by Steve | Dec 28, 2009 | Archive - 2009, Magazine Articles
Archive: Letting Jesus build his Church
By Elizabeth Glass-Turner
Whether on the property of a declining, derelict United Methodist church, or in an old Winn-Dixie, Jorge Acevedo is haunted by the red letter words of Jesus’ great commission to go. Pastor of a church that has sprung from one location to three in the past thirteen years, Acevedo insists that having multiple locations was not part of the original plan. But as he and his congregation searched for ways to reach their community, what resulted was a unique series of opportunities between Grace Church and their target community: “the people nobody else wants.”
The phenomenon of big churches becoming small is a familiar one. Systemic congregational decline has been a problem for years. What is unfamiliar? A big church deliberately becoming small. And in adopting a struggling congregation, that’s exactly what Grace Church did. By taking on a shrinking location, the vision of the leadership was to turn decline into mission.
“When I first walked into the Ft. Myers Shores fellowship hall, it was filled with yard sale stuff,” Acevedo recalls. “The Sunday school classrooms were packed to the ceilings with it, because they needed to sell it to keep the church doors open. They had to do fish fries. So even though yes, we’re a big church, because we have three campuses, our second campus was a typical United Methodist church. In fact, it was smaller than the typical: we averaged about 40-50 in worship attendance when we got there.”
Acevedo acknowledges that small churches often have bad self-esteem. By adopting an existing, struggling church, Grace Church was able both to reach into a growing community and to encourage the folks who had been watching their congregation decline. With 25 people from Grace Church joining, the new site was energized, and after a work day, the church had been repainted, fixed up, cleaned, and was ready to be renamed as a part of the Grace Church community.
What were the results? That location now averages 400 people in worship on Sunday mornings, with a thriving Upward sports ministry that has introduced “the working poor” in the community to the lively congregation. As Acevedo insists, “the church was always supposed to be an irresistible force, a movement. It was the Jesus movement, it wasn’t anything other than the move of the kingdom of God into the world.”
With the flourishing results of the adoption of that congregation, Grace Church began to feel compelled to find other ways of expanding its reach into the surrounding communities. Having taken on decline in a nearby local church, Grace Church found itself taking on decline in its community when the opportunity came to purchase an empty Winn-Dixie. The new location provided a wealth of practical ministry to the surrounding area, increasing contact yet again with “the people nobody else wants.”
“The unique thing about Grace Church,” Acevedo describes, “is that our church reaches huge numbers of addicted, broken people. Last weekend, in our three Celebrate Recovery’s, we had 650 people. So, our church is filled with Harley Davidson people; the tattooed, the pierced; exotic dancers; folks who were drug dealers. Our vision and goal is to lower the crime rate in our city. And we know that by the grace of God we’re doing that, because we’re seeing felons—lifelong felons—experience the transforming work of Jesus in their lives.”
Acevedo acknowledges that the ministry gets messy. “We get taken. These guys who were doing well go back out and use, go back out and get arrested. We’ve done funerals for our addicts who decided to go out and use again, and the addiction killed them.”
But this is how Jorge Acevedo and his congregation feel led to serve. Rather than a program of growth in a relatively easy, white suburban neighborhood, he fervently believes that much of ministry is “letting Jesus build his church”—however that may look. In particular, the pastoral leadership experiences a blue-collar burden: the distinct call to reach the working poor. The average income at Grace Church is $42,000 a year, per household. The community has the highest foreclosure rate in America.
Acevedo is passionate about urging other churches to feel the compelling call to reach out to blue-collar folks. As he puts it, “carpet is cheap; people are precious.” The facilities at all three Grace Church sites are meant to be used and dirtied. This gritty, flesh-and-blood, hands-on outreach comes from a long season of reflection and discernment.
“I’m a good Wesleyan, and I believe in prevenient grace. I was completely unchurched. I was a pagan, alcoholic drug addict that Jesus found. I landed in the United Methodist church in Orlando. I believe the hand of God led me into the United Methodist Church, where I learned, but I didn’t apply to my life, that beautiful Wesleyan commitment to both personal piety and social holiness.”
