This month’s edition brings you a helpful and eye-opening interview with Dr. C. Michael Snow of Houston. You’ll see how his work has helped in the transformation of a declining urban church to becoming an alive and vital congregation on Houston’s north side. The complete text of Dr. Snow’s resulting thesis is now available from CityVoices for $10 per copy.

Also new in the urban mission arsenal is CityVoices new (but always expanding) City Mission Bibliography. You’ll find this annotated bibliographic tool located as part of our website (www.cityvoices.com) for perusal or download to your own computer. Currently more than twelve pages, you’ll find this listing of the best of urban books divided into three areas: 1) the Urban Context, 2) Race and Ethnicity, and 3) Urban Ministry, per se. Feel free to contact us from time to time with what you feel should be additions to this ever-growing resource tool. We look to see our bibliography become one of the best, and most practical tools yet developed.

God’s grace and peace today,
Let’s stay in touch,

Roger Johnson, Editor – CityVoices

********************

Declining Urban Churches: Strategy Needed

When Mike Snow accepted the call to pastor Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church (LCMS), in Houston, in late 1989, he found an urban congregation that had clearly seen its better days. The church’s physical community had experienced both economic and racial change in degrees that the congregation was unable to cope with. The church had experienced devastating losses of resources, leadership and vision. The result was congregational in-fighting. Lutheran traditionalism became an element of power. Eventually all of these factors combined to paralyze attempts at effective ministry at Beautiful Savior Church. Many urban pastors have seen, or been part of similar situations.

But Mike discovered that all was not lost. Now, fourteen years later, Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church has developed a new life and ministry. Transition can be slow, difficult and even painful. Nevertheless, a strategy emerges from this tremendously important process in the renewed ministry of city congregations.

Mike, you’ve been at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church in Houston since 1989. Give us a brief description of the church when you first came there.

Beautiful Savior was planted and grew to 1,300 members in ten year’s time. But by the end of 1988, it had lost some 800 members. In conversations with the mission planter who started the church, he felt the congregation had lost its mission vision. And sure enough, it had.

When I got here the church had lost a large number of members due to a variety of reasons: white flight, internal strife. Financially, Lutheran Church Extension Fund was threatening to begin foreclosure proceedings. Basically, the future was somewhat bleak. But the congregation did have a desire to regain its lost members, so we started programs of outreach and ministry to our community.

Now, here in 2003, the congregation has regained a tremendous amount of its mission vision. We’re community outreach focused. Building of relationships (both inside and outside the church) is a priority. Volunteerism is high. Stewardship is very strong: our goal is to be debt-free within five years. The congregation understands the priority of ministry over statistics. The best we can tell from Scripture is that souls do not have a specific color. When Christ came to die, it was for all human beings on the face of this earth.

We’ve really worked at our staff reflecting the ethnic make-up of the congregation, with both Hispanics and blacks serving in key roles. Fifty percent of our congregation is under age 40. Seventy percent have come from an unchurched, or nominally churched background. We don’t struggle with tradition issues; we’re making new traditions.

Just to compare things, Beautiful Savior Lutheran is no longer the church over 1,000 people. You may be half the size, but you’re mission vision has multiplied.

We’re half the size of those “glory days,” but through lots of work we enjoy a different kind of glory. We don’t have the numerical membership we did in the 1970s, but our outreach is probably ten-fold. We have some 300 individuals in the community who call this place home, though they are not members. Through partnerships around us, we minister to many people outside of the congregation.

Each summer we do Vacation Bible School in the local YMCA day camps. We work with the police department to host their annual Christmas celebration for underprivileged families. We work with various scout groups that meet in our building, and I meet with the scout’s parents in support groups. God’s given us a large facility, and we have some good resources to meet needs in the community.

Geographically, you’re on the north side of Houston, correct?

