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Greatest Hit: Making Space to Engage Our Neighbors

This fall, in addition to sharing reflections on “what is saving your ministry right now?”, we are also bringing back some of our most popular posts over the last couple of years. We hope these “greatest hits” will allow you new insight in this busy time of year. We invite you to join the conversation here, on Facebook, or Twitter!

This post on multicultural ministry and community engagement is one of our most popular posts in the history of the NEXT Church blog. We’ve updated it slightly below in hopes it becomes a fresh resource as you look towards December.

By Rachel Triska

Several weeks ago, I was sitting in our coffee bar during an event and overheard a conversation that made me smile. A tech company had brought 125 of their employees from across the globe to our space for a major annual meeting. One of the guests was visiting with Kevin (a Dallas cop who runs security for all our events). The gentleman asked Kevin, “So what is this place?” Kevin began to give him our elevator pitch, “Life in Deep Ellum is a cultural center built for the artistic, social, economic and spiritual benefit of Deep Ellum and urban Dallas.” Then he added, “Basically, it’s a church that opens up to the community for a lot of different things. I’m here all the time – art shows, corporate events, fundraisers.” To which the gentleman responded, “You could have asked me for a list of twenty guesses – a church would not have been one of them.”

From the Life in Deep Ellum Facebook page

From the Life in Deep Ellum Facebook page

Joel and I have been pastoring together at Life in Deep Ellum for almost six years. Deep Ellum is a historic neighborhood just outside downtown Dallas. It’s often described as the Brooklyn of the South. Basically, it’s a small neighborhood with a big personality – lots of artists, entrepreneurs and folks who pride themselves on not needing God.

It’s that last characteristic that forced us to think differently about how to engage our neighborhood – traditional methods of outreach were not working. It was my husband who first pointed out what this neighborhood was forcing us to do. It forced us to stop thinking like pastors and start thinking like missionaries.

He was absolutely right. We found that to connect with our neighborhood we had to slow down enough to learn the language, the customs, how to appreciate their sense of humor. Some people might say we’ve kind of gone native. Ministering in this neighborhood certainly changed us.

What I love about thinking like a missionary is it taught me to think beyond Sundays. To think about how we might engage our neighbors seven days a week. That’s how we reached the decision to operate as a cultural center Monday-Friday.

Every Sunday we stack all the chairs in our venue (worship space) and put them away. Our band clears the stage. We take down all our church-specific signage. We clear out because we are making space to engage our neighbors. Those very same neighbors who say they will never go to church but hang out with us in our building all the time. On Tuesday nights a dance company takes over the space. Mondays and Wednesdays we host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In the next few weeks we’ll host a book launch for a local author, a closing reception for an art exhibit and have 500 teens in for a spoken word event.

Each year, not including Sundays, we see between 10,000 and 20,000 people come through our building. Our coffee shop will serve somewhere around 35,000 cups of coffee this year.

A lot can happen when we think beyond Sundays. One of our friends who first engaged with us via community events says, “What happens here Monday through Friday is why I gave Sundays a chance. And what happens here on Sundays restored my faith in what Christian community can be.”

We use Monday through Friday as an opportunity to redefine for people what it looks like to be the Church on mission. And often, it does open their hearts to what happens on Sunday.


Rachel Triska is the Chief Practicioner at Life in Deep Ellum. Rachel enjoys running, reading the classics, and expressing her inner child while playing with her two daughters. rachel@lifeindeepellum.com

 

Looking for more? Check out the resources below from NEXT:

Life in Deep Ellum: A Prophetic Proclamation

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. During April, as we continue to process the 2015 National Gathering, Joe Clifford is curating a month of blog posts exploring multiculturalism in the NEXT Church. Join the conversation here, on Facebook, orTwitter!

by Joel Triska

In 2006, the Dallas Observer heralded the front page story, Deep Sixed: Reports of Deep Ellum’s death are exaggerated, but not by much. The story was about our beloved neighborhood, Deep Ellum (pronounced eL-uhm). In the early 1900’s, Deep Ellum was a place for the marginalized. If you followed Elm Street out of downtown Dallas, it plummeted into a world of saloons, small shops, and jazz musicians. Since it’s inhabitants were mostly freed slaves and Jewish immigrants, the community became known as “Deep” in reference to it’s location from downtown and “Ellum”for it’s colloquial pronunciation of Elm.

Deep Ellum has seen its heydays, but in 2006 we were dying. That’s when our church decided to take a very different approach to serving our neighborhood. Typically, the Church has looked for what is broken in a culture and strove to fix it. This has led to many beautiful developments in education, confronting crime, and addressing poverty. Of course, all of these efforts honor God and have their place in the Kingdom. However, we decided to focus our intentions on the strengths of the neighborhood instead.

In partnership with the Sociology department at Baylor University, we conducted a massive survey of Deep Ellum. Instead of looking for the weaknesses, we looked for the strengths. So after about 1,000 street interviews, Baylor helped us compile the data and shrunk it down to four strengths – four community assets. For us, these strengths represented the areas where the Spirit of God was already at work in our neighborhood. So by supporting these community assets, we were partnering with God’s dream for Deep Ellum.

