Many years ago, I was called by God and His congregation in Monterey Park, California, to pastor our struggling church there. Just a few years before, UCLA had done a study on dramatic transitional communities, in which one majority ethnicity was replaced by another in short periods of time. Monterey Park topped that list. In 20 years, it had gone from majority Anglo to majority Hispanic to majority Cantonese Chinese. The church, while helping start a separate Chinese church, had remained Anglo. It was an island in an ocean of change.<\/p>\n
As we arrived, our observation was the church had become an escape for many who attended. It was a place where the people felt safe and unthreatened by the changes all around them. My wife and I focused on why they felt that way.<\/p>\n
We learned that the change in the community\u2019s makeup left them with an identity crisis. This was not the Monterey Park they had grown up in, knew and loved. Everywhere they looked, they saw unfamiliar things, often in another language. It was disconcerting, to say the least. This affected their self-esteem as a congregation. Insecurity and doubt had settled in, to the degree that the members were embarrassed or ashamed to invite others to join the church. There were reasons for this, including the inability or desire to connect with their neighbors and the discomfort with what those neighbors would find in the church experience and whether they would be accepted by those already there. This left most of the church unwilling to invite others to be a part.<\/p>\n
There were deeper reasons as well. Most of the church had forgotten the founding vision of the church, to reach out with the gospel to the lost and unreached people of the community. They had begun to think the church existed exclusively for their needs and concerns. Others felt that if we just updated our \u201cstreet sign\u201d and rang the church bell again (yes, it still had a bell), people would be attracted to the church and that would be enough to bring them in. Mostly, though, they had lost their first love; they had forgotten to focus their attention and heart on loving God first and their neighbors as themselves. It was a heart issue.<\/p>\n
Over the next few years, we loved the people and worked with them to engage the community again in a fresh new way. Attendance doubled and baptisms once more became a consistent part of the church service. Outreach was changing the church, and the church family became more multi-ethnic, while still speaking English in its services. The community recognized its existence again, and even the mayor came and celebrated with us! It was a remarkable turnaround.<\/p>\n
How did this happen? How did we get the church to re-engage the community around us? Well, there are many ways to do this and each needs to be contextual for a church\u2019s location, but here is what we did:<\/p>\n
1. We focused on falling in love with Jesus again <\/strong><\/p>\n First, and most importantly, we spent time reflecting on our salvation and His work in our life, individually and collectively. We celebrated with times of prayer, focused renewal experiences and celebrations full of gratitude. For us, our hearts were the key to the entire process.<\/p>\n 2. We celebrated the legacy of the church<\/strong><\/p>\n We told the stories of our heroic predecessors who had founded the church and helped make it what it had been. We talked about not just their actions, but their passions and motivations. This renewed a \u201ccan do\u201d spirit in our hearts and challenged us to be bold in reaching out.<\/p>\n