The challenge of church planting

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, February 15th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: church planting.

Between 2011 and 2017, the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area saw about 220 new churches planted. But only three of those church plants were in poor neighborhoods.

BROWN: Planting churches in distressed communities is a unique challenge and traditional church planting strategies may not be up to it. So a new movement of church planters is trying to step up. WORLD Associate Correspondent Jeff Palomino has the story of one such effort.

WORSHIP: Praise the Lord everybody, Praise the Lord, Come on and Praise Your Savior, Your God who is worthy, the fruit of your lips, the clap of your hands…

JEFF PALOMINO, REPORTER: It’s Sunday at Congress Heights Community Church.

AUDIO: [WORSHIP]

Today there’ll be worship, scripture readings, prayer, and a sermon. Probably sounds a lot like your church, right? But did this happen to your pastor this week?

ROULHAC: I mean, just even last night, I was preparing for the sermon trying to finish up the sermon, I'm downstairs, working and we hear, like 50 rounds of shots..

That’s Josh Roulhac, the lead pastor.

ROULHAC: And thankfully, my understanding and seeing on the news, it didn't seem like anybody got hit by that. But there have been times where people have gotten hit. And so gun violence is plaguing our neighborhood.

Washington D.C is divided into eight areas called “Wards.” Congress Heights is in Ward 8. Over 91 percent of the ward’s residents are black, and it accounts for 62% of all homicides in the city. But gun violence isn’t the only sign of distress.

ROULHAC: Ward 8 in particular is, like, the most economically depressed ward of all the wards, right?

Drugs and crime come tied to the community’s economic depression…but there are other factors, too.

ROULHAC: I mean, we have like, one grocery store here in our neighborhood that serves the whole Ward eight, and the area is considered a food desert. And so, so distressed in that sense.

Then there’s education and home life.

ROULHAC: I think the kids are trying to do as best as they can, but they're coming in with so many burdens they have a single parent at home, maybe they haven't had a meal that morning…

Many church plants focus on a certain demographic, like young families or college students. Or a certain location, like a well-off suburb.

Those are praiseworthy endeavors, but that style of church planting doesn’t really work in distressed communities like Congress Heights.

ONWUCHEKWA: A lot of church planting is aimed at communities where the makeup of the community is like soil that already has all the basic nutrients.

That’s John Onwuchekwa. He’s the Co-Director of the Crete Collective, a new network aimed at planting churches in distressed and neglected communities.

So, what does it look like to plant a church in a neighborhood like Congress Heights?

First, a lot of ground-breaking needs to happen ahead of time. Onwucheckwa calls this “church-plowing.” He gives an example of his former church in West Atlanta.

ONWUCHEKWA: A group of folks on my team moved into the community that we planted our church in in 2015. And they actually started in 2011, buying homes, planting roots, helping to deal with things like drugs, and prostitution, and safety and failing schools and all of these things. And it really took them four years to plow and to build the type of trust in the community that when they said, We're getting ready to plant a church here, the community was on board.

This “long-view” leads to a related challenge: financial self-sustainability. Here’s Josh Roulhac again.

ROULHAC: For us self sustainability is a down the road thing. Some church planting networks may be like, hey, we'll support you for three years. And then we're by that time three years, you should have 300 members. And you should have, you should be able to afford everything on your own. That may not happen, that may not ever happen.

In 2020, Roulhac took a church planting residency with a congregation in southeast DC. That’s when the idea to plant a church in Congress Heights got started.

Roulhac and a core team started praying and planning. They began to connect with the neighborhood. Helping with clean up days and back to school events.

ROULHAC: There was an event over the summer…this group put on and it was a bunch of community partners out in the community. And so we had a table there…We were the only church. And we didn't have some of the things that other organizations were offering. But we did have Jesus, we were offering Jesus and he's enough. And we're passing out Bibles. And they went like hotcakes.

Church planting in distressed communities has to be creative. Crete Collective’s John Onwucheckwa talks about Galatians Chapter 2, where Paul was asked to “remember the poor.”

ONWUCHEKWA: I think we've so often taken the word,”Remember the poor,” and flattened it and reduced it to where it's only charity. And in the world that we live in, in the churches that we have, there's so many creative ways that we can remember the poor.

Roulhac explains how this works in Congress Heights:

ROULHAC: In our discipling efforts, want to give people Jesus, want to get people Jesus, that's what we're gonna give them. That's their only hope. At the same time, some may need medicine…some might need some counseling. And that's okay. Counseling is a gift from God. Might need to attend an AA meeting. And so we partner with other organizations, who specialize in food insecurity, who specialize in mental health and counseling, that's where we also have to go in our discipling efforts…

WORSHIP: Jesus, Jesus the name above every other name, Jesus, the only one who could save…

Today, Congress Height Community Church meets in the borrowed sanctuary of another church. It’s small, but that’s okay. Roulhac’s in no rush.

For now, it’s enough that there’s a brand new, gospel-preaching, hope-giving church in a community that didn’t have one.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jeff Palomino in Ward 8 of Washington, D.C.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.