We are on the near north side of Houston, in the Greenspoint area. In the early 1990s, this was considered one of the most dangerous areas in Houston, due to crime, gang activity and associated violence. We’re a block off of interstate Hwy. 45 north, and that brings quite a bit of drifters through our area. We had some “starter apartment” in the area that basically became sites for HUD-sponsored housing and entry points for immigrants.

Now, we’re excited to say we’re one of the safest sections of the city. That comes from working together as a community. One of our goals was to address actual needs that we could address in the community. Not assumed, but actual needs. We focused on at-risk youth, knowing that gang activity is usually related to young people who aren’t feeling loved by other people. The gangs will accept them for who they are.

The church had been involved in early childhood ministry for over 30 years, but we started working with the national organization of Midnight Basketball for youth. We pull in over 100 young men for basketball, off the street, 10 pm to 2 am. They’re allowed to play in our church gym, but they have to go through behavior-modification classes before they can play.

It’s great the way you’ve seen change in your community. But isn’t it an on-going thing that you’re going to have to work with all the time?

All the time! One of our members really hit it right. She says that really and truly what she sees is not a community decline, but really a rotation of souls. When our white folks left, minorities moved in, and their souls needed to be touched with the gospel.

Mike, have you got any rough statistics on the ethnic groups in your area?

We base a lot of our statistics on the demographics of the Aldine School District (our local public school district). Our area is now about 28 percent Anglo, then almost equally divided between blacks (35 percent), and Hispanics (34 percent), with about 3 percent Asians.

Your thesis itself: “A Model for Transition of Ministry in Declining Congregations,” to what degree was it prompted by your work at Beautiful Savior Church?

The thesis literally became my ministry. This is not the first declining congregation that I’ve served. My first congregation was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was called to be a Hispanic worker in that area, where plans had already been made to close the church. Four years later, the congregation became self-supporting for the first time in its 25-year history. By the time I left, 40 percent of the congregation had Hispanic surnames.

I’m thoroughly convinced that we as human beings get so caught up in statistics and other things that we actually miss the basic plan of Scripture: take the Word! Don’t sit and wait. Take it! If God has called us to a location, then we need to be reaching out in the community and have our facility, more or less, become the property of the community. Once the community takes ownership, they take care of it. Community people who use Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church often take better care of it than our members. As we strive to be a part of our community, vandalism goes down. By God’s grace, we haven’t had any vandalism in over 10 years. The needs of the community are the needs of the church. God’s put us here to identify real needs, to see how we can use our gifts to minister to them. As we seek to apply the gospel to the community, he blesses us.

What are a couple principles that continue to guide your ministry?

Why did God call me here? Each pastor really needs to ask himself, “Can I do this? Is ministry in a declining situation something that I can handle?” You have to get past the whole thing of personal success. Success is not based on numbers; it’s based on faithfulness. As ministers, we sometimes put a model out there and say we need to do “bing, bing, bing!” to achieve success. But then some of our lay people come up with different gifts. If somebody comes by going in the same direction but with a different wagon, go and help them! We need to not only turn over the challenge of ministries to our laity, but then we need to give them the authority to carry out those ministries. At Beautiful Savior, we’ve more or less arrived at a staff-led board of directors. We don’t do a lot of committee meetings; we just do a lot of ministry.

Each year we pass around a list of all the things we’re going to do in the year ahead and we ask for volunteers (people who want to work on specific projects). And then when the project comes up, we call those volunteers. Hopefully, people are volunteering for what they feel good about. It works for us.

Is it your opinion that an evangelism committee appropriate isn’t appropriate? Rather, the whole church has got to be about evangelism.

Exactly, the whole church has to be about evangelism. I think you need certain folks to take leadership. We have a director of missions. And that person shares outreach ideas that we bounce around in our council. But we try to provide everyone with some place where they can get involved. Through our scouting program, I meet with parents, some women who have come out of abusive marriages. Through that little group I have ended up confirming two adults as new members of our church and baptizing five children. It’s simply relationship-building.

