In this episode we talk about unique disciple-making communities in urban centres. Kevin shares some creative ideas on outreach and paints a picture of what ministry to the marginalized could look like.
In this episode we talk about unique disciple-making communities in urban centres. Kevin shares some creative ideas on outreach and paints a picture of what ministry to the marginalized could look like.
Transcript of Podcast by Multiply Network
Created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-
making communities across Canada
2019 – Kevin Rogers
Paul Fraser: Welcome to the Multiply Network podcast, a podcast created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-making communities across Canada.
Hi there. Welcome to the Multiply Network podcast. My name is Paul Fraser, the host of the Multiply Network podcast. We’re so glad you jumped on this month’s. You’re going to be so happy you did.
We’re going to be talking with a good friend of mine, Kevin Rogers. He’s in Windsor, Ontario. He planted a church twenty years ago. He has a huge heart for the marginalized, the broken, those in urban centers and you’re going to hear a great story with some great insights on how to reach our urban centers. We’re talking about unique disciple-making communities this month and they really are doing some incredible things: some feeding programs in Windsor. They are going into some high-risk apartment buildings, providing lunch programs for people. You are going to love what they’re doing and I hope you are going to be inspired by them.
The interview is coming up right now.
We are super, super, super-excited to have a friend of mine join the Multiply Network podcast. Kevin Rogers, welcome!
Kevin Rogers:
A. Hey, Paul. I’m a fan of the podcast. I listen to every episode about what you are doing. It’s amazing.
Q. I get such great feedback. You’re a great fan but you just have great ideas. In fact, you’re the one that got me thinking about doing our Take 5 videos and making them podcasts for people to listen to. You have great ideas. Thanks for listening in.
Now you get to be the one interviewed. How do you feel about that?
A. Yay! I feel good. In fact I’m working on a podcast. It is in the development stages, creating a connection ---
Can I do my little plug?
Q. Yes, great. Do a plug, Sure.
A. Okay. Sure. So watch for a new podcast that will be coming out later this year called Sidewalk Skyline. I interview people who are doing very unique urban ministry across Canada in our urban centers. I have some fascinating stories of people doing some incredible things. So that’s my plug.
Q. Okay. I’ll be a thankful fan as well. Thanks, Kevin.
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about where you are and what you are doing for the three or four people who may not know who you are?
A. Laughter. I responded to a call from God to plant a church. So I moved to Windsor and began to put all of the pieces together to form a core group and launch a church. We launched in 1994 and just celebrated our 25th anniversary – New Song Church – where I’m still the pastor. And I think I may stay. I’ve kind of been here a while and just enjoyed the longevity of it all.
Q. So go ahead. Talk a little bit about what kind of church you planted because this month we’re talking about unique disciple-making communities. You didn’t plant just the typical church?
A. Right. So growing up in a pastor’s home and growing up in church I heard a lot of great messages growing up about going into the world and making disciples. Yet in my early young adulthood I wondered how do you do that? How do you actually go into a world and make disciples? I kind of thought at that time, well, I don’t think church ministries is where I would end up if I were going to be making disciples. And of course I grew into the realization that the church is God’s vehicle for making disciples. So when it came to church planting I didn’t know a lot. But what I did know was there needed to be a way for people that had a lot of barriers up to come to Jesus.
And that’s why I had to approach it like a missionary going into a new culture. So as I moved into a neighbourhood, our church after three years, we bought our first building. It was an old bar in a neighbourhood, Port City, that at that time had a reputation for having one of the worse crime rates in the city and a lot of social issues and a lot of poverty. You know, twenty-plus years later we’re in a neighbourhood that is coming back to life. It has one of the lowest crime rates in the city and it hasn’t happened yet through gentrification but I believe it has happened partly because of the presence of the church.
Q. Yes.
A. The fact that we’ve been here feeding people, advocating for people, getting enmeshed in the lives of so many marginalized people it really has brought a lot of peace to the streets in our neighbourhood.
Our focus when we started the church, I knew that it needed to be a church plant that was going to make marginalized at its center. That was who we needed to be missionaries to. So approaching it like a missionary, you know, coming into what was a new culture to me. I grew up lower middle-class pastor’s life to entering into a place of homelessness and addiction and prostitution and violence and every kind of trouble. But it was that missiological approach to say this is a great place to have a church.
Q. Yes.
A. We need to be here. It takes a while to really know the people and for them to trust you but that’s the nature of New Song Church.
