Consuming Jesus

Recently my wife and I moved from Chicago’s western suburbs into the city. We lived in the suburbs for eight very good years. For five of those years I was an associate pastor at our church. While the church exhibited some socio-economic diversity, like most churches in the western suburbs it lacked noticeable ethnic diversity. Two years ago some friends of ours who pastor a church in Chicago asked if I would consider joining their pastoral staff. Their invitation was especially intriguing because New Community Covenant Church was founded six years ago as a multi-ethnic congregation.

I won’t bore you with the two years it took to finally accept their invitation. Suffice it to say that though we had never felt at home in the suburbs, leaving our community there was one of the most difficult things my wife or I have ever done.

I am now a few months into my new assignment as Pastor of Community Life at New Community and am convinced that the move into Chicago was the right thing. That is a great feeling! While transitioning into my new position I was reading Consuming Jesus. It was encouraging to read the book and notice all the ways that my new church was intentionally pursuing many of the things Paul Metzger articulates in the book. For example, for the past five weeks the church has gone through a sermon series called Race Matters. During this series the congregation has seen how reconciliation is at the very heart of the Gospel. We have been challenged in very practical ways to acknowledge the active or passive racism in our lives. In a couple of weeks we will offer breakout session for the black, white, Asian, Latino, and international folks in the congregation. Led by trusted facilitators, these sessions will be a time where people can be brutally honest as they confess, ask questions, and vent their frustrations.

In my role as Pastor of Community life I am responsible for the church’s small groups. One of the tricky things about New Community’s small groups is working towards diversity in our groups. I am finding that as new people wish to join groups I have to work closely with the small group leaders to find a group where the new person will experience the diversity that is so important to us.

Consuming Jesus addresses something that will be important for our church to continually be vigilant of: the affect of consumerism on racial reconciliation. Our church is mostly made up of young professionals, many who are making plenty of money. As we continually cast a vision for multi-ethnic and missional community that seeks to bless our city, we are aware that this regularly goes against the dominant paradigm of the city. We are currently raising money to lease a warehouse in the most troubled corner of our neighborhood. In addition to worshiping on Sunday mornings, this warehouse will allow us to have an incarnational presence in this neighborhood seven days a week. I am hopeful that as we ask the congregation to sacrificially give to this aspect of our mission we are also challenging patterns of consumption. Our presence in this under-resourced neighborhood will also make it clear how important socio-economic diversity is to the health of our church.

The type of reconciliation articulated by Paul Metzger is a lot of work! The divisions, skepticism, and complexities run deep. But after just a few months in a congregation who understands the significance of Gospel reconciliation I know there is nowhere I’d rather be.

David Swanson is the Pastor of Community Life at New Community Covenant Church and blogs regularly at http://davidswanson.wordpress.com.

Bethany Evangelical Free Church in Littleton, CO has been on the missional church trajectory since 2004. Yet it was only in 2007 that we had significant progress. Through demographic research (Percept Studies and Caleb Project’s Crossing Cultures), we discovered that North Littleton (Broadway to Santa Fe, Littleton Blvd. to Belleview) contains one of the largest constituencies of Hispanics in the state of Colorado (69% Hispanic in contrast to 3-5% Hispanic of surrounding communities). This community is only one mile from the church I pastor, Bethany Evangelical Free Church.As the result of this information, we decided to further survey this community. We reserved Powers Park in North Littleton one Saturday during the month of May in 2007 and hosted a Fiesta in the Park. We served hamburgers, green chili, distributed Mothers Day presents, played Latin music and used a simple questionnaire surveying the basic needs of the people.During this time, God graciously sent us a Hispanic pastor with a core group of twenty five Hispanics looking for a facility. God was graciously honoring the small steps of faith Bethany was taking. Not long after this May 2007 event, Vida Nueva Para Denver started, which is Bethany’s Spanish speaking church.  There are currently ten nations represented including Mexico, Spain, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Columbia, Venezuela, and Argentina.Not long after starting Vida Nueva, which meets in the Underground Worship Venue at Bethany at 10:45a.m., we also started a Multi-Cultural Adult Bible Fellowship. This provided an initial place for integration of English and Spanish speakers. Pastor Francisco Mendez runs this Adult Bible Fellowship in both languages. We also started a multi-cultural service every six weeks including the two services of Bethany Evangelical Free Church and Vida Nueva. Lastly, Pastor Francisco Mendez has a radio program on Tuesdays at 2pm on a local Hispanic AM radio station in the Denver area.Then God blessed us when Alejandra Harguth met Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior through Pastor Francisco and Vida Nueva last September 2007. Alejandra just so happens to be the Director of the Littleton Immigration Initiative in Littleton, CO. She is a gatekeeper into our community. Not long after Alejandra’s conversion, she asked if we would host ESL (English as a Second Language) classes in conjunction with Bemis Library. Our response was, “This is what we’ve been praying for, for the last couple of years. We would love to host ESL classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights.” Bethany now has vibrant initiatives reaching Hispanics in our community.I must say, God is honoring our simple steps of faith. Honestly, we have no idea what we are doing other than  becoming like Christ in character and in priorities. Since starting Vida Nueva, Bethany now has a Philippino bible study on Thursday nights, an Asian constituency (including a Japanese band that led Vida Nueva recently) and an African American constituency coming to Bethany. Building a bridge for Hispanics was building a bridge for all ethnic groups in our experience. Our prayer is that Bethany Evangelical Free can become a living testimony of a church that transitioned from an inward programmatic mono-cultural Evangelical church to a congregation that is aware of and evangelizing the culture of the surrounding community.Pastor Kevin J. Navarro

We are going to be introducing a new category to the Consuming Jesus blog.  This category is titled “From the Trenches,” and will give us an opportunity to hear from pastors and practitioners that are active in engaging in the ideas presented in the book.   We hope that it will be another good way to spark discussion about how Jesus’ consuming love calls us to address these race and class issues in the church.