“A lot of people do want to come here because they can afford a house, but a lot of people want out,” Scott says. “It feels a lot like a military town. People get here, they get their house and get established, and as soon as they get a chance, they’re gone. So we don’t have a booming population, and economically we’re not a strong community. We have a lot of empty storefronts. Thirty years ago, it was a sleepy little retirement town. That’s really changed. There’s way more crime and gang-related stuff in our valley now.”

These facts make it all the more remarkable that Community Christian has seen so much growth.

“It’s not because we’re this booming suburb with a bunch of new housing,” he says. “We just feel like God is doing something here that’s beyond us, and we don’t want to mess it up. I’ve asked people who were new to the church if they’re new to Hemet, but they’re not. They just never found a church before they found ours.”

Grace Blair is one of the newcomers. Although she’s a Hemet native, she only started attending Community Christian in 2021. Her mom had died unexpectedly at the end of 2019, and then when the pandemic hit, she wanted answers to some big questions.

“I was lost for quite a while trying to figure it all out,” she says. “Community Christian is right around the corner from my house, and I have had so many friends go here. Church was never a big part of my growing up, but after those big life-changing events, I was getting curious. The church is such a welcoming place. There’s no judgment. It’s so easy to go, and you just feel at home. I started attending with a few of my friends, but now my girlfriends and I take up two whole rows.”

Blair echoes Scott’s sentiment that God is moving in Hemet. “Just within the last three years of me going, I’m sensing something changing in the valley. Something is pushing people to church, which is amazing.”

Part of that, Scott says, is fruit from the church’s efforts to keep connected with its people during COVID-19. A team of people called every member a few times during the pandemic, and he created a daily devotional called “Sixty Seconds with PJ,” which he continues to this day. The church also regularly hears that people begin attending after first watching online for several weeks or months, so their web presence has been critical.

The church has been intentionally reaching people with their invite culture. They began focusing on their “top five,” encouraging members to identify at least five people in their lives who need a relationship with Jesus, and to regularly pray for, serve, love and invite them to church.

“I think we’ve done a really good job of reaching the people who are in our community now,” Scott observes. “As people leave the church and new people come and take their seats, they reflect more of the diversity and differences in our community. I think that’s really good. We’re not trying to reach the same old church people; we’re trying to reach people who don’t know Christ. We’re on a record pace for baptisms in one year, so we know we’re getting a lot of people who are new to faith. That’s what’s important.”

And when people visit Community and decide to stay, Scott says, it’s because of the worship, the teaching, the children’s ministry and, most importantly, the feeling of belonging. 

“I think it’s just the personality of the church to welcome and love people,” he adds. “It really is.”

COMMUNITY CHRISTIAN CHURCH
Hemet, California
Lead Pastor: John Scott
Website: Community.cc
Founded: 1981
Fastest-Growing: 40
A 2024 OUTREACH 100 CHURCH

“Only he who cries for the Jews is permitted to sing Gregorian chant.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I recently saw an Instagram post of a woman holding a book in her hand while standing in front of the religion section at Barnes & Noble exclaiming, “I can’t wait to read this one!” The book is a recently published title by a friend of mine on the subject of race and how to unpack white privilege and white identity in a more equitable and Christian manner. Many people responded to the post, chiming in with encouraging comments like, “Ohhhh, that looks great!” and “I need to get my hands on that one!”

But one comment on this post stood out among the rest. A prominent evangelical thought-leader jumped into the thread with a warning and word of caution about this kind of book. Knowing only the cover and the concept, he presumed to know the content and, based only on his presumptions, he decried how unhelpful he feels these kinds of books are for the soul. It wasn’t until he was near the end of his comment that he admitted not knowing the content of the book. Nonetheless, he went back to issuing a spiritual warning before ending his thoughts.