Q. So you have this tremendous heart for urban areas. So when I think of Windsor I’m not thinking downtown Toronto urban, but there are a lot of similarities and you grew a heart for the marginalized you mentioned. Why don’t you talk a little bit about your passion that I think for you has grown? It wasn’t always there. It grew for the urban areas. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that?
A. Yes. It definitely grew. I would say it grew before church planting. It grew from childhood, growing up in a pastor’s home, and just watching the way that my dad would care for people, the way he would take people who were marginalized or struggling and just pastor them. That heart came along long before the city.
But the heart for the city, like when I travel from time to time and I get to be in a new city or another city where I can walk around on the streets, I love to just walk and get a five-senses tour of the city. I’m amazed every time at how I almost choke up, almost get ---
I get emotional just being in city life. So I think that is something that God placed there.
When we talk about urban the majority of Canada’s population, well over 80%, live in urban centers. When you look at the placement of where our churches are located, there is a disproportionate placement of churches in suburbs and outward.
Q. Right.
A. So what about the city center? I know that this is part of your history in Edmonton.
Q. Yes.
A. We share that view, that vision. The best definition I have come across for urban I heard from Steve Pike’s Urban Islands Project out in Denver. He defines urban this way: high density, high diversity and high disparity.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. So high density ---
Q. Okay. Just stop. Let that sink in. When you think about those things that doesn’t necessarily mean a city over a million.
A. No.
Q. You can have that anywhere.
A. You can.
Q. Wow.
A. You can.
Q. So unpack that for us?
A. Yes. So high density, you know, downtown Toronto, the city limits of Toronto are going to grow this year by hundreds of thousands of people moving into the same tight geography. It is getting thicker. It is getting denser. And if you look at the missionary journeys in the New Testament, all of the church planting happened as they went to major crossroad cities throughout the ancient Near East and further, Asia Minor and into Europe. It was always going first to the city where the high density was.
The high diversity speaks to the fact that if you get a lot more people together you are going to see just a greater conglomerate of diversity taking place. People in a small town might feel like they’re the only one like themselves in this town but they go to a city and discover there’s a whole tribe of us here. So high diversity.
And then high disparity. In our church not far from here is the neighbourhood of Walkerville, which has some of the most prestigious homes, you know, the places you want to live. But you go over one street and on some streets you are going to find crack houses.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. The lines are drawn sharply in the city. Sometimes in rural poverty is hidden. Sometimes poverty is hidden in the suburbs. But it is right in front of you, it is very visible, the disparity between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, the rich and the poor, those who have great entitlement and those who have none.
Q. Right.
A. So to me that’s urban: high density, high diversity and high disparity. In my role as one of the directors with Mission Canada, my portfolio is urban centers. Mission Canada is our PAOC missionary agency to raise up missionaries to Canada in strategic areas and into the gaps of Canadian culture, into the places our churches are sometimes reticent to go or just don’t know how to get in to the gaps. So Mission Canada is all about stirring up that kind of missionary vision and fervour to go.
So urban centers, boy, what an amazingly huge harvest field and yet at the same time, you know, you don’t have people lining up to do urban ministry yet.
Q. Well, let me jump in. Yet. Yet. Of course, yes. We keep praying for labourers, that God would send workers into the fields, and certainly urban areas are one of those places that we need more people to go.
And of course he calls us to make disciples. So one of the things we talked about and I’m certainly grateful for Mission Canada and Brian and the entire team that do such a great job finding the gaps in Canada and raising up workers to go, but not just to go but to make disciples. And one of the things that we talked about in our 2020 Initiative, our vision, was that we wanted to make 1500 disciple-making communities by 2020.
So what do you think a disciple-making community is and how can they look?
A. In my context a disciple-making community, the first thing I had to shed was the ingrained notion that discipleship is linear, that it is classroom based. That’s our educational system. Right. We go to school. When you finish Grade 1 you go to Grade 2. A lot of times we approach discipleship with an educational paradigm.
I think discipleship in the Jesus sense, in the rabbinical sense, was much more about how are we doing life together and how does the teacher or the rabbi or the disciple-maker impart wisdom, not just through their teaching but through the demonstration of their life. If we approach church in a very departmentalized programmatic sense, we might miss a deeper element of discipleship where the best discipleship sometimes happens when you’re walking with somebody through a crisis. The best discipleship sometimes happens when you’re standing in the gap with somebody that hasn’t earned, doesn’t have any merit to receive grace or favour. But as you become their advocate, as you become the one that is their stand-in for Jesus, they actually learn to follow Jesus by your example.