You haven’t mentioned too much about getting people to be good Lutherans, baptisms and confirmation classes.

As people come into our church, we still do follow the procedure of junior confirmation. I do adult confirmation in a one-on-one setting. Experience has taught me that when you schedule an adult confirmation class, only half the people show up. As we do it one-on-one, we’re usually confirming 20-25 adults each year. Our adult Bible classes even do a review of Luther’s small catechism from time to time. But we also know that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is not the only Christian organization on the face of this earth. I’ve had a number of folks come, and we try to tell them if you’re not being spiritually nourished here or if your gifts could be better used somewhere else, then we’ll help you find that place. The important thing is coming to repentance and confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then serving Him.

Mike, transitioning out of decline in an old, under-resourced inner city church is a hard thing to pull off.

Absolutely. Our turnaround here at Beautiful Savior in Houston is something you never really stop doing. But to see a change in mindset and a change in focus toward a mission vision really took us about six to eight years. Since then we’ve been doing something to expand on it each year.

So you do feel that the transformation that happened at your church can happen in other places?

Yes I do. And I think that what happens is that we all of a sudden say loss of resources in the inner city will be fatal to our church. When a church’s original people and their resources leave, it’s really a changing of resources. There’s still plenty of people there, just different! We have a tendency in our tradition (LCMS) to think of mission as only being overseas. And then we step over the people right around us. We have to figure out some way to balance that out.

Early on in your thesis, you talk about prayer, upfront in public places around the church. How important are those prayers in the transformation process?

One thing that has to happen is that your whole team (Sunday school teachers, organist, elders, etc.) has to be one. We’ve done a number of prayer workshops around here. Before every service here our music director, head elder and myself pray a quiet, silent prayer at the altar. The people just see us come up. Before each of the workshops and Bible studies we come up and pray together. To me that’s an educational model, showing our people that we are in this together, praying for them.

I take this into the public arena as well. For about three years I was on the Board of Directors for the local Chamber of Commerce. They asked if I would open a meeting with prayer, and I said, “You know who I am and you know what I do!” And the director said, “Certainly. They’re yours for up to seven minutes.” Talk about a tremendous opportunity for presentation of the Gospel! When people see that you’re not afraid to approach your God with your concerns, it’s quite a model for them.

Mike, in America’s cities, do you think we often give up on revitalization of churches too soon, often in favor of mergers or even church closings?

We forget that it takes time to get into a declining situation, and you’ve got to take time to get out of it. I’m blessed that I’ve been here at Beautiful Savior for 14 years, and I think we’re still growing. It’s not a mere event, it’s a process. You have to be willing to ride it out.

Sometimes we have unrealistic expectations of what a ministry should be. How do you evaluate a ministry? If you’re still open and touching the lives of people, that’s great. Church denominations have gotten themselves to where they follow the corporate model so strictly that if you can’t produce a tangible number of members in a short period of time, then you’re not successful.

That concerns me, and it also concerns me when we at times, in publications, see stories of churches that have grown so rapidly, and what have they done? They have merely transferred in members of other churches. That’s a circulation of the saints. To me, that’s not church growth. Beautiful Savior looks at kingdom growth. We’re very open to varieties of cultures. We even have street people worshipping with us, who may be here for several weeks, and then we won’t see them. That’s okay. We forget that as we seek to minister to the unchurched, they don’t have a worship habit. So why should they be here every Sunday? Our responsibility is to do the ministry and let God grow the church.

It seems like you’re saying that older city churches with big buildings, that can be hard to maintain, may in fact have positive resources when it comes to community outreach?

Exactly. When I first came to Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, no one was allowed to use the gym facility except members of the church, unless they paid a rather hefty fee. Now people who need help, can seldom pay any hefty fee. We’ve tried to team up with other human care providers who had the resources but didn’t have the facility, so long as they understood the guidelines they had to follow. They brought resources with them, but they also gave us plenty of human contacts. I’m speaking of the school district, our city management district, the police department and the scouting programs. The city is doing a revitalization project not too far from us, and they needed a meeting site. When we opened up our facilities for such a meeting, people in the community know where we were, and we now have a voice in how our community is being revitalized.

