, too. In addition to their Scum Bicycle Factory where anyone can come and repair their bikes, and their Sunday dinner ministry, they are planning on adding Sunday morning services and a nursery, looking for opportunities to plant new churches and reaching out to the “poorer piece of homeless” that lives around them.

Scum Daddy wants us to know that the city of Denver still needs us, and not just our money. “Young adults here are looking for mature adults to answer their questions,” he says, “questions they can’t ask their parents.”

Jim Dixon, Cherry Hills' senior pastor, has great compassion for the inner city; he mentions it in his sermons quite often. We can anticipate that future capital campaigns will allocate a portion for our church partners, keeping Cherry Hills accountable in the eyes of God, supporting the churches of the city and blessing the scum of the Earth.

For more information on Scum of the Earth, visit www.scumoftheearth.net.