Throughout the beginning of his ministry, Acevedo felt the tension between ministries of the soul and ministries of the body. “As I read and reread Wesley, there was no divide,” he realized. “It was something that we had just kind of drifted to, to this great divide.” It sunk into Acevedo that offering one or the other was offering only half of the gospel. “We’d see God clean up the insides of people, but the outsides were still damaged, broken, tattered, and torn. Addiction and sin had robbed their capacity to have a job, to get their education, to have food, to have medical care.”
“The gospel is about the full restoration of our lives,” he affirms. “It’s not just souls going to heaven. We want to help rescue people not only from the hell they’re heading to, but the hell they’re living in.”
It was a visit to Wesley’s famous New Rooms in Bristol, England, that broke Jorge Acevedo. While touring the site where Wesley had trained lay preachers, a fellow traveler asked the guide whether the old-fashioned, boxed-in pews had always been there. Acevedo recalls the response: “They said ‘no, when he was here, there were no pews. There were simply chairs and benches for morning services. And then afterwards, they would be moved out of the way, to either feed hungry children, or have a hospital clinic, etc.’ And I just began to sob, because I grew up in the Wesleyan/holiness tradition, where it was about saving souls, and I was passionate about that. But I realized that I wasn’t being true to my tradition, and more importantly, true to Scripture, if we weren’t holistic in our ministry.”
The resulting, robust ministry of meeting both physical and spiritual needs had another effect, as well. “I knew there were a bunch of people sitting in my church for whom the best expression of the love of Jesus was to hand out a bag of food. And we didn’t have that opportunity for them to do that, in our church. We weren’t helping those people grow to full devotion in Jesus, because we didn’t have any place for them to do that.” What Acevedo discovered was that the ministry of filling stomachs also filled souls—and not just of the recipients, but of those participating in the practical ministries.
As Grace Church continues to look for ways to let Jesus build his church, Acevedo still hears the haunting words of Scripture: “we didn’t only give you Jesus, but we gave you ourselves.”
“As a big church that averages 2,600-2,700 on three campuses, it’d be real easy to say, ‘Okay, we’re big enough. There are enough people that we’ve reached.’ But in my city, there are more lost, addicted, broken, hurting people that still haven’t heard the gospel. And I think we need to let Jesus build his church.”
Elizabeth Glass-Turner is a freelance writer, and a gardener with more enthusiasm than skill. Passionate about robust, sacramental faith and an avid reader of murder mysteries, she resides in central Kentucky with her husband and two dogs.
by Steve | Dec 28, 2009 | Archive - 2009, Magazine Articles
Archive: “Lord, send us the people nobody else wants”
By Elizabeth Glass Turner
Jorge Acevedo never pictured himself as the lead pastor of a multi-site congregation. A self-described “pagan” before his conversion, Acevedo came from an unchurched background before landing in the United Methodist Church. For 13 years, he’s been pastor of Grace Church in Cape Coral, Florida. Shortly after this interview with Elizabeth Glass-Turner, he was recognized as the 2009 Distinguished Evangelist of the United Methodist Church by The Foundation for Evangelism. As much as ever, he feels the compelling push of the Great Commission.
What sparked you to plant multiple campuses?
The whole multi-site strategy for us was really birthed out of a practical necessity. When I came in 1996, there was plenty of space and room to do everything. There weren’t a lot of people, and things weren’t going real well. On my first Sunday, we totaled 330 people in one service. Last weekend, we had somewhere between 2,600-2,700 people in 10 weekly services on three campuses. So things have changed quite a bit.
We came to realize that if we were going to grow, we had to grow on multiple campuses. At the time, I hadn’t seen any United Methodist churches that had done it, but I had seen other churches that had. I really wondered whether there was enough liberty and stretch in our United Methodist polity to do that, and found out that there was.
How did the transition get started?
In late 2003, I was having some conversations with my district superintendent about a dying, declining congregation in a nearby community that was starting to really explode in growth. There was a serious conversation about closing it. I asked the superintendent and bishop if we could adopt that campus. To my surprise, I got a full go-ahead. Then we went to work.
