Church planter Brian McWethy pastors a 1-year-old church in Amboy, Ill. Dan Ghramm and Alex Ennes stand outside Hilarities Comedy Club in Cleveland’s E. 4th entertainment district. Ghramm pastors Gateway West Church and Ennes is the pastor of Gateway Church, which meets Sunday mornings at the comedy club. Photos by Jim Whitmer and Gus Chan/Genesis Photos
In the Midwest lostness is surprisingly high—75 percent according to North American Mission Board statistics. Evangelical churches are scarce. (It’s actually three times easier to find a bar than a Southern Baptist church in the region.)
Southern Baptists have been working in the region since the 1950s. But according to Steve Davis, NAMB’s regional vice president for the Midwest, early efforts focused on starting churches for primarily transplanted Southerners. Davis, a native of Indiana, says he’s heard many of these early Southern Baptists in the Midwest talk about going to grocery stores and inviting people who bought grits or had southern license plates to church.
While it might have been a good way to find people with an inclination to attend a Southern Baptist church, it often led to churches out of sync with the communities they served.
“They became colonies of the South in the North—and they didn’t reach the indigenous people,” Davis says. “When the jobs started drying up or people retired and went back to the old homestead in the South, a lot of these churches were left struggling.”
Today, Davis believes the region has a desperate need for a diverse lot of new churches that will reach the increasingly diverse region—and reach them in their own cultural context.
Grace Fellowship Church-Amboy and Alex Ennes’ Gateway represent those diverse ways Southern Baptists are reaching their communities through church planting. Grace Fellowship-Amboy, which was started as a campus of a larger church but plans someday to become autonomous, focuses on demonstrating Christ’s love in practical ways in the rural community—whether that’s handing out cold water and popsicles on a hot day or helping a person who needs a hand up.
“Time is as short as ever,” McWethy says. “We can’t wait for them to come to us. We’ve got to meet them where they are and show them how much Christ loves them.”
Ennes has plans for a new coffee shop that’ll be a place where Gateway members can build evangelistic relationships in downtown Cleveland and where urban professionals can come to discover how they can contribute to their community.
Fast facts
The Chicagoland area contains nearly 10 million people in three states— Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana—putting it in the top 25 largest metropolitan areas in the world. Close to one in five people who live in the Chicago Metro area are foreign-born.
There are more bars per capita than churches per capita in the Midwest. Five of the top seven states in bars per capita are in the Midwest.
Source:
www.floatingsheep.org
Nearly 35 percent of Cleveland residents lived below the poverty line in 2009 according to U.S. Census data. That’s the second highest rate of any city in the country (Detroit is first). St. Louis is the fifth poorest city in America according to that statistic.
Source: The New York Post
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