Ministry in Fresno, California

I am grateful to be the Preaching Minister of the Woodward Park Church of Christ in Fresno, California. The Woodward Park family has blessed my family by taking us in and loving us as if we were their very own. It is humbling, rewarding, and eternally gratifying.

My family has now lived in California for half-a-year. The acclimation to California culture hasn't been too difficult; grasping the challenges of ministry in this city and culture, on the other hand, continues to stretch and challenge me in ways ministry in the south never did.

Consider, for example, the Fresno metropolitan area is home to over 1,000,000 people and is one of the fastest growing metro areas in California. According to a CSU-Fresno website, over 100 different languages have been identified within Fresno, making it one of, if not the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States (at Woodward Park alone, we have assemblies for English, Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong while supporting an inner-city church where the services are held in Spanish). According to an October, 2005 Brookings Institute study, Fresno was ranked as the city with the highest percentage of those living below the federal poverty threshold in concentrated areas (neighborhood clusters). In city-wide poverty rankings, Fresno ranks 16th among the nation's largest 50 cities.

To help grasp the sociological ramifications of life in Fresno as a window to ministry need, I have immersed myself in readings on California demography in general and Fresno county demography in particular. I'm learning more than I ever dreamed so as to better understand how to serve as an equipped minister in this multiracial, multicultural city.

Last Friday at Borders, I picked up Mexifornia: A State of Becoming and devoured the insights in the book. Mexifornia is written by current Stanford classicist professor Victor Davis Hanson, a resident of Selma (17 miles south of Fresno on CA-99), and addresses the immigration issue and its impact on life in Calfornia. Using his hometown of Selma as his laboratory, Hanson explores how life has changed in one small, central valley town in the course of his lifetime:

"I write here from the perspective of a farmer whose social world has changed so radically, so quickly that it no longer exists. Three decades ago my hometown of Selma was still a sleepy little town in central California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the coast and the high Sierra. It was a close-knit community of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians whose parents or grandparents had once migrated from Denmark, Sweden, Armenia, Japan, India, Mexico and almost every other country in the world, to farm some of the richest soil in the world. Selma's economy used to be sustained by agriculture -- in the glory years before the advent of low prices caused by globalization, vertically integrated corporations and highly productive high-tech agribusiness -- and supplemented by commuters who worked in nearby Fresno. The air was clear enough that you could see the lower Sierra Nevada, forty miles away, about half the year on average, not a mere four or five days following a big storm, as is now the case.

Sociologists call a small, cohesive town like the old Selma a 'face-to-face community.' As a small boy I used to dread being stopped and greeted by ten or so noisy Selmans every time I entered town. Now I wish I actually knew someone among the many I see.

The offspring of Selma's immigrant famers learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing of the old country and little of the old language. Now Selma is an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, and is expanding at an unchecked pace...

Time passes; things must change. And so I accept transformations that are inevitable: a price-cutting Wal-Mart would drive out our third-generation Japenese-owned nursery, and multinational agribusiness would overwhelm the once prosperous Sikh family farm down the road. While I saw all this happening as if by time lapse, I hoped that the new Selma would at lease retain the language, customs, laws and multiracial but unicultural flavor of the old. But it has not" (1-2).

Hanson captures well the sentiment of many long-time Fresnans who've lived through the changing demographic of their home city. To walk through the mall or browse the aisles of Target reveals a city unlike any I've ever experienced: a veritable melting pot of cultures, languages and peoples who've descended on central Calfornia.

As a minister and disciple of Jesus, my heavenly citizenship must frame the way I see every person. I cannot look upon others as an impediment to my lifestyle; no, I give thanks to God that he is bringing the nations to our doorstep.

Our challenges are great. The needs of our city, immense. But I have faith that the God who enabled a band of twelve men to change the world in their lifetime can enable a strong, healthy congregation like Woodward Park to reach their city with the gospel by living out the mission of Jesus everyday.

The King's Dream, Part Three

Michael Lewis has written one of my favorite all-time books, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. I call it a favorite, not because of my affinity for the subject of the book -- the Oakland Athletics baseball team -- but my appreciation for the model Billy Beane and company have installed in building their organization. The success of the A's model has been had to argue against, especially in the last ten years. Their success as as small-market franchise in game marred by fiscal inequities has been incredible.

Lewis has become intrigued, it seems, with sports stories that unearth deeper issues of culture and society. He's done it again in The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game as he reveals why the left tackle on the offensive line has become, in today's NFL, the second most significant position on the field -- second only to the quarterback.