Mike, as you see many once-thriving congregations that may have now fallen on bad times, what hope do you have for a real transformation in their local ministries?

What sometimes happens in our cities (and we have to deal with it), is that at one point denominations felt they had to plant what are now too many churches within a given urban area. At this point in history, maybe 50 – 75 percent of those congregations are hurting. As I look at some congregations I can understand a merger. But I also think that in our case, we’re back to the idea of ministering only to Lutherans, without touching the lives of all the people around us. I do have hope for these places. If God wanted us there in the beginning, do you think there would come a time when He didn’t want us there?

Churches don’t want to admit that they are starting to decline. If we could get churches to admit it and start working on it not, we would be taking a step in the right direction. We need to spend some time in evaluation, “Are we meeting the needs of the people in the location where we are?” We have a tendency to assume needs, as opposed to finding out the actual needs. We need to find out who the people are who have these needs.

The Scriptures are about relationships. Jesus came so that we would have a relationship with the Father, and the way that other people get into that relationship is by us building relationships with them to share the gospel with them.

Copies of Dr. Michael Snow’s thesis, “A Model for Transition of Ministry in Declining Congregations” are available for purchase from CityVoices. ($10 per copy). Call (773) 477-8163, or contact roger@cityvoices.com

Contact: Dr. C. Michael Snow, Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, 161 West Road, Houston, TX 77388, ph: (281) 445-2203, ccsnow@pdq.net

********************

An Exodus to Vegas: Jewish professionals flock to the city, but being observant can be tough

By Jerry Hirsch , L A Times Staff Writer, May 13 2003

LAS VEGAS -- More than 3,000 years after the Exodus, the Jews have returned to the desert, this time settling into sprawling new subdivisions with greenbelts and swimming pools and taking jobs in gleaming office buildings. This is not some Zionist dream to convert the Judean desert into the new land of milk and honey. This is the 21st century version of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is Lost Wages, Sin City, the U.S. capital of the gambling and sex trades. It is also home to the fastest-growing Jewish population in the United States.

The statistics are staggering. Hundreds of Jews pour into Las Vegas each month, primarily to feed a shortage of doctors, teachers, accountants and other professionals created by the transformation of the once-small tourist town into the nation's fastest-growing metropolis. The Jewish community grew by nearly 20,000 residents, or 35%, to 75,000 from 1995 to 2000, according to the American Jewish Year Book, and is estimated to have crossed 80,000 this year, giving Las Vegas a Jewish population bigger than those of either Orange or San Diego counties.

Las Vegas has kosher restaurants, two Jewish newspapers and two Jewish grade schools. It has a Jewish mayor, a Jewish congresswoman and a cadre of Internet-ordained rabbis who cater to the town's 24-hour wedding trade. Several real estate agents specialize in finding homes for observant Jews within walking distance of any one of the community's 20 synagogues.

When pediatric gastroenterologist Howard Baron moved to Las Vegas a decade ago, his wife, Bonni, joined a co-op of several observant families to order kosher meat shipments from Los Angeles and Phoenix. Today Bonni can get just about any food product locally -- one Albertson's has even added a kosher meat counter and deli.

Baron, 42, came to Las Vegas because it was a city of opportunity, a place desperately in need of medical specialists like him. After finishing a fellowship at UCLA 10 years ago, he could have returned to his home state of Minnesota to join a medical partnership making $80,000 a year. Instead he accepted a $120,000 offer from a practice in Las Vegas, a salary made even more attractive because Nevada has no state income tax.

Baron, his wife and their young daughter, Alayna, settled in the Green Valley neighborhood of Las Vegas. Technically a part of Henderson, Nev., this community within an easy drive of the Strip is characterized by manicured lawns, bike paths and greenbelts, which, if not for the surrounding desert, could be mistaken for Irvine. A few years later, the Barons' second child, Zoe, was born.