The leader’s comments fit a pattern that has lasted, in some shape or form, through most of the history of evangelicalism. The pattern of thought is that the messier parts of reality can distract or interfere with the spiritual parts of our being and faith. Or, put more succinctly, as long as we keep our eyes on Jesus, then what happens here on Earth, however unfortunate, is secondary. We need to “keep the main thing the main thing,” as I’ve been told. And that main thing is a spiritual telling of the gospel in tight, highly parsed language that is distinct from issues like race, privilege or worldly injustice.

The Flaw in Our Gospel

Over the last half-dozen years, I have had hundreds of conversations with pastors—many of whom are passionate about extreme poverty, government corruption on other continents or the refugee crisis around the world—who say quite plainly, “Justice is a good thing, but we have to be careful that we keep it out of our gospel conversations.”

The thought-leader and his compartmentalization and spiritual warnings in the first instance, and pastor-theologians trying to cordon off and protect the gospel in the second, all demonstrate the flaw in our gospel that has lingered in varying ways throughout evangelical history: We think the cross of Jesus is the gospel.

But the cross of Jesus is not the gospel, but a part of the gospel—a part, but not the whole; a means, but not the end.

When Jesus died for the forgiveness of sins on the cross, he was operating as the perfect sacrificial lamb—the sacrifice—that had always been foreshadowed by the sacrificial system in the temple courts.

Now, when Jesus died on the cross, the Bible says the heavens shook, the sun stopped shining and there was a great commotion in the temple. It is important to note that it wasn’t the altar (what the cross symbolized) that split in half. Rather, the 60-foot-tall temple veil was torn from top to bottom, symbolizing how, through Jesus’ death, we have been reconciled to God.

The forgiveness of sins served the purpose of restoring our relationship with our Creator. But forgiveness is never the end; rather, it serves reconciliation. While the cross was always a means to an end, it was not the end itself. As Paul explains the gospel in Colossians 1:19–20, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” The pleasure was in the reconciliation, which was accomplished by the cross.

The means cannot be taken in isolation from the purpose it served. So, I will say it again: The cross is not the gospel, but a part of the gospel.

Yet, for much of evangelicalism, our focus has been squarely on the cross alone—the substitutionary atonement of Christ’s death.

Transaction replaced reconciliation.

Personal salvation for the individual took the spotlight rather than Christ’s redeeming work for the many. There was an overemphasis on salvation for me, which lessens the experiential significance of our adoption back into the family of a relational God.

If all we have is Good Friday, then we are missing Easter. If our gospel is cross only, then we cut off resurrection, which is the very hope we have as Christians and the one thing Paul says we need in order for our faith to not be foolish or us to be pitied (1 Cor. 15). How can we say that justice has no part in our gospel when Jesus came so that unjust people could stand next to a just God, as if we are just, through a process of justification whereby we are justified? (Hopefully the linguistic irony is evident.)

Somewhere along the line, forgiveness of sin, alone, went into our gospel box rather than the setting right (justice) of all that was broken (injustice) through the life and ministry of Jesus—what I would call the in-breaking of the right arm of God to work restorative justice for his creation. Or as Isaiah put it:

“The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him” (Isaiah 59:15¬–16).

If we can’t fully comprehend God without mention of his love or heart for things being as they ought to be, then how can we comprehend the gospel or his good news without reference to the same?

Much more could be said on this point, but saying that the gospel needs to be protected from justice language is to miss the point of the good news in the first place.

Next up: Part 2 of the discussion:
What Happens When We Compartmentalize Faith?”

He and his congregation, Iglasia Bautista West Brownsville (West Brownsville Baptist Church) in West Brownsville, Texas, have run the Golan Ministries (Ministerio Golan) since 2019. The church also serves the local homeless population, hospital patients, nursing home residents, prisoners and the food insecure.

“The ministry is named in honor of the Golan Heights in Israel,” Navarro says. “It was a place of refuge for people (Deut. 4:41–43). And it’s appropriate because of what is happening with the migrants.”

Once cleared by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the adult migrants the ministry serves arrive at a nearby bus station where they can catch a ride to their destination city. It is there that Navarro and his church greet the weary travelers. 

Most of the 17,500-plus migrants the ministry has served come from Latin America, but it has helped people from countries across Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe as well. They’ve celebrated more than 6,000 decisions for Christ, given out more than 7,500 Bibles and provided more than 31,000 meals.

“These people are already here, and somebody has to give them a chance,” Navarro says. “

The migrants, he says, are grateful. “Imagine me saying ‘Welcome’ not only in Spanish, but with their accent.”

Now a U.S. citizen, Navarro entered the country illegally as a minor from Guatemala many decades ago, so he understands what current migrants are experiencing.

“All of us [in the church] came to this country as migrants,” he says. “We know the context. We understand the journey that every single migrant has to go through. I speak out of my own personal conviction, and because it’s a mandate. We have to care for the stranger.”

In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, Senior Pastor Nathan Joyce of Heartland Church—a predominantly Caucasian congregation in Paducah, Kentucky—felt God pulling him to do something positive.

“The riots were happening two hours away but it felt like it was in our backyard. It hit home,” recalls Joyce, who stopped by Washington Street Baptist Church, a predominantly African-American congregation, to see Pastor Raynarldo Henderson, a community leader for over 25 years. “We decided to do something to break down racial barriers.”

The ministers committed to doing more than merely coming together for a reconciliation Sunday.

“We weren’t interested in doing a worship service, followed by tea and crumpets,” says Henderson. “We tend to put all white folks in a box and all black folks in a box and we make assumptions about who they are. When you spend time in fellowship together, you learn your assumptions are often false.”

The ministers began combining their congregations on the fifth Sunday of the month to facilitate interaction and connection “and to tear down erroneous perceptions and stereotypes,” adds Henderson.

They alternate services—one month having it at Washington Street Baptist, which typically attracts 150 people each Sunday, and the next time holding it at Heartland Church, a 2,000-member congregation. Following the first blended service, Joyce recalls how a Caucasian member approached him with tears in his eyes, shocked by how deeply God had touched his heart.

“Being face-to-face washes away the stereotypes and rhetoric that divides us,” notes Joyce, who uses a biology class as an analogy for God’s teachings. “The preaching is ‘classwork’—the informational stuff. The worship services are the ‘lab’ where preaching is put into practice.”

Though news stories and political viewpoints serve to polarize the population, Henderson and Joyce have witnessed how this outreach has healed hearts and bridged gaps.

“People feel the tension in the world and want to do something to improve it,” says Joyce. “This gives them a proactive outlet to do so.”

Northwest Arkansas isn’t known for being a beacon of diversity, but one church in the region has made multiculturalism a major part of worship. At Open Door Baptist Church in Rogers, Arkansas, three language groups can be found praising the Lord. Open Door has traditionally been a culturally white church, but membership has declined over the years, leading the staff to welcome both Spanish- and Korean-speaking congregations to worship there.

“We have gained so much friendship with the other cultures,” says Pastor Jerry N. Harris. “They actually feel like a part of us. They’re welcome here, and they feel welcome. We have different styles of music. Not only that, we get to learn more about the other’s culture.”

Due to language barriers, the three congregations usually don’t listen to the same sermon. But on the first Sunday of the month, they come together for the music portion of the worship service. Harris says that many members of the Spanish- and Korean-speaking congregations are either fluent in English or do speak some of the language. This allows for translation when pastors from the different congregations address all three groups at once. Harris, for one, says he’s learned phrases in Spanish and Korean, and that he’s noticed Korean churchgoers trying to speak Spanish and vice versa.

“We’ve learned to love each other whenever we meet together for worship,” Harris says. “We shake hands. We hug each other. We actually enjoy each other. What has happened is that the Koreans are becoming more and more comfortable being around the Caucasians, and the Hispanics are also really, really comfortable. They’re really part of our fellowship.”

