Multi-Site Goes Inner City

An affluent multi-site church can reach beyond the suburbs. Outreach recently talked with Campus Pastor Eli Orozco and his team to learn how their church, Community Christian Church in Naperville, Ill., broke the barriers of culture, race and geography to start a campus in a troubled neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

Outreach: Pastor Eli, how did you sense God calling you to start this new kind of site—a multi-cultural, inner city campus?

Pastor Eli Orozco: I was born and raised in Mexico City, but my family lived in Chicago. So I would visit throughout the year and get involved in serving different churches in the United States. Some of those churches actually flew me over just to help with drama, worship leading or other things for a Hispanic outreach they were doing.

Three years ago I was at an outreach event in Chicago over Christmas, and people were coming to the Lord in a powerful way. I thought, is this what God’s called me to? I had four days left before I went back to my home and business in Mexico, so I got down on my knees and prayed, “God, I’ve got four days before I go back to my normal life. I just feel like there’s something you might want me to do in Chicago. Please respond today to let me know if you want me here.”

About five minutes later, I received a phone call from Community Christian Church. They’d been praying for two-and-a-half years for a guy to do Spanish outreach for them, and someone had passed them my name.

During my interview, they shared their vision for a new multi-site project, one far bigger than just a church plant. This would be a way to figure out how multi-site church planting would look like in the Hispanic context. It would be a concept with amazing potential to shape the future, as Latino influence was exploding in the United States.

God made it clear that this was where he wanted me. So I began a ministry in the Pilsen neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

Outreach: What were some of the unique challenges and opportunities that made the Pilsen community a good fit for a new campus?

Pastor Eli: Well, it’s obviously a lot different than the suburbs, which was a risk for Community Christian. But the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods make up the second-largest concentration of Hispanics in the United States. They deal with a lot of immigration issues, justice issues, abuse from employers, hardcore gangs, drug abuse and domestic violence. In addition, the neighborhood has a Catholic church on every corner, providing a certain degree of resistance.

So there were lots of problems, but what we really needed was an entry point into the community. And three years ago, something tragic happened that opened doors for us—a drive-by shooting. A girl named Anita was killed.  We contacted the family and told them we not only wanted to contribute spiritually to the community, we wanted to address other things like academics, justice and community development. We longed to alleviate suffering in the community and help them out with support and recovery.

So we asked the family if we could hold a special service for their daughter. And more than 150 people attended the service! It was a powerful ceremony, and the first time we publicly had the chance to talk to the community about God’s love and hope. That was the catalyst for all the principals to open the doors of their schools, saying, ‘Hey, we love what you guys are doing, so if you need to use our space or our auditorium, it’s yours!”

That’s when God ultimately confirmed the Pilsen neighborhood was the area where He was calling us to start working. So we relocated to live among the people, which I strongly believe in.  I moved from the suburbs, Sam Menesses, our arts director, moved from Costa Rica, and Tony Escobar, who heads up our children’s program (Kids City) and arts, moved from Lincoln, Ill., to the city. On Sundays, we meet in a school called Orozco Community Academy. It’s kind of like a jewel in Pilsen because it’s a new facility—a state-of-the-art building.

Outreach: Oh, wow. How did you get that facility?

Pastor Eli: We were looking for a place to hold services, so we knocked on doors at lots of different schools and community centers. Everybody said, “No, no, no, we don’t know about church and spirituality. It doesn’t mix with what we do.”

At the time, I actually lived in front of Orozco Academy. I saw it every day, but I thought, “I can’t go in there because they are going to say no.”

But one day we just walked around the place and prayed about it. When we went in, the principal said, ‘You know what, it sounds like a good thing. Let’s explore it!’

We ended up getting to use the facility rent-free.

Outreach: What’s a typical service like there?

Pastor Eli: We have a Spanish service and an English service. Before we launched, we planned to just focus on a Spanish service for people who relocated from Mexico. But then, we realized we had a lot of second-, third- and fourth-generation Hispanics in the community who preferred the English language. So from day one, our campus launched with two services—one in Spanish and one in English.

For the English service, we also have Anglos, African Americans and Asians. It’s pretty diverse. The whole experience reflects the city, where you see all these colors and hear all these languages and different types of music. Our service is a little taste of that.

We have a 9:30 a.m. Sunday service in Spanish, and kids’ programming in English from 9:30-10:30. The second service in English starts at 11:00am, with our Spanish children’s programming.

Outreach: I’ve heard that all the Community Christian sites adhere to the same topic, or Big Idea, for their weekly services. How do you adapt that to your unique ethnic focus and setting?

Pastor Eli: We are aligned with the Big Idea, but we knew from the beginning that we weren’t going to have a typical new site. At the time, the Big Idea was designed by people in the suburbs, so it wasn’t going to be a perfect fit for any other type of campus. It helped that we didn’t have to spend our time developing all new materials, but we quickly realized the challenge of contextualizing them to fit an urban setting.

So we did a lot of planning. We had preview services. I started by grabbing some of the Big Ideas from past services and trying to play with them. I found it’s important to stick to the central idea that we’re teaching, but all the examples and illustrations should be based on what is going on in the community—what our people are going through. We have to be flexible to bring relevance to the Big Idea. For instance, we totally redo some of the videos and sketches for our audience.

As far as the music, we always align it with whatever we’re sharing—making it more relevant. Sam does a great job by adding Latin feel to it. Last weekend we had an acoustic set combining Latin and jazz. And we get people dancing and rocking out. That’s part of the ethos around here.

One of the best things about multi-site is the flexibility. We’re campus-specific to be able to provide that.

Outreach: Earlier you mentioned Sam Menesses, your arts director, and Tony Escobar, who heads up your children’s program and arts. Sam and Tony, how did you join the team?

Sam: I used to be Eli’s roommate in Mexico City. We’d left our fulltime jobs and were working on starting a ministry in Mexico, creating a Web portal for connecting Latin American pastors. But it was very clear to me that God was calling Eli to do Hispanic ministry in Chicago.

More than a year later, while I was living in Costa Rica, I got a call from him, saying, “Come, check this out.” And when I came to Chicago to see the ministry, I saw the work God was doing and the state of need the community was in. But I didn’t have a VISA to be able to work legally in the United States.

Well, God provided a VISA in an incredible way, and that was the sign that I was to go to Chicago. I moved three months later to head up creative arts at the Pilsen site. I take care of the music, the production and worship, sketches and video.

Tony: I didn’t know Eli or Sam before taking the job, but I grew up in the Pilsen neighborhood. When I got married, my wife and I wanted to get involved in urban missions and move back to Chicago, but we weren’t sure how.

One day, I got a call from Eli. He’d seen an article about me, and in it there was one line about how I wanted to do inner-city ministry. It was microscopic, almost! But he saw it, and asked if I’d be interested in coming to check out a church plant in Chicago. When I asked him, “Where is it?” and he said the Pilsen neighborhood, my jaw dropped to the floor.

Now my role is helping out with the family ministry—adult ministries, small groups and leading the children’s ministry team.

Outreach: What’s the single best ministry tactic you’ve tried in the inner city?

Pastor Eli: Well, we had tons of young adults and teens that were not interested in any kind of religion. But we noticed it was a very artistic community, with painters, poets and musicians, so we thought the best way to reach this group might be connecting through the arts. That’s when we started making open mic night one of our top outreach priorities.

When we arrived in the neighborhood, community open mic night was held at a café, and at first we just came to watch. And then out of nowhere, the owners asked us to start hosting it. We decided to contextualize the event to appeal more to artists by holding a poetry reading night, eclectic night, or short film night. That took us from five to seven attendees to a full house of 80 at the café every Wednesday. We presented it as a product of Community Artists, a branch of Community Christian Church.

Then, we focused on defining a follow-up method so we weren’t just letting these people go. On each table we placed sign-up sheets. Attendees could use them to sign up to perform that night, but we also included a space for an e-mail address or telephone number and any comments they wanted to add. We used this information to create a database of 240 different artists in the community. We said, “24 hours will not go by before we contact these people and thank them for coming, then tell them about what we’re doing in the community.”

 Thanks to our phone calls, people started participating in our community events such as Clean the Streets Day and family fairs. This has been the most successful venture for us. But we continue to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us how to identify with people, how to connect with them.

Outreach: After you’ve been through it, how would you recommend other churches prepare for starting a multi-cultural campus in a very different neighborhood than they’re used to?

Pastor Eli: Before you move into the neighborhood or start going in 20 different directions, establish what God is specifically calling you to do there. We knew that He was calling us to the Pilsen community, but we needed to determine a few key ministries to focus on. We expected challenges and prepared for them.

To get a better handle on the culture, do demographic studies to learn the economic styles, people styles, etc. Ask yourself, Who and where are the people in town we want to pursue, and how will we reach them?

Most importantly, tap into what the community really needs. Connect with people at their point of need. We did this through the open mic night for artists, which really helped establish our presence in the community. Make sure you have this connection point.

To learn more about the Pilsen campus, visit Pilsencommunity.org.

Don’t miss Leadership Network’s first Coast-to-Coast Multi-Site Conference coming up Feb. 5-6, 2007 in San Diego, California.

 

-Outreach magazine, "Web Exclusives," January/February 2007

 

©2007 Outreach Publishing. All rights Reserved. Usage and reprint permissions.