The great motto of the Reformation was “ecclesia semper reformanda” (church always reforming). When I think about the renewal of the church, I have a flood of images from stories and experiences of churches experiencing renewal in various forms. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the church is renewing. However, that good news is invisible to many church authorities, perhaps because it is happening primarily on the margins of institutional and established churches. The margins are wide; they include swaths of the Global South as well as communities of color in the US. Some of these renewing churches are small, without the energy to publicize and document their work. Others are not small but are relatively uninterested in reporting their achievements to traditional channels. What does a renewing church look like? What are the marks of a renewing church?
My daughter, a typical millennial in many ways, came back to Christian faith one summer in college when she started attending a Pentecostal Hispanic church in the barrio led by a second-generation former gang member. She visited the church one day because she was interested in an internship with a group doing activist community art. The church was known for inviting local graffiti artists to paint graffiti on its walls. In fact, they had put up additional walls to make room for all the graffiti. The church had also initiated a project involving local youth and church members to redo a street mural which had been defaced. The pastor told my daughter that she was welcome to intern but that she had to become part of the life of the church. She started regularly attending services and experienced that, on a regular basis, someone came to Christ out of the gangs—with great tears and laughter, and with much joy for the whole community. She saw people healed after years of addiction and hopelessness. She also saw these renewed people engage in bringing new life to their community through programs for children, partnerships with neighbors in projects to improve their community, and participation in anti-gentrification campaigns and police dialogues. The crowning moment was when her trans friend came out to the pastor and was fully welcomed—in spite of the fact that some of the church leaders disagreed. The pastor said, “We are all family in Christ, forgiven beyond anything we deserve or could have hoped for. We have to learn to love each other.”
When my daughter went back to school in Western Massachusetts, she looked for a church. She called me one Sunday afternoon, sad and confused. She said, “Mommy, we went to a church with a rainbow flag in the window, but it was just a political club for old White people. No one talked personally about Jesus, and no one got healed. If I want a political club, I can find one with young brown people at school.” I dare say that if she had gone to a church that was a different kind of political club, she would also have been equally disappointed. We know what a renewing church does not look like.
Another story: a Hispanic immigrant church during the pandemic. The rules for COVID assistance for small businesses excluded anyone with an undocumented family member. Many undocumented workers also lost their jobs and did not have any access to unemployment benefits. Each citizen family at this church took responsibility to care for a family who couldn’t get help. Some of these citizen families were also economically struggling; it was not a wealthy church. Can you smell the aroma of Christ? People who experience new life in Christ brought new life and hope
to others.
Daniel Rodriguez, in A Future for the Latino Church, describes the immigrant churches he researched who are attracting and engaging the second generation.1 It is not surprising that these churches are vital on multiple levels; a church that is attracting young people is likely to keep going and growing for years to come. The common characteristics of these churches include:
None of this can happen without significant and ongoing investment of energy, enthusiasm, dedication, and discipline. Churches that are renewing are passionate places, full of people to whom the church matters, not for its own sake alone but for the sake of a hurting world that needs the holistic redemption of the whole gospel. They are places where people depend on the power of the Holy Spirit to carry out and sustain their work and where people experience that their trust is well-placed.
Rev. Brandon Wrencher and I recently completed our book, Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities.2 In it, we study two renewal movements that were led by poor and marginalized people: the base Christian community movement in Latin America and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s and the hush harbors, the independent slave churches in the United States. These small Christian communities shared much in common with the churches described by Rodriguez. We identified a list of five common characteristics shared by the two movements:
Kinship refers to the profound sense of being part of a healthy extended family in which people care for one another on every level, even when it is not easy to do so. In the base Christian community (BCC) movement, they moved their weekly gatherings from one home to another. When a family could not receive the community because the roof needed repair, they all fixed the roof. When members joined a march to support neighbors fighting to save their small plots of land from land grabs by the powerful, other members took responsibility for their children so that they could take the risk without fear. The following quote from the Philippines says it well:
Each community saw itself as a sharing community responsible for the sick, the oppressed, the lonely, the dying, the children in their community. When
they prayed together on Sunday, they brought these concerns vividly into the prayer of the community. When they left the chapel, it was frequently straight to tackle some new problem that had been brought to their notice at the assembly: to help plow the field of a man who had TB, to collect clothes for a family whose house had been burned, to investigate rumors of a child being maltreated. If there was another community with a problem, someone would be reporting and asking for volunteers to help in a rally or a long walk.3
The level of kinship practiced in the BCCs often required sacrifice. Another example: The marketplace women were organizing against the moneylenders and working to set up a cooperative. Salvador, a member of the BCC, wanted to help. For all of Lent, he skipped his breakfast of a hard biscuit and juice to be able to give the women his ten centavos—even though his family regularly suffered from hunger.4 This kind of sacrifice was not an unusual occurrence.