Each congregation is small, which helps the churchgoers connect cross-culturally. The church’s original congregation has an average weekend attendance of 25, while 75 people worship in the Korean congregation and about 50 in its Hispanic counterpart.

Harris says many churches across the country have tried to become multicultural and failed. He believes that churches often require members of ethnic minority groups to assimilate into mainstream American culture, which backfires.

In Harris’ experience, minority groups don’t generally feel comfortable simply being absorbed into an ethnically white experience. “We never try to have a joint-preaching service except on special occasions,” he says. “If we were trying to assimilate Hispanics and Koreans, that totally would not work.”

Harris says his church receives phone calls from members of the Latino and Korean communities inquiring about worshipping at the church, and he refers them to the appropriate pastor. But sometimes they prefer to worship during the English service, as was the case for a few Korean newcomers to Open Door.

Daniel Cerda, pastor of the Spanish congregation, says he’s enjoyed sharing the same church building with two ethnically distinct congregations.

“I like the idea that we are taking away cultural barriers,” he says. “Even though we speak different languages, we definitely emphasize community, fellowship and unity.”

Cerda credits the church’s youth, who tend to be bilingual, with helping the congregations transcend cultural barriers. He says they’ve helped church members build bridges with each other. He also says the leaders of each congregation have contemplated bringing church members together for activities other than the praise segment of the service.

“Maybe one Sunday [Harris] can speak English and somebody can translate into Spanish,” he says. “I can speak in Spanish and someone can translate into English.”

But, ultimately, the language of the sermon matters little, Cerda says. The spiritual edification of the church body is his priority.

“When all three congregations are together, it doesn’t really matter whether one is Hispanic or Korean or Caucasian,” he asserts. “The main focus is to take the worship straight up to God.”

OPEN DOOR BAPTIST CHURCH
Rogers, Arkansas
OpenDoorBaptistRogers.org

In 2013, Pastor James Roberson; his wife, Natarsha; and their daughters were living a happy, comfortable life in Atlanta, Georgia, when he said, “I feel a call to plant a church in New York.”

“Where in New York?” Natarsha asked with trepidation.

James had no clue.

With no plan in mind—only a poignant pressing on his heart—in February 2013 the family moved to the Big Apple, where James proceeded to prayer-walk the streets of Brooklyn daily.

One day he found himself in front of a church near the Barclays Center, home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. He went inside and introduced himself to the pastor, who graciously invited Roberson to lead a Tuesday-night Bible study at the church. At first, just a handful of people showed up.

“It was very humble beginnings,” recalls Roberson, who asked group members what it would take to get their friends and co-workers to attend. They said a frank discussion about love, sex and dating would be the draw. So, Roberson hosted an event where he delivered a 15-minute message and then answered questions about the Bible regarding sex and relationships.

“We were blown away because 120 came that night—mostly young, unchurched professionals who had a genuine interest in learning about God,” says Roberson. “After that night, the Bible study quadrupled in size.”

In April 2014, Roberson launched The Bridge Church—a name he had picked to reflect the church’s purpose. “The whole point of a church,” he says, “is to reach people.”

Josh Edney, who also relocated from the South, met Roberson and began researching assimilation plans to determine how best to retain visitors. Excelling in administrative ministry, Edney joined The Bridge Church as executive pastor in 2015. Soon after, the church started nine “City Group” Bible studies, which are essentially sermon-based, small-group ministries.

“It’s about feeling the heartbeat of the city though discipleship,” says Edney. “We wanted people to be able to take Sunday’s sermon, discuss it in a family context and share God’s Word with the community.”

Roberson thinks City Groups caught on so quickly because of New York City’s highly competitive atmosphere. With the theater, the arts and Wall Street, the cutthroat culture tends to breed insecurities. City Groups provide love and acceptance.

The church’s mission statement involves connecting to God, growing as family and serving the city. To fulfill that mission, they’ve grown several ministries, including the “Do Justice” and “I Am Known” initiatives.

Shootings around the country led to the formation of “Do Justice.” What began as a way for people who felt afraid and confused to process these events has become a means of improving community relations with the police.

In addition, the church designed sweatshirts that say “I Am Known,” which they distribute to the homeless community to let them know that they are seen, heard and loved by God. The first winter they gave out 250 sweatshirts. In 2016, they distributed 425. This past winter, the number grew to 700.

Because most of Brooklyn is immigrant-based, the 155-member congregation is primarily made up of millennials from Caribbean countries.

“We’re 80 percent single, 70 percent Caribbean, 15 percent Latino and 15 percent Anglo, which makes for a pretty diverse crowd on Sundays,” says Roberson, who has delivered equally diverse messages on justice, homosexuality, Black Lives Matter, transgender issues, politics and the need for unity.

“We always strive to be culturally relevant and doctrinally sound,” says Roberson. “And while we don’t use the culture as a litmus test for what to preach about, we do use the Word of God as a vehicle to discuss what’s happening in society.”

For both Roberson and Edney, the greatest reward from planting The Bridge Church has been witnessing life change. For instance, they speak of Jorge Maldanado, a Puerto Rican who abandoned God as a teenager, and Maximilian Hernandez, a half-Cuban/half-Jewish man raised in an unchurched Puerto Rican household. Both men lived faithless lives plagued by internal struggles until they found Christ, who filled them with love, hope and mercy.

“I have contemporaries who go to Puerto Rico and France. I may not get to visit these beautiful locales, but you know what I do get to do? Baptize Jorge and Maximilian,” says Roberson. “Seeing people go from being far from God to serving God is the most satisfying thing in the world.”

THE BRIDGE CHURCH
Brooklyn, New York
BridgeChurchNYC.com

A funeral for an elderly white woman took place in January at Fielder Church in Arlington, Texas. During the service, one African-American young person after another stood to give testimony to this woman’s love for each of them. She was their Sunday school teacher.

A scene like this isn’t uncommon at Fielder today—but it would not have happened a few decades ago.

Fielder has always been a large, popular church in a part of town that used to be mostly white. But about 15 years ago, then-Senior Pastor Gary Smith attended the dedication of a new junior high school and realized Arlington was changing. Of the 24 cheerleaders at the dedication, 23 weren’t Caucasian. Fielder no longer reflected its community, and a slight decline in membership was symptomatic.

“The conviction to diversify started with a recognition that our strategy didn’t fit our community,” Smith says. “What happened later, though, is that I discovered the rightness of it. This is what our church should be doing.”

Fielder now has a membership that’s more than 30 percent Hispanic and African-American, and a congregation of old and new members who support the vision of diversity.

“Many churches fail at these kinds of transitions because they want a quick fix,” Smith says. “They want to hire an African-American worship leader and a Hispanic small-group guy and see a change overnight. That’s a good start, but you have to change culture. For us, this has been a four- or five-year journey of tears and strong words, of swallowing pride and asking forgiveness. But the other side of it has been delightful.”

At the outset of Fielder’s journey, Smith encountered resistance. Eventually, he says, some of those who were upset came on board, and a small minority decided to leave.

“Our church right now loves this,” Smith says. “Fielder has always had a heart to reach its community, so the core of our people embraced it. People have done a lot of confessing, too, and have grown. They just had to open their hearts, including me.”

A large part of reaching their community was having a better understanding of it. To that end, Smith hired new church leaders who represented those communities, including Jason Paredes, who joined Fielder in 2005 to lead the Hispanic ministry. Today, he is the church’s lead pastor, succeeding Smith after a three-year leadership transition.

Fielder instituted a service-focused, adopt-a-block strategy to get the congregation into the neighborhoods it wanted to reach. It also opened a second campus in nearby Grand Prairie, Texas, where much diversity exists. Fielder began offering a Spanish service, making all communication bilingual, and putting Hispanic and African-American leaders in front of the congregation regularly. Fielder’s reputation began to change.

People now think of Fielder as the diverse church in the area. In fact, the Dallas Cowboys chose it to be their main partner in its annual backpack drive, and the NAACP asked Smith to speak at its Dallas-area Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Dinner, honoring Fielder for its community service.

“This is the maturation of what our church has been going through for a decade,” Paredes says. And he gives a lot of the credit to God. “I wish we would’ve had something to follow, like a four-step plan to becoming diverse. But it was just God pouring out his Spirit upon us.”

Read more stories of diversity in outreach »

FIELDER CHURCH
Arlington, Texas
Fielder.org

Bold. Inclusive. Relevant.

That’s how Urban Village Church in Chicago, characterizes itself—and for good reason. The church reaches a cross-section of Christians from different economic backgrounds and racial groups by operating in four Chicago neighborhoods: the South Loop, Wicker Park, Andersonville and Hyde Park-Woodlawn.

“Part of the vision was that we’d be a multisite church in multiple neighborhoods,” says Hannah Kardon, Wicker Park site pastor. “Jesus focused so much on who our neighbors are, and having multiple sites is helping us to know the different parts of our city’s story, the fullness of its diversity.”

Wicker Park, for example, is a highly gentrified, mostly white neighborhood, while Hyde Park has a large, economically diverse black population.

Kardon says that too often, churches want to attract diverse groups of people without shaking things up, but true diversity should be represented both in the pews and in leadership. Urban Village has an average weekend attendance of 400 and meets the Faith Communities Today survey’s definition of a diverse church, meaning that at least 20 percent of worshippers belong to a racial group outside of the congregation’s most dominant demographic. At sites such as the church’s Hyde Park location, half of the worshippers are from minority groups, says Emily McGinley, a site pastor.

Because Urban Village strives to be antiracist, the leadership must constantly challenge racial biases, even among themselves, according to McGinley. The staff has attended trainings on systemic racism and tries to model appropriate ways to address issues of race and inclusion to the congregation. That includes owning up to their privilege in society and biases against marginalized groups.

While “nice Christians” may want to avoid discussing race and racism, McGinley says in today’s sociopolitical climate it’s increasingly difficult to ignore these subjects.

“We live in the age of Black Lives Matter,” she says.

To get insight into how they can improve their handling of race relations, Urban Village is currently undergoing a racial audit, a months-long process that will examine the church’s diversity practices. A group called Chicago Regional Organizing for Anti-Racism (CROAR) is conducting the audit. It works with churches, nonprofits, government agencies and corporations to dismantle systemic racism from their ranks.

“We look at the policies, we look at the personnel, how hiring is done—what might be done differently,” says Derrick Dawson, co-program coordinator of CROAR. “We actually direct them to do this work themselves.”

The organization has helped Urban Village to conduct a “power analysis” to determine how leadership is chosen there.

Dawson, also a member of the Antiracism Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, says most churches shy away from problems related to race.

“Churches are interested in talking about diversity, but I think it’s more difficult when you’re actually interested in sharing power with people of color,” he says. “It takes a commitment that I think can be challenging sometimes.”

Urban Village will receive the results of its audit in May. From there, the staff may proceed how it chooses, Dawson says. Usually, however, the individuals involved in the audit process take steps to implement changes.

The church has also stood out from others by finding ways to make members of the LGBTQ community feel welcome, including a young man who contracted HIV and figured he could never again be part of a congregation. At his request, Urban Village hosted an HIV-testing event after a service, with the goal of preventing others from contracting or spreading the virus. The young man has even shared his testimony with other church members, McGinley says.

In addition to teaching the congregation to welcome diversity and inclusion, Kardon says Urban Village wants church members, especially those who feel marginalized, to know “the relevance of Jesus to their experience in the world.”

“Jesus called us to live out our faith Monday through Saturday and not just Sunday, and to meet us in our pain and our struggles and to offer support to people who are hurting and who are scared,” she says.

