My Patient Revolution

A 21-year-old pastor of an 18-member inner city congregation stood on the steps of a former Russian Orthodox church on the Hispanic southwest side of Chicago and asked, “How in the world are we going to reach this community?” That was 1986. Today, New Life Community Church has 2,300 attenders, eight locations, services in Spanish and in English, and an unrelenting passion to reach every person in Chicago.

That young pastor was Mark Jobe. “We knew reaching the neighborhood would be difficult, and we weren’t big enough, smart enough, or wealthy enough, but we were willing to change.” Jobe knew the first barrier to overcome was music. The church’s organ and hymnbooks would never fit the neighborhood’s growing Mexican population. “The first month I advertised free guitar lessons,” Jobe said. “That was something I could do. It was an outreach to the community.”

Twenty years later, Mark Jobe is still helping his church connect the gospel with those around them. “We’ve done a lot of bridge building,” he says, “not because we like bridges, but because we are determined to reach our destination.” That destination, Jobe says, is to become a church comprising one percent of the city—approximately 30,000, representing all strata of Chicago—black, white, Hispanic, Asian, CEOs, and street people.

New Life’s efforts have, so far, resulted in eight congregations planted throughout the city; each one seeking to connect the gospel in its own context. New Life’s Little Village campus uses Mariachi music, while the North Side campus has a Starbucks-like café. “The message is the same. It’s the styles that differ,” Jobe says. “It’s beautiful seeing people who are so different from one another all connected by the same church, sharing the same vision.”

You grew up with missionary parents. How’s that influenced you as a pastor?

I was six months old when we left the U.S. and went to Costa Rica. When I was about six years old, we moved to Spain because my parents wanted to reach a more unreached area. So the desire to understand other cultures and reach out to different people is sort of inbred in me. It’s part of my DNA.

So starting a Spanish-speaking church would seem natural for you. Was it?

In the beginning the biggest barrier was myself. Although I spoke Spanish, the European culture I grew up in was very different from the urban Hispanic culture here. Put me in a plaza with a latte speaking to university students in Europe and I was comfortable. Put me on the southwest side of Chicago with Mexican immigrants and gangs, and we’re talking about a totally different culture.

I think it’s a tendency of every person to think their own culture is better than the culture they’re trying to reach. I had to learn that my personal style was secondary to my calling. Missionaries know this, but it’s something I still had to learn.

You’ve described New Life’s calling to be a church of blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, CEOs, and street people. Why is this diversity so important to you?

We’re not after diversity for diversity’s sake. Our calling is to reach all the people in our community, and that’s what has driven our focus on diversity. Any church that takes seriously the Great Commission is going to have to be intentional about diversity. We cannot be serious about reaching the city without asking, “How do we reach the people around us, who are from a lot of different backgrounds?” The answer is “In a lot of different ways.”

Why not focus your church’s ministry on a single category of people, and let other area churches reach the rest?

The church growth movement in the 1980s advocated that churches reach their own sociological groupings, and studies showed that churches grew more rapidly if they targeted a single group. Some of this makes sense. If we’re trying to reach a Hispanic community, obviously we need to speak Spanish. But I also believe Jesus has called us to be ambassadors of reconciliation.

Our main drive should be reconciliation with God. But the Bible says our mission is also about reconciling Jews and Gentiles, reconciling parents to their children, reconciling masters to their slaves.

The Bible is all about reconciliation. First reconciling us with God, and then reconciling us with others across ethnic, generational, and economic barriers.

So if churches aren’t crossing some of these cultural barriers—

I think churches that don’t do this are failing to present a huge component of the gospel.

Some have argued that if a church does not define a specific target audience, it will be ineffective. Do you agree?

I believe in diversity, and I also believe in effectiveness. I think it’s wrong when a community is mixed, but the church targets only one group in that community. In other words, if diverse people live together and work together in this area, then we need to reach them together. The mandate of Christ is very clear—love your neighbors; make disciples of all nations—so we will attempt to reach everybody we can. That doesn’t mean we’ll be equally effective with everyone.

At New Life we’ve been a lot more effective reaching Hispanics than we have been, for instance, reaching the nearby Polish community. But this doesn’t mean we’re going to pursue only Hispanics. We’ve been brainstorming ways to reach our Polish neighbors in Chicago, and if we can’t reach them with what we’re doing, we need to try something else.

Again, what drives us isn’t diversity, but the Great Commission.

What if you were in a setting less diverse than Chicago?

Churches need to ask themselves, how can we reach the whole community that God has called us to? Today, there are very few places where that won’t mean building some bridges to another culture, another social class, or another ethnic group. In fact, statistics show that in the not-so-distant future whites will no longer be a majority in the United States. Sooner or later every church will need to face these challenges if they take the Great Commission seriously.

So in the future, culturally diverse congregations may have an advantage over homogeneous ones?