We had 25 people who were attending Cape Coral, who were driving 17 miles to come to our church. We had become a regional church. I asked those 25 people if they would prayerfully go back to their community to partner with this church, which would be a campus of Grace Church. It would have the same DNA, a different preacher, but the same kind of preaching. By the grace of God, that thing just started to grow. We’re now finishing our 5th year. We’re now running over 400 at that campus.
So honestly, at the time, it wasn’t the plan to be a multi-site church. It just seemed like the right thing to do. We started seeing things happen. We became multi-site by accident. That was really our first campus.
By 2005-2006, we started saying, “Hey, this multi-site thing will really work!” At the campus I was appointed to— Cape Coral—we were out of space. We could put about 1,500-1,800 in three services on Sunday morning; then we added a fourth service on Sunday morning. But that was about all we could do.
We had tried to buy property around us, and we couldn’t. Our leaders agreed that there was no way we could shove many more people into the campus and that the only way to expand was to become multi-site. That’s how it was a practical necessity for us. We seemed to be kind of stuck. We now believe that that was kind of a divine thing, and that God was really setting us up to be multi-site.
In 2006, we felt the leading of the Holy Spirit to buy a vacated Winn Dixie grocery store that was on 8 1/2 acres: 57,000 square feet under one roof.
Six and a half days a week, the resulting Grace Community Center is basically a holistic ministry center. On Sundays, because we had no more space a half-mile down the road, we asked about 150 leaders to come and start the new worship service there. We’re running between 250 and 300 at that service right now on Sunday mornings.
Why do you think many growing churches think primarily in terms of building programs?
I heard a guy one time at a multi-site conference say the only people who like big church buildings are pastors and architects!
What we discovered is that congregational diversity was a good thing; if we could keep the vision and the DNA the same, but put it in new wineskins, in different parts of the community—it would look a little different, but beneath the surface, it’s the same stuff. And that looks different at each of our campuses. We discovered that you can reach more people by using multiple sites.
There’s a church next door to us that has the same amount of acreage that we do. For years, we’d been trying to buy that property. Our hope was, we could build a 1,500 to 2,000 seat auditorium and park people. But as we began to do the math—what it would cost us to buy the property and build the sanctuary—it was two to three times more than it would cost us to buy an existing building that’s bigger than we could have ever built. So in terms of a stewardship issue, it seemed obvious.
But here is where the pastor’s ego has to be put aside. The pastor has to realize that he or she isn’t going to be standing in front of 1,500 to 2,000 people. And we’re not doing a video venue; we have live preaching at all our sites right now. We’re a real blue-collar congregation and we’re simple. We don’t have million dollar plasma screens. We all preach the same basic message—same Scripture, same points. We now teach as a teaching team, and our church is healthier because it’s not personality-driven. There’s an efficiency that happens with these multi-sites.
You’ve had people who are committed enough to the vision of the church that they’ve been willing to help launch the other campuses. There are a lot of great people who would be willing to do that kind of thing—but a lot of other people wouldn’t.
We still bump into that. For every one that went, there were 10, 15 who stayed. There are some brave, apostolic souls out there. Notice I said we sent 150, not 500, to start the new campus. I wish we had, frankly. It would open up space here, and it would really jump start the other one.
There are—and I think they’re in every church, by the way—those men and women who feel that calling. I think there are always those frontier, pioneer kind of people in every congregation. When I was in seminary, I was a youth pastor at a relatively new church. When the district started talking about starting a new congregation, a number of people who helped start my church were pretty excited to start going back to a high school and starting all over again. There are those people who have that kind of anointing in their life.
As the denomination talks more openly about church planting, what advice would you give?
First off, we need to figure out a way to engage the blue collar and the poor. I think we’ve got to go to places where nobody else is going. We’ve got to figure out a way to reach the urban areas and the rural areas where the church is not prevailing.