Find more stories of diversity in outreach »

URBAN VILLAGE CHURCH
Chicago, Illinois
UrbanVillageChurch.org

David, a young man living in New Orleans with his wife and seven children, spent much of his time under the influence of drugs. His addiction caused him to lose everything—his wife, his kids, his morals and his freedom. With a criminal record, no marketable job skills and nothing but a yearning for the next high, David felt hopeless—until, that is, he was given a job through the Restoration Initiative for Culture and Community (RICC), an outreach ministry of Canal Street Church.

“We figured the best way to reach our diverse city is by offering job training programs,” says Page Brooks, senior pastor of the church.

RICC only hires men with criminal backgrounds, offering them both skills training and spiritual discipleship. In David’s case, RICC also helped him get clean and sober. Once his life was back on track, his wife took him back and he secured permanent employment.

“This is our goal—to see a holistic idea of restoration,” says Brooks.

Canal Street Church, a multiethnic, multicultural community with an average weekend attendance of 170, originally started out as a nondenominational church plant that met in the building of a historic Presbyterian church where the congregation had lost its minister. Brooks acted as interim pastor of the Presbyterian church in the mornings and lead pastor of the church plant in the evenings until September 2012, when the entities merged into one, creating Canal Street Church: A Mosaic Community.

“This city is burned-out, spiritually, in terms of organized religion,” says Brooks, who describes New Orleans as a mix of Protestants, Catholics, Voodoo worshippers and New Age followers. As a result, Brooks notes that ministry has to be very relational. Thanks to RICC, which also provides ESL classes, kids camps, and after-school programs, Brooks and others from the church have become well-acquainted with members of the community.

“When we get to know families intergenerationally by ministering to the kids in the after-school program and to their parents in the ESL classes, we’re better able to minister to them in times of need,” says Brooks. “Giving people success at life by way of the power of the Spirit—that’s the bedrock of what we do.”

Find more ways to serve your community »

CANAL STREET CHURCH
New Orleans, Louisiana
CanalMosaic.org

By launching his new church at a farmers’ market in Silicon Valley, Daniel Atondo hopes to connect with a crowd more known for technology innovation than religion. Eden Church unintentionally found a home in a banquet hall at the market in downtown Campbell, California.

“This was the only location we could find,” says Atondo, lead pastor. While he never imagined planting a church in such a setting, Atondo soon realized the farmers’ market was a strategic location.

“This actually could be a great opportunity,” he says.

That’s because the thousands of residents who don’t attend church services visit the market or walk around downtown. Having a plant there allows Atondo and his pastoral team to reach these people. The church has seized the opportunity by passing out reusable bags to shoppers, as environmentalism is almost as important to residents as technology.

Most of the people Atondo meets have no church background. On average, the church draws about 90 attendees per service.

“It has been a cool experience,” he says. “There’s such a diversity of culture here; a huge percentage of people are foreign born.”

Silicon Valley attracts a number of technology professionals from Asia. In addition to its cultural diversity, the area boasts extraordinary wealth. And Atondo took into consideration the lifestyle of residents while readying the church for launch. Eden Church had a soft launch in January and grand opening on Feb. 12. Atondo says that if the premises weren’t spotless, residents wouldn’t feel comfortable letting their children attend services.

“Families worship children and education,” he says of Silicon Valley. “They make sure they’re involved in recreational activities and coding programs for kids at a really young age.”

The Eden Church staff try to connect with community members on an intellectual level, since so many are highly educated. While Atondo says some people he meets resent religion, he doesn’t think that’s the case with the typical millennial.

“I do think there is some skepticism, but I really think this younger generation is more open to spirituality,” he says.

Although most visitors haven’t yet made a commitment to Christ, Atondo believes they will in time.

“They are walking,” he says. “They just maybe haven’t made that public decision, but they are definitely on that path to commit their lives to Christ. They’re on that trajectory.”

EDEN CHURCH
Campbell, California
Eden.Church