I think that is really important in thinking through discipleship.
In urban Canada there’s five key models that I see of how PAOC is expressing ministry in urban centers. The acronym I use is QUEST, Q-U-E-S-T. Can I unpack that for you?
Q. Yes, do that.
A. So the first one, “Q” is qualitative neighbours. So imagine living in a city specifically on mission to your residential neighbours. We have people who are making disciples by moving into neighbourhoods, getting to know the neighbours and intentionally living in a way to be light bearers, benefitting the lives they encounter on a daily basis. Our friend Karen out in Vancouver is a great example of this and there are other organizations in PAOC and outside, the Parish Collective, the Downtown Windsor Community Collaborative. There’s models popping up where people move in as an organization.
And the premise is that if you actually get geographically specific and name specific about loving your neighbour as yourself that you earn the proper place to be a proclaimer of the gospel, a demonstrator, a model of the Jesus life. And often people who live as qualitative neighbours will have rhythms of spiritual practice that are more home-based than church centered. There’s a greater focus on living a shared life in shared space with others in the discipleship journey.
Raymond Bacci said: “Is Jesus just our message or is he also our model?” In fact we know now that nearly all urban persons come to Christ through relationships not through media. The bigger the city the higher this percentage seems to be. So the bigger the city the more people come to Christ through relationships. So qualitative neighbours.
Another expression, the letter “U” is urban church. Urban Church. So urban church is sometimes qualitatively different than suburban church or town church or rural church. An urban church is primarily a congregational expression of disciples who are in the urban core. Often we’ll call churches that are sort of more in the core downtown areas, we might sometimes think of them as mission churches because sometimes they are located in urban settings that tend to have just a very colourful vibrant scene happening around them.
Q. Yes.
A. Urban churches tend to have a mix of both local residents, people from the neighbourhood and commuters who make the journey into the city because they are attracted to that unique local mission. Or they are historically attached to the congregation. Well, this is a church that our family has been at for forty-five years, you know. Even though the city grew up and changed all around and we live twenty kilometres away, we drive in because this is our church.
Q. Yes.
A. But a healthy urban church will discover that parish around them that need to reach the people that are within walking distance, within thirty-minutes walk of the church. So you look at Danforth Community Church, I know Charles Hermelink pastors there, in a three-kilometre circumference I think he’s got half a million people. So some of those people are in his church and some are commuters. But the city desperately needs us to reach our city.
“Q” qualitative neighbouring, “U” urban church, “E” energizers. Energizers. Immediately people think of the battery and the bunny.
Q. Yes.
A. But energizers, I would say, are those who are making disciples through an intentional focus on shaping the culture in the arts, the media, in education, in social services, in politics and community engagement. Energizers are bringing energy. They are bringing light and God’s spirit by making disciples in some cultures and among influencers.
Q. Okay.
A. So Light and Film is a great example of this with Jamie Rau and some of his associates, where they are making disciples in the film industry, in the entertainment community. Connie Jakab in Calgary with the arts community and all that she’s doing, you know, a middle-aged mom with kids who is right in the heart of Calgary’s hip-hop community. She is an energizer. She is bringing the life of God into a sub-culture. People who are energizers are placed alongside those who are influencers. So energizers.
Qualitative neighbours. Urban Church. Energizers. “S” street workers. Street workers will be a combination of evangelism and social justice who work with people moving about the urban core. So in Montreal we have Jean Paul (?) whose handle is rue du Pasteur, street pastor. He spends his ministry days on the streets of Montreal like a chaplain, just watching for opportunities to talk to people and to find people in crisis and help them to get to strength and supports that they need.
E. J. Toopee (?) same thing in Toronto. We have street workers. I would say that what defines them and their disciple-making is that they are mobile.
Q. Yes.
A. They go where they can develop meaningful connections to people in need. So “Q”, “U”, “E”, “S” street workers, and finally “T” transformers. And of course we all picture the kids’ show, too. Right. Transformers.
Q Yes, I’m thinking optimists prime as a Mission Canada worker.
A. Optimists prime? Yes. So optimist disciple-maker. (Laughter) Transformers bring an intentional focus to at-risk populations. Transformers express the compassion of the gospel through hospitality, through relief and development work and discipleship. So transformers generally their urban strategy will include things like street missions, food security, housing initiatives, children and youth programs. So these are five models of how disciple-making is happening in PAOC in Canada.
If God were to invite anyone who is listening to the podcast to move downtown, what would your life as a disciple look like? And I think that we have to think missionary. We have to enter the culture, learn the language, learn the customs. And before you can be a good missionary you have to leave your homeland for a new place.