Maintaining the intimacy of kinship among an unrelated group of people is never easy. It is even more difficult in the context of a civil war. But the BCCs learned to practice reconciliation. Instead of seeking to punish those who betrayed the community or otherwise harmed the community, they actively sought the repentance and transformation of the offender.
Being leader-full—sharing leadership to a very wide extent—was evident
in every aspect of both the base Christian communities’ life and the hush harbors’ life together. The main positions rotated, and they celebrated everyday tasks as sacred duties. No one was left out; everyone was expected to contribute their gifts. This was founded on a fierce belief in the equal value of every person—in direct contrast to the messages that they were given by their societies. It was underscored by shared decision-making practices involving all members of the group.
Consciousness (conscientizacion) meant intentional awareness of all aspects of the daily reality experienced by members of the group—including the sociopolitical and economic realities of their lives and the roots of the problems that they faced. It also involved the practice of seeing these realities through the lens of the liberating Word, of the Scripture read from the perspective of the marginalized. The Magnificat, Mary’s poem in Luke 1:46–55, speaks differently to those who live under a form of feudalism dating back to the Spanish conquest than it does to an upper-middle-class North American. Does God really mean to give food to the hungry and send the rich away empty? Is there hope that the people who are taking the lion’s share of the produce of their small farms will stop and let the farmers feed their children well? That is truly good news, almost too good to be true. The members of the hush harbor also faced the realities of their lives as slaves in the light of the Word; they took the Exodus story as their own.
The thorough commitment to the horizontal application of the Word did not lessen their vertical connection and commitment. Both the BCCs and the hush harbors were known for their experience of the joy, peace, and healing power of the Holy Spirit. Spirit-uality is a spirituality full of the Spirit. Ana, a base ecclesial community (BEC) leader from El Salvador, tells the story of her initial encounter with a BEC as a college student. “What drew you to come back?” I asked her. “The joy,” she answered. “People were so full of joy, so excited. You could feel the Holy Spirit in the room, moving us, everyone hoping for a great change.”5 The hush harbors were also powered by mystical experience: “The prayer warriors of hush harbors were prophetic contemplatives, those who saw moments of stillness as a chance to encounter the sacred, to be set free, and for the experience of that spiritual freedom to invoke their deepest conviction in a liberated world.”6
Lastly, the combination of their analysis of their reality and their experience of the power of the Spirit led to liberating action, to faith-full organizing. They fought for a better life, for a more abundant life, for all. They did not place artificial limits on the realm or call of God. Their faith made a difference not only for themselves as individuals but also for their communities and societies. The phrase from Gaudium et Spes (the 1965 document on the church produced in relationship to the Second Vatican Council) for the church is “soul and yeast of the society.” The base Christian community movement took that seriously.
When my daughter was in high school, she brought a friend to the house who had grown up in a family with no religious tradition or commitment. She said to me, “I am kinda interested in Jesus but only if he actually changes the world.” I was struck by the extent to which that is the heart cry of many millennials (and in a slightly different voice, Generation Z). These new generations that are leaving the church in the West by droves are interested in Jesus. However, they are only interested in a Jesus who actually makes a difference in our daily lives and in our hurting communities, a Jesus who actually changes the world. The base Christian community movement and the hush harbors changed the lives of those who participated, giving them healing, strength, and hope. Those who received these gifts seamlessly moved into action to change their communities toward the greater availability of abundant life for all. Their leadership by marginalized, poor people of color is a testimony to the reality of the God revealed in 1 Corinthians 1:26–29: “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential, not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him.”
The experience and quality of the base Christian communities and the hush harbors continue to exist in the lives of Christian communities led by a wide variety of pastors of color and their extended families all over the world. Iglesia de Restauracion in Los Angeles, for example, is led by Rev. Rene Molina Sr. and his millennial son, Rene Jr., along with the rest of their extended family. The two Rene Molinas love and respect each other, working together to serve the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking congregations within their several thousand-member church in a low-income area of South Los Angeles. They each bring their respective gifts and capacities, typical of the gifts of their respective generations to a ministry that integrates evangelism and community development. The church is known for the Spirit-filled love for God and each other that pervades all their activities. Iglesