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Woman Living in Shed Sparks Expanded Ministry
By Craig Pinley
IRVINE, CA (September 23, 2002) - Pastor David Gibbons knew that more than 1,500
people were making Newsong Community Covenant Church their home on Sundays
last winter.
What he didn't know was that one individual had made a temporary home in a
storage shed on the church property. That discovery has made a profound
difference in how his church is doing ministry.
Once Gibbons and other staff members were able to help the woman find
housing and employment through a local Salvation Army agency, they set out
to help others like her. For three months, staff discussed biblical
mandates and passages that dealt with justice issues. Now, a long-range
strategic plan is being implemented at the church, including site visits,
interviews with other churches and individuals and the start of two
Community Development Centers in southern California.
"We're focused on community transformation here," Gibbons said. "One part
has to deal with spiritual issues, but we also have to deal with physical
issues. It's not a short-term thing. We have World Vision representatives
here and they've told us that it takes 15 years to transform a community.
It's changed our paradigm. Often we do hit and miss services, like serving
in soup kitchens, but we want to look at the systemic issues that are
causing abuse."
Newsong Community Covenant is unique in many ways. The average age of the
congregation is 28, much younger than most churches, and the diversity of
the congregation differs from the norm as well. About 80 percent of the
church is Asian American, which includes Chinese, Japanese, Indian,
Filipino and Malaysian groups. About 17 percent is Caucasian and three
percent is African American or Hispanic.
Gibbons, the lead pastor, has advocated racial reconciliation to his
congregation since founding Newsong Community Covenant nearly eight years
ago and its diverse congregation seems intent on being reconciling agents.
He had become more convinced about the need for racial reconciliation after
taking a contemporary issues class, saying, "I was feeling the Holy Spirit
speaking to me about dealing with the underserved in society."
When he returned from the 2002 Evangelical Covenant Church Midwinter
Pastor's Conference in February, Gibbons was told that a woman in the
neighborhood was living in the church's storage shed. The woman had come to
church for a time and had asked for a job, but there was none available.
Gibbons asked his church to pray about how Newsong Community Covenant can
respond more decisively to help the community.
"We called a meeting and asked, 'What are we going to do?'" Gibbons said.
"I felt the Lord saying to us that we needed to deal with this issue right
now. That started the whole journey for the church."
The pastoral staff began to study the Bible in earnest after the discovery.
Then Gibbons organized a 10-week sermon series about compassion ministries,
telling his congregation about discovering the woman who was living in the
shed. "It forced us to deal with the
ministry of compassion," Gibbons said in recalling the sermon series. "We
had to provide a cultural shift for the church and it gave our congregation
a chance to deal with what it meant for them."
Gibbons drafted a strategic plan to address this issue and from that have
emerged two new ministries through what Newsong Community Covenant calls
"JAC" - ministries of justice and compassion. David Benevides was hired to
help lead the staff in a ministry to a neighborhood in Santa Ana. This
corporation will focus on education, employment, housing and medical
transformation in the community. Benevides has already been
working with an organization called Kidworks in Santa Ana and has helped
form a neighborhood church from his networking.
Stephen Jean-Marie, an African American rapper known as "Cue," has also
joined the staff in order to help the church develop an arts center in the
Crenshaw neighborhood in Los Angeles. Known by the acronym SHAW, the
corporation will focus on sports health, arts and worship. Gibbons expects
that both facilities will be catalysts for church plants in the future.
"Multiethnicity and JAC are the two key issues for us," Gibbons said.
"We'll be considered irrelevant if we don't consider the issues. And our
grace journey that is given to us is to be lived out with the underserved.
What we are embracing is what we call the theology of discomfort - if we're
loving as Christ has commanded, it's not going to be comfortable. There's a
lot to process."
Newsong has exploded numerically during the past four years, doubling its
worship attendance while becoming the fifth largest Covenant congregation
in North America. It also has a strong leadership base. Last year, nearly
400 of the Newsong Community Covenant lay leadership core attended its own
leadership conference.
But Newsong Community Covenant had its share of discomforting moments
during the early years of its ministry. The church began with 25 people.
They originally met in Gibbons' apartment and he joked about the group's
first offering of $5. Still, he believed that God had led him to ministry
in southern California and recalled "driving up Bonita
Canyon Road, just praying for Irvine, saying, 'God, give me a piece of your
action.'" He's gotten plenty of it lately and there's more action for his
church if they're willing to look for it.
"When we think of strategic planning we think about things that are
something where only God could get the credit," said Gibbons as he
discusses multiethnic ministry and reaching the lost for Christ. "You have
to ask, 'How big is your God?' If He wants you to do this, He will get it
done."
For more information on Newsong Community Covenant, call the church staff
at 949-477-0700. More about the church can be found on its web site at
www.newsong.net.
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