Q. Yes.
A. I would say that is a big need in our tribe, our family, Christian family. We need more people who will leave their homeland for a new place. That doesn’t always mean somewhere on the other side of the world. It might mean actually moving down the street.
Q. Yes, yes.
A. And discovering you are in a new land where you have to enter the culture, learn the language, learn the customs and then contextualize the message.
Q. You have painted an excellent picture for us I think of what some great things, like what kinds of ministries and people, workers are doing in our PAOC family. And then of course outside our PAOC family.
When I hear about urban work and when people talk about it, it’s not just one group that is doing it. It is many groups together that are doing it.
A. Oh, for sure.
Q. And it’s a wonderful way for us as a tribe to join other tribes because we all have the same goal in the end. We’re to bring life to the cities, to the brokenness, to people ---
I would like to get a little bit more specific about some of the things that maybe you are experimenting with in your context.
A. Sure.
Q. We talked about that at the Western Ontario District event and I said, “Okay, we need to talk about what you guys are trying.” So why don’t you take a couple of minutes and talk about that.
A. Yes. So what we’ve been experimenting with, a lot of it I would simply call it the ministry of hospitality.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. The gift of hospitality as we have learned to express it ---
Let me tell you about Feeding Windsor. Feeding Windsor is one of our ministries in New Song Church. People who are interested can go on the Web: feedingwindsor.ca and get the big picture, the overview of all the different things that we’re doing. But I would sum it all up as a ministry of hospitality. So probably the two ways that Feeding Windsor is showing some real fruitfulness is (1) in our relationship with churches. Besides our church we have a Baptist church and an African church that we partner with that in all three of our churches across the urban core, we’re doing a weekly community meal free of charge. The motivation behind it is this is how the church can love its neighbour. So we check our evangelist hat at the door and we put on our loving our neighbour showing hospitality hat in our community meals.
Out of that relationship that is formed it is causing, over time, people to come in the doors of the church, encounter godly people and next thing you know, they are asking questions. Next thing you know they are opening up to you and coming to Jesus. So that’s something we have done for a long time.
The other thing that is newer that I want to just hit on is our lunch clubs. We worked out an arrangement with the City of Windsor. They have several properties that are low-income neighbourhoods, geared-to-income, some of the darker places in our city are in low-income housing. So a building right downtown that is an eighteen-storey high-rise, the biggest high-rise downtown, four hundred units filled with people with all kinds of problems. Over the years there have been jumpers going off the balconies. There has been prostitution in the hallways, drug deals. It’s just a mess.
And yet in the midst of that horrible mess that sometimes happens there are a larger number of people that are not buying into all of the chaos that is around them. They are living scared. Older single people that this is the only place they can afford to live and so when they come into the building they just keep their head down and get right to their apartment and don’t really build a lot of community friendships in their building because it’s not a high trust environment.
So we went in with our lunch club and here’s what we offered. We said in the community room we’ll provide a Monday to Friday lunch club. You can sign up and for $25/mo. we’ll give you lunch five days a week all month long. So super-affordable but it is empowering the residents to say, with their meagre, meagre incomes, well man, I can’t feed myself for $25/mo. and I can’t eat that cheaply. So they come. They get a nutritious well-rounded meal in the community room. At first people would just take the take-out container and hurry back to their apartment. But as we persisted increasingly we saw that people would come and sit down to eat their meal in the community room. They would start talking to their neighbours. Some of the folks in the building who were hard in their addictions, they wouldn’t spend $25 on a meal program so they had another use for the $25 at the beginning of the month. They were going to spend it on addictions. So the level of chaos was thinned out just by virtue of the fact that we created a way for people in a risky place to go to a safe community.
On the heels of doing those kinds of things – and we’re in several buildings increasing into neighbourhoods – the city loves us. They have rolled out the red carpet. So we’ve gone in and run Alpha programs. We run Bible studies. This year alone in my church there’s been at least a dozen people that came and got baptized in water and the majority of them were people that were getting saved and reached in their building, not in our church. So that’s something that we’re really excited about, just an incredible door that God has opened.
I always wondered in a city, you know, how do you actually crack the code of getting into those high-rises. One way is to move in yourself and reach out to your neighbours, start to build some security that way. But in the case of poverty folks, this is low-hanging fruit. You don’t need to have a million dollar strategy to reach millionaires. Some of the richest people I’ve met, rich in spirit, have been among some of the poorest people. Some of the most generous people I know are some of the poorest people I know. That’s the treasure in the broken land that we’re going after in my church. That’s my heart for urban centers.