And then I think there’s something to be said about our strategy—for our United Methodist churches that have strong DNA, to do what we’ve done and adopt some of these dying, declining churches and help new life come again. Is it hard? It’s very hard. It’s a whole lot easier just to go out there and start a new thing in an upper/middle income white neighborhood and we’ll grow a whole bunch of big churches. We need to figure out a way to multiply our efforts with these large churches and go to other places that typically the church isn’t going to and, interestingly enough, our Muslim friends are. They’re going to the inner city.
What do you want to say to United Methodists who want to see denominational renewal, reform, and revival?
I have a guarded optimism about our denomination. My guardedness is birthed out of a concern that we tend to put all our renewal hopes in the general church. I’ve been to General Conference three times, and frankly I’m not convinced that renewal in our church is primarily going to come from there. I appreciate the crystal clear mission of the United Methodist Church. I believe the four focus areas are right on, but I also think that renewal is going to begin for our denomination in the local church. We’re going to have to have vibrant, vital, reproducible congregations of all sizes and in all places, led by God-honoring men and women who are passionately committed to personal piety and social holiness if renewal is going to come to the United Methodist Church.
I am hearing this kind of talk among the leaders of our church and this is a good thing! But we need to ask ourselves what we are personally doing in our local congregation that is significantly making an impact for the turn-around of the United Methodist Church. We can fight about church issues at annual conference and general conference, but we need to really ask ourselves what our local churches are doing to reverse the decline.
A number of years ago, I heard Bishop Peter Storey of Johannesburg, South Africa, talk about the hellish season of Apartheid in his country. One of the things he said was, “You can either shout at the darkness, or you can light a candle.” What I fear is that as United Methodists if all we do is shout at the darkness then nothing will change. Instead we need to light some candles. Vital, vibrant, healthy, and holy local churches will attract the lost and broken of our world. People will beat the doors down to be in a place where Kingdom life is being experienced. It’s the fire of early Methodists. It’s the fire of Pentecost.
Shouting at the darkness seems like such an alluring temptation. Do you see this same kind of challenge at the local level?
I have to deal with this every week. Some of my best friends in the church work in one of our ministries where they refill the pockets in the sanctuary chairs. One of the things we do is let people eat and drink in our sanctuary. We just don’t feel it’s a big deal for there to be coffee stains. And my friend emailed me and said, “Don’t you think that maybe we don’t have to have coffee in the sanctuary?” And I said, “It pains me to even disagree with you, but I have to lovingly disagree. Because it would be inconsistent for us to say that we’re a church for people that nobody else wants and nobody else sees, and then not do everything to be hospitable to them.”
We don’t have coffee in the sanctuary because we’re trying to be cool. We have coffee in the sanctuary because people who are barbarians, who are pagans, who are barely saved, if saved at all, we want them to be comfortable, to feel safe so that we can give them the dangerous message of Jesus.
How do you stay fresh and inspired?
Well, for me, there’s my personal devotional life, prayer time, and commitment to Christian community. I’ve been in a pastors group for about 16 years. We keep each other from taking long walks off short docks. We remind each other that we need to stay in the game, and that God and our city are depending on us to be faithful. I’m in two men’s groups here in my church. So for me, community is a big part of that, staying community-connected.
I don’t like the term, but on the “professional” side of my career, I am most concerned about giving the ministry away and not caring who gets the credit. I do believe that a lot of ministries are dwarfed by leaders who are afraid to give the ministry away. All the trails end up sneaking back to their desk. I’ve worked very hard and very diligently at trying to empower our staff and our leaders to own their ministry and to manage the problems that come with owning their ministry. If we don’t do that, it’s going to kill us. I struggle with that. Perfectionism and control are two areas of recovery for me right now. But I’ve just discovered by sheer exhaustion that I can’t juggle that many balls in the air.
So, I’m still a work in progress. I struggle every day with not allowing my clock to rob my time with God. I’d love to tell you I hit it seven days a week. It’s probably more like five days a week I get my devotions in, reading Scripture. And then I end up losing, and if I get too many strings of those days hooked up together, then I’m not of much use to God.
Elizabeth Glass-Turner is a freelance writer, and a gardener with more enthusiasm than skill. Passionate about robust, sacramental faith and an avid reader of murder mysteries, she resides in central Kentucky with her husband and two dogs.
