LEAP Goes to Chicago

On a cold winter’s day, four staff from the Christian Reformed Church's denominational offices drove to the Roseland neighborhood in Chicago on a mission to do one thing: listen.

The staff—representatives from Christian Reformed World Missions, the CRC Office of Social Justice, and World Renew—were brought together by LEAP (Linked Engagement  Action Programs) to meet with a select  group of African American young people, pastors, and youth leaders.

In Chicago on that wintry day, 20 people gathered in Greater Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church to offer their vision for intergenerational ministry and missions.

The vision they laid out—for churches actively engaged in using the gifts of all of their members—echoes a narrative familiar to many churches in the denomination. There remains the continuing need to set priorities and provide resources for missions.

With this in mind, the group in Chicago offered a specific challenge for World Missions and World Renew: you need to rethink how you engage North American ethnic minorities in missions.

Hearing this challenge and all that it implies was important and one reason LEAP brought people together for the meeting, says Shannon Jammal-Hollemans,  project developer and team leader for LEAP.

Jammal-Hollemans says an underlying value to the work of LEAP is the importance of leadership development through missions.

She says LEAP seeks to serve as a vehicle for young people, ages 14-30, to increase their vision, skills, and knowledge to become more responsible global Christian citizens.

“It is comprehensive in that it seeks to cover this wide span in a person’s life; but it is also segmented in that it will offer different things at different times,”  she says.

“LEAP is not seeking to create new programs, but to connect existing ones. It hopes to advance opportunities to learn from the ‘other’ by bringing greater synergy to international partnerships between World Missions, World Renew, and other organizations, and North American churches.”

The young people and leaders in Chicago told the CRC group, says  Jammal-Hollemans, that if the denomination values the participation of historically underrepresented ethnic groups, it needs to take on an active role of making this happen.

While World Missions and World Renew offer some opportunities for engagement in missions, the financial barriers to life-changing engagement in missions are great.

This was made clear by the fact that all of the pastors at the meeting were bi-vocational, managing full-time jobs in addition to serving their congregations.

For them, fundraising for missions just isn't feasible.

The issue is not that these urban churches are not interested in missions. It is that when churches are working to keep their lights on, serving the hungry on their block, and supporting parents trying to raise children in poverty, raising funds for missions is just not practical.

But rather than walking away from this challenge, the CRC would do well to remember, they said, that struggle and suffering unites us. No one is immune. And so when a culture often characterized by its own struggles and suffering goes to another culture characterized by suffering, the paradigm shifts from service “for” to service “with.”

“These churches have something to teach us about  how to do missions and community development in ways that are meaningful  and have a lasting impact on all involved.” says Jammal-Hollemans.

While how to do this remains unclear, World Missions and World Renew are partnering together through LEAP to continue to listen to these congregations and take the necessary steps to move forward, she says.