Lewis's story is not solely the evolution of a game as he tells the gripping story of Michael Oher. I confess as I share the following review that I have not read the book (I've read several different reviews, including an extensive one in Reader's Digest, and heard an extensive interview of Lewis on Jim Rome's show). The following words from Mike Cope capture the essence of the story...and the essence of the King's Dream:

"It’s the story of Memphis — a city with an invisible Berlin Wall between white and black. Lewis talks about the Christian academies that sprang up quickly with forced integration so wealthy white children wouldn’t have to go to school with black children. He talks about the pilgrimage east — as far away from the problems of West Memphis as possible.

But this story is specifically told through one young man: Michael Oher. He was a child who seemed to have no hope.

He was one of ten children of a crack cocaine-addicted mother. At times they had no shelter. When asked what he remembers about his first years of life, Michael says: “Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.”

For a few years they lived in Hurt Village — a community of about 1000 with no — count them, ZERO — two-parent families. Seventy-five percent of the adults there had some mental illness. Drug lords waited with crack in hand at the first of the month when welfare checks arrived in the mail.

By the time he was 15, Michael Oher hadn’t been to school much. He’d been tested, and his IQ came out to be 80.

But all that changed. I’ll leave the details for you to enjoy the book. But the short story is this: he fell victim to the love and nurture of one wealthy, white family in East Memphis. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (a former basketball player and a former cheerleader at Ole Miss) welcomed him into their family. He suddenly had a family, including a sister his age and a younger brother. He had a school to attend — Briarcrest Christian School. He had clothes and food. His IQ rose from 80 to 110.

Whether you’re a football fan or not, you’ll love the chapters on the recruiting of Michael Oher. Every college coach in the country began salivating when he saw tapes of Oher treating large opponents as if they weren’t there. In one game Briarcrest played, every offensive play consisted of giving the ball to the running back and telling him to stay behind Oher until he heard a whistle. They destroyed their opponent on that one play.

This is a hard book because of the despair. You realize that most people in the Hurt Villages of our inner cities don’t have a Tuohy family to help them.

But it’s also an inspiring read because this one family — this one white, wealthy, Evangelical family — brought a monstrous kid into their lives before anyone knew he had athletic super-talent. He was lost, and Leigh Anne Tuohy was going to care for him."

The King's Dream, Part Two

Yesterday, courtesy of the holiday, Mandy and I took the girls to Shaver Lake. Shaver Lake is a resplendent, picturesque hamlet in the Sierra Nevadas, elevation over 5000 feet. The climb from the Valley floor to the apex of the mountains is such a testimony to God's creative genius. We had a blast playing in the snow and hiking trails. As Trae pointed out, yesterday was Tori's first experience with snow and she loved it!

It hit me yesterday on the drive home how neat a place Fresno really is. In Arkansas, it's a 24-hour drive west to Colorado to snowski and an 8-hour drive southeast to Alabama and Florida to play on the beach. From Fresno, you can be in the snow in 40 minutes (east) and on the beach in 2 1/2 hours (west).

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I grew up in a segregated town. Benton, Arkansas during my youth was a city with a clear line of demarcation: the "coloreds" lived across the railroad tracks in the Southside community.

The movie theater in my hometown was a clever two-level, two-screened cinema. I say "clever" because the two-level, two-screen setup of my youth masked the fact that when my parents were young, the building housed two distinct theatres: the bottom level for the white folk and the upper level for the black folk.

The Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (which I alluded to yesterday, see here), helped to rectify some of the sad heritage of racial discrimination and civil inequity. Still, though, some of that heritage remains, even if unspoken in the way the races still remain relatively segregated like in my hometown.

When I was a teenager, I joined up with a couple of other guys in the youth group and we determined to build a bridge with the youth group in the Southside community of Benton. What began as an effort to build bridges between kids turned into a larger project. We made friends, not only with the teens, but with every member in the Johnson Street Church of Christ. To this day, I give much credit for my ministry to my friends at Johnson Street who loved me, encouraged me and gave me an open invitation to preach.

Ironically, Johnson Street was founded in the 60's as a "mission point" for my home church. A building was built across the tracks where the African-American Christians in my hometown could worship.

Why? Why did disciples of Jesus allow the segregation of the city to become the model for church?

If I could hop in a time machine and go back and change one decision, it would be the decision the church of my youth made in planting the Johnson Street church across town. Why? Because in a city that needed a shining light for the equality of all men, the church stood positioned to make that statement...and decided instead to punt.