Initially Baron wondered if his family could settle into the type of Jewish life he and Bonni had grown up with in Minneapolis. The family attends religious services at least once a week and keeps Friday nights clear, reserving the evening to light the traditional Sabbath candles and say the ritual blessings over wine and the braided challah bread.

"To be observant here presents challenges compared to other cities where generation after generation of Jewish families have lived," said Baron, who helped found his neighborhood synagogue, Midbar Kodesh (Holy Desert) Temple. "You have to be a pioneer. Your children can't just show up at youth activities, you have to create the youth group."

Siberia yes, Las Vegas no, was the long-standing policy of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the charismatic "Rebbe" of the ultra-orthodox Chabad movement. Schneerson barred his rabbis from venturing to the city despite their global mission to bring unobservant Jews back into the fold. But even Schneerson could not resist the opportunities waiting in Vegas. Though he rarely left the red brick Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn prior to his death in 1994, Schneerson understood the demographic changes taking place in the Nevada desert. In December 1990 he directed one of his students, Rabbi Shea Harlig, to move to Las Vegas as Chabad's shliach, or emissary. His orders: Get assimilated Jews to reconnect with their religion and find wealthy donors to fund the project. Harlig did both. Within a decade, three Chabad centers and an elementary school were built.

A survey by Chabad of the local synagogues found that just 10% of the community attended Yom Kippur services last year. Harlig estimates that at best just 4,000 to 5,000 residents are active participants in Las Vegas Jewish organizations and that most of the population is assimilated and nonreligious. "People who are willing to pack themselves up and move to Las Vegas are rarely searching for spirituality," said Harlig, whose religious zeal is not unlike that of a Christian missionary.

********************

Best of the Books:

“A Model for Transition of Ministry in Declining Congregations,” C. Michael Snow, D.Min. thesis, Concordia Theological Seminary, 1999, published by CityVoices, 2003.

Mike Snow’s complete and tremendous helpful thesis on effective ministry in declining congregations is NOW available from CityVoices. Call (773) 477-8163 or email roger@cityvoices.com to order copies for yourself and neighboring congregations. $10 per copy.

“United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race,” Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Michael Emerson, George Yancey, and Karen Chai Kim, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003.

From the title, “United by Faith” might strike some as the necessary sequel to Mike Emerson’s acclaimed “Divided by Faith,” (Oxford U. Press, 2000). But in effect, this book breaks new ground with a combination sociological and theological appeal for the importance of multiracial, multiethnic Christian congregations. Within their compact volume (212 pp) the authors provide us with a good deal of biblical/theological background as well as historical analysis of the problem of churches divided along racial and ethnic lines. Then they move into the emergence of multiracial congregations in North America, and begin their analysis of four multiracial congregations within our country.

This complete-style book finishes with optimism and great hope that multiracial churches can and must grow. In fact, as the authors state, such churches can help all of America get across many remaining hurdles to becoming a full multiracial society. Recommended reading for all of us who are serious about building solid churches in otherwise divided city neighborhoods. As yet, CityVoices is not carrying this book, but it can easily be purchased at Amazon.com.

********************

Thanks for reading CityVoices!

I hope you’ve enjoyed, and profited from, our discussion on transforming the mission and ministry of older urban churches. Contact us to purchase your copy of Dr. Mike Snow’s entire thesis, “A Model for Transition of Ministry in Declining Congregations.” It’s a piece that churches in many different settings are currently finding most helpful. E-mail any of your comments back to CityVoices at roger@cityvoices.com.

Remember to take a good look at the CityVoices website: www.cityvoices.com and browse through our growing number of resources.

To place orders on any resource materials we offer, call CityVoices at (773) 477-8163, or email roger@cityvoices.com

Thank You!

Roger Johnson – Editor, CityVoices (Chicago)