In some ways it’s happening already. A number of couples are attending New Life because they’re in bi-racial marriages and have felt uncomfortable at other churches. The diversity at our church makes them feel more accepted, more at home.

At our North Side campus, our worship leader is black and his wife is white. Diversity is a huge thing to them, and it’s not just about ethnicity or skin color. For them diversity is about acceptance, about not expecting everyone to look like you. A more diverse church is seen as more welcoming.

Which has been tougher for you—racial and ethnic diversity, or economic diversity?

Definitely the economic differences. In fact, I’ve discovered that people of different ethnicity but the same economic level often have more in common than people of the same ethnicity at different economic levels. The challenge is always the bias and prejudice that exists between the wealthier and the poorer.

On one side, wealthier people can perceive the less wealthy as lazy, uneducated, and unwilling to work. They may not understand all the complicated factors that keep people locked in poverty. Other times the prejudice is among the poorer who see those with more money as snobs, or they resent those they think have had life served on a silver platter.

What kind of leadership is necessary in a diverse community?

We look for leaders who are effective and called and have character. These traits are more important than degrees or resume. A lot of the people we’ve reached are first generation Christians, and many of the leaders at New Life have risen from within the community. If we required leaders to have certain degrees, that would rule out many of our best people. And we’ve seen that the leaders tend to attract people like themselves. If the leaders are too different from the community we’re trying to reach, they may not be effective.

By looking at character, calling, and effectiveness rather than education, we are raising up leaders from within the very communities we want to reach.

So who a church reaches is determined by who is leading?

Here’s what I know—it starts with leaders. If we’re going to reach the African American community, we need some key leaders in the church who are African American. If you look at our leadership team, one of the obvious things is that there are no African Americans. We have been effective at bridging some cultures, especially white and Hispanic. But we have not been as effective with African Americans partly because the neighborhoods we started in were a mix of whites and Hispanics. But if we’re going to be effective at reaching Chicago, we need to reach more African Americans. So we have been praying intentionally about some African American leaders for our church.

Is it possible for leaders from one culture to reach people in another? Can they pick up what they need to know?

Maybe. But this is a big mistake people make when trying to reach a new community. I run into older guys who say they’re going to reach young people, so they start trying to be hip, trying to talk differently, and trying to dress differently. I know a 45-year-old guy who says he’s going to learn Spanish because a lot of Hispanics are entering his community.

I say to these people, “Don’t try to be something you’re not. You’ll never learn Spanish, especially at 45, to a degree that will really allow you to minister well.”

It’s better to get someone Hispanic on your team, or find a young person with a passion to reach other young people. Get someone who is already part of the culture, and they will be able to say the right things in the right way and you will automatically start connecting with the community you want to reach. That’s been our philosophy when we assign leaders. I don’t find a leader and then try to change their personality. I try to connect the right leaders with the right people.

For example, we had the opportunity to launch one of our locations in Melrose Park, a heavily Italian community that in recent years has become more Hispanic. As I was thinking about that location, I wondered, Who would do well in this half-Italian, half-Hispanic area? The leader I thought of, John Palmieri, had been at our church for a while. His father was Italian, but he had a lot of ministry experience in Hispanic neighborhoods. He has done a terrific job in Melrose bridging the older Italian people with the younger Hispanic families. They’re holding three services now.

Half the challenge in leadership is placing the right people in the right context.

How do you maintain unity among your leaders despite your diversity?

It’s driven by two things: we all share a common vision, and we are really intentional about relationships. We do a lot together. We have fun together. We laugh together. We play together. The pastors’ wives get together twice a month for their own gathering. The younger pastors are mentored by the more experienced ones. We do a pastoral family retreat every year where a lot of our goal is just to laugh together and have fun. We play a mean volleyball game. I think a lot of our unity flows from our work at building relationships.

Has this dynamic among leaders influenced the rest of the church culture?

At New Life, we talk about “flowing with the river.” We believe God’s calling for the church is like a river, and those who jump into the middle will flow better than those that stay at the edge. Every New Life location may do things a little differently as they minister in different cultures, but we’ve discovered the people who jump into the middle of the river, by sharing our vision and building relationships, are more effective and more fruitful.

Do you ever look at your diverse congregations—the unity they share—and wonder, How is this possible?

We bring our congregation together a couple times a year for a big worship service. We have shared youth ministry and special events—men’s and women’s retreats and such. At the last women’s retreat, when they broke out into small groups, I cringed when I saw one group where everyone was different. The women were all different ages, from different backgrounds, different educational levels, and I thought, That’s going to be a terrible group because they’re just not going to relate to each other.

I was wrong.

Talking to the women later, they shared how they felt like God had divinely put them in the same group and how well they connected. These were people who would not naturally gravitate toward each other in another setting, but because the small groups are all about brokenness and prayer and worship, there is a melting together that occurs.

That doesn’t make sense to me, but that is the work of God.