Many through the years have echoed words originally attributed to Dr. King: "it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning."

Thankfully, that isn't true at Woodward Park.

My personal history doesn't mirror our right-now challenge in ministry in Fresno. In the South, the issue is color, black-and-white (although the Latino population is booming throughout the South). In Fresno, California, the issue doesn't seem to be color because every hue of skin on earth can be found here (and I'll devote my blog tomorrow to some statistical analysis of that reality). People in Fresno have long since gotten used to living in neighborhoods where every family isn't a pigmented mirror image. Parents have long since gotten used to the fact that their children's class at school will have descendants from every continent.

Our right-now challenge in Fresno isn't the color of skin because God has brought the nations to our doorstep. Our right now challenge is to affirm the King's Dream: that all men are created equal and all men and women have the same access to salvation in Jesus Christ.

The King's Dream

Last Thursday, Mandy and I went to see Freedom Writers, the gripping true story of rookie teacher Erin Gruwell. Gruwell is hired to teach freshmen English at an integrated Long Beach high school two years after the infamous L.A. riots.

Her class is an eclectic tapestry of faces and races. The atmosphere is charged with territorial rivalry. For her students, caught up in the gangs of Long Beach, their main ambition is to survive another day, literally. Learning English is the farthest thing on their minds.

Through some innovative methods, Gruwell not only accomplishes the mission given her by the school district, she helps bridge the racial gap dividing her students. Her success and innovative methods have led to the founding of the Freedom Writers Foundation.

40 years ago, another innovator was blazing a trail across the American South. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the primary voice of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's, dreamed of a day in which every American was evaluated "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Dr. King's life was cut short when, in 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, but his legacy endures.

Today, our nation pauses from the routine of everyday life to reflect and remember the life and legacy of Dr. King.

What Gruwell and Dr. King accomplished in their life's mission was not simply a dream rooted in their own values; their dream was born of the King of Kings' dream. Jesus himself dreamed of a kingdom where people saw one another as God does. When Samuel was sent by God to size up the sons of Jesse to anoint the next king of Israel, we discover "the LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16.7). To see people not on the basis of the color of their skin but by the content of their character is to see people as God does.

For the next few days, I want to devote my blogs to pursuing the implications of living as color-blind disciples of Jesus in a multiracial, multiethnic world. Government intervention, such as the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, can promote behavioral change but only the dream of Jesus can prompt attitude change and new vision, causing us to see every human being as God does -- as a valued soul created in the image of God.

Lions, Languages and Longings

So, what are you Arkansans doing today? Let me guess, waiting in exhaustively long lines at the grocery store check-out?

I see the weatherman is calling for 2-4 inches of snow to blanket the Hot Springs area today and tonight, which should make tomorrow night's semifinal between Don Phillips's #2 Jessieville Lions and the 3rd ranked Bearden Bears a classic.

Last week, I picked Jessieville to win by seven and sure enough, they pulled out a last-minute, 28-21 win. The last time Jessieville made it to the semifinals (two years ago), they were knocked off by Charleston, 10-0.

Check back tomorrow for my pick. I've gotta wait and see if the weatherman's forecast is accurate as I think the weather and field conditions will play a factor.

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There is a really good article that appeared in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle unpacking the multicultural mosaic of California. 30% of all non-English speaking residents in the United States reside in California. The article highlights the demands placed on the educational system of California to teach English, but I think the ramifications identified in the article have major implications for those of us seeking to minister effectively in such a diverse culture.

I am grateful that at Woodward Park, we offer assemblies for the Cambodian, Hmong and Lao in their native tongue, in addition to our English assemblies.

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I love this quote in Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat illustrating the high-demand for connectivity during the infancy boom of the Internet.

"You had to go out and get a PC and a dial-up modem. The skeptics all said, 'It takes people a long time to change their habits and learn a new technology.' (But) people did it very quickly, and ten years later there were eight hundred million people on the Internet. The reason? 'People will change their habits quickly when they have a strong reason to do so, and people have an innate urge to connect with other people, and when you give people a new way to connect with other people, they will punch through any technical barrier, they will learn new languages -- people are wired to want to connect with other people and they find it objectionable not to be able to" (68).

Forgive my presumption, but isn't the church especially created by God to provide the very connectivity that the Internet offers? If, as Friedman suggests, humans have an "innate urge to connect with other people," then we in the church are ideally suited to provide a connection point with God and with other people.