Learning Love from Partners, Porches, Chips & Salsa
- By Jenelle Denson, Grace Fellowship Community Church
This summer, some of us from Grace Fellowship Community Church were blessed to visit Casa San Dimas, a house run by InnerCHANGE, where we heard how God is using two faithful servants, Nettie and Joy, to care for gang youth and their families. They have become friends with youth in gangs, helping them care for their babies, welcoming them into their home and studying the bible with them; reminding them that God loves them. They also visit youth who are incarcerated, and show them that God has not forgotten them.
We were also able to visit the Church of the Sojourners and saw how they love and serve one another by living in communal homes. Their homes become places of refuge for the hurting and lost. By becoming a family and living in community they experience the joy in learning to live reconciled lives with one another. By worshiping together, serving each other and their neighborhood, modeling what repentance and forgiveness looks like, their lives show the wonderful gift that community is to us.
It is encouraging to see these Christians living out their calling in the places God has put them. The humility and acknowledgment of their need for God and the ways they see their own sinfulness, has allowed them to see non-believers as friends and potential partners in the gospel. Neighbors are not seen as people who have problems that need fixing, but people to be friends with, so that God can reveal himself through those friendships. Sitting on the front porch eating chips and salsa with gangsters seems almost too simple, not to mention dangerous, yet that is exactly what happens at Casa San Dimas, and it is what Jesus did and calls us to do too.
We were able to witness how great God’s imagination is when it comes to giving His people what they need to do His work. When God revealed to Nettie that He had gifted her with being a good big sister, her fears of inadequacy in working with kids in gangs began to melt away. This example helps me realize just how much God uses the things in us that we don’t even notice, not the fancy tools we see as necessary for successful ministry. I wonder, can we at GFCC also learn to let go of the limits we feel and the “tools” we think we need, and just let God use the gifts in us that we don’t even know we have? Can we learn to eat chips and salsa with our neighborhood youth and get to know them as friends?
Please pray for us at GFCC that we would open ourselves up to new friends and partners in the gospel as we live side by side with our neighbors on 16th street. Pray also that we would share the joy of living lives of repentance and forgiveness with them. As we remember what God is doing in other churches and ministries, it is exciting to think about what God will do with us too. If you ever get the chance to visit other churches and ministries where you live to see what God is doing through them, I encourage you to jump at the chance.
Just the beginning
Welcome to the GRIDD. Whether you want to learn more about the city, see how God is at work in and through His Church, or to simply catch up with what we’re up to and what we’re thinking about these days, we want the GRIDD to be of service.