Armed with this valuable information, we painfully let go of our old strategies. They weren’t really working anyways, so we might as well try something new, right? After some fundraising, we remodeled our space into a Cultural Center built on four pillars: Art, Music, Commerce (or entrepreneurship), and Community. Four community assets. In addition, as the Dallas Observer announced the death of Deep Ellum, we strategically named our church Life in Deep Ellum. It was a prophetic proclamation over our community. While others saw decay, we spoke life.

Our building has a coffee shop which serves as a hub for the community. It offers hospitality to the many patrons we serve throughout the week. We also curate an art gallery which strives to find local artists and give them their first solo exhibit. We lease space to business startups, host community events/concerts, and all the time hold church services on Sundays. Like the New Testament teaches, we don’t equate “church” with a building. Our people are the church. Our building is our mission.

This is the short version of how our church became an incarnational faith community – reflecting the ethos of our surroundings. In Texas, churches have a tendency to stick out with their sprawling parking lots which remain empty Monday through Saturday. The irreligious often see them as intrusions into the landscape. It is our heart to challenge the American Church to work with their neighbors so they can be integrated into the fabric of their context. When we engage our neighbors, we will naturally find ways to connect. New programs will launch and new partnerships will form. Often, this will slowly fill up our parking lots during the week, too. The question we like to ask others (and continually ask ourselves) is this: What if we could be a church not just in the community, but a church for the community? The answer will look different for us all, but it also has the power of reconnecting the Christian faith with an increasingly post-Christian context.


JoelTriskaJoel Triska is the Resident Philosopher at Life in Deep Ellum, a cultural center built for the artistic, social, economic and spiritual benefit of Deep Ellum and urban Dallas. He also co-pastors The Gathering at Life in Deep Ellum with her wife Rachel. Their work in Deep Ellum has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal.

Making Space to Engage Our Neighbors

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. During April, as we continue to process the 2015 National Gathering, Joe Clifford is curating a month of blog posts exploring multiculturalism in the NEXT Church. Join the conversation here, on Facebook, orTwitter!

By Rachel Triska

Several weeks ago, I was sitting in our coffee bar during an event and overheard a conversation that made me smile. A tech company had brought 125 of their employees from across the globe to our space for a major annual meeting. One of the guests was visiting with Kevin (a Dallas cop who runs security for all our events). The gentleman asked Kevin, “So what is this place?” Kevin began to give him our elevator pitch, “Life in Deep Ellum is a cultural center built for the artistic, social, economic and spiritual benefit of Deep Ellum and urban Dallas.” Then he added, “Basically, it’s a church that opens up to the community for a lot of different things. I’m here all the time – art shows, corporate events, fundraisers.” To which the gentleman responded, “You could have asked me for a list of twenty guesses – a church would not have been one of them.”

From the Life in Deep Ellum   Facebook page

From the Life in Deep Ellum Facebook page

Joel and I have been pastoring together at Life in Deep Ellum for almost six years. Deep Ellum is a historic neighborhood just outside downtown Dallas. It’s often described as the Brooklyn of the South. Basically, it’s a small neighborhood with a big personality – lots of artists, entrepreneurs and folks who pride themselves on not needing God.

It’s that last characteristic that forced us to think differently about how to engage our neighborhood – traditional methods of outreach were not working. It was my husband who first pointed out what this neighborhood was forcing us to do. It forced us to stop thinking like pastors and start thinking like missionaries.

He was absolutely right. We found that to connect with our neighborhood we had to slow down enough to learn the language, the customs, how to appreciate their sense of humor. Some people might say we’ve kind of gone native. Ministering in this neighborhood certainly changed us.

What I love about thinking like a missionary is it taught me to think beyond Sundays. To think about how we might engage our neighbors seven days a week. That’s how we reached the decision to operate as a cultural center Monday-Friday.

Every Sunday we stack all the chairs in our venue (worship space) and put them away. Our band clears the stage. We take down all our church-specific signage. We clear out because we are making space to engage our neighbors. Those very same neighbors who say they will never go to church but hang out with us in our building all the time. On Tuesday nights a dance company takes over the space. Mondays and Wednesdays we host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In the next few weeks we’ll host a book launch for a local author, a closing reception for an art exhibit and have 500 teens in for a spoken word event.

Each year, not including Sundays, we see between 10,000 and 20,000 people come through our building. Our coffee shop will serve somewhere around 35,000 cups of coffee this year.

A lot can happen when we think beyond Sundays. One of our friends who first engaged with us via community events says, “What happens here Monday through Friday is why I gave Sundays a chance. And what happens here on Sundays restored my faith in what Christian community can be.”

We use Monday through Friday as an opportunity to redefine for people what it looks like to be the Church on mission. And often, it does open their hearts to what happens on Sunday.


Rachel Triska is the Chief Practicioner at Life in Deep Ellum. Rachel enjoys running, reading the classics, and expressing her inner child while playing with her two daughters. rachel@lifeindeepellum.com