Yes, there’s other people, all these different ways that we can make disciples. And I would say our church is probably more of an energizer urban church. We’re not so much culture shapers in terms of hanging with the high rollers and influencing the influencers, but it is who we are and what we’re doing.
Q. Love it. Man, this is so good.
Why don’t you take just a minute as we get close to wrapping up here. What would you say to our pastors in our Movement in Canada, what would you say to them, what is important for us to remember as a Movement and maybe what we need to start leaning into?
A. The first thing I would say is the outward bound vision. Abraham was called by God to go to a new place. I’m not suggesting every pastor say “It’s time to move!”
Q. Laughter.
A. What I’m saying is where you are it’s time to move. Where you are it’s time to hear the urban cry or the suburban cry or the town cry. Hear it.
Q. Yes.
A. And start to think and train your people to think like missionaries. Spend less time focused on are we making sure that every need in the local church is being met by us and start instead to think how is our local church positioned to reach our world and how do we release people to get into the surrounding culture.
The second thing I would say to those who are musing on these things is the image of God is in every person and it is waiting to be revealed. So much of our mission is hindered by how we are steeped in our biases and prejudices. I had to learn that coming into the urban culture and the poverty culture was that I had so many preconceived ideas that I had to let go of. Jesus was so accessible to sinners. We all have to make our churches accessible. In fact, it is legislation I think where by 2025 we all have to be meeting our building codes to make sure they are wheelchair accessible and all the things that go along with that
Q. Yes.
A. But the bigger question is you may be wheelchair accessible but are you sinner accessible.
Q. Yes.
A. How easy is it for a sinner to come into church? That’s where we’ve got some work to do.
Q. Yes.
A. I would say also to those who are pondering the call of God to something new. Don’t take the world’s “No” for an answer. Why can’t new churches and disciple-making communities thrive in impossible places where everything is set against you?
Q. That’s a good word.
A. Case in point. China. Right? 10% of China’s population now identify as Christians and that’s on the heels of years of Communism where the church was banned and outlawed. So don’t take the world’s “No” for an answer.
Q. That’s a great word.
A. We are called to impossible places.
Q. Thanks, Kevin. That is really, really good.
As you know, we do rapid fire questions. So get ready. They are going to come flying at you pretty quick.
A. Okay. I’ll try to respond quickly.
Q. Best book you’ve read in the last six months?
A. Oh. Actually I’m reading it right now. It is written by one of our PAOC guys. I’m reading a pre-release called Hidden Faces: Discovering our True Identity in Christ. It is by Josh Tremblay.
Q. Oh! Yes, I know Josh.
A. He’s pastoring Lifeboat Church in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia.
Q. Great. Okay.
A. You know what? When this book launches I would encourage everybody to (something) for this one. This guy ---
I’ve known Josh a long time. I had no idea of the depth that was in his writing. My goodness.
Q. Cool.
A. He’s a classic in the making.
Q. Favourite podcast?
A. Well obviously it’s this one.
Q. Yes, of course.
Next to it?
A. I have to say, yes. There’s two other podcasts that I am especially enjoying right now. Deep Talks is one, exploring theology. And Meaning Making. Another one that I just started listening to that is really giving me a good stir is Bema Discipleship. Bema Discipleship, the guy doing the podcast, basically it is a series of discussions on viewing all of the biblical stories from an Eastern perspective rather than through Western eyes.
Q. Oh, cool.
A. This guy was rabbinically trained so he’s really giving some fresh perspective to a lot of familiar stories. So there’s two I’m enjoying. And then for fun I like another one called Crime Town where they are exploring major American cities and just kind of the seedy under-belly of organized crime in those places.
Q. Your least favourite cold drink?
A. That bubble tea. I don’t know. It doesn’t do anything for me.
Q. Bubble tea. Your favourite hot drink?
A. Favourite hot drink? Coffee.
Q. Just straight up?
A. Americano. I like a good Americano.
Q. Okay. Professional athlete; what would you be?
A. Not much of a sports guy, more of a board game guy.
Q. If you were a board game, if your life was a board game, what board game would your life be?
A. Laughter. Trouble!
Q. Trouble. Hey Kev, thanks so much for jumping on today. We so appreciate it.
A. Thanks, Paul. Love what you’re doing and love our Movement. Man, we’ve got so many exciting things popping up.
Q. I totally agree. Again, thanks so much.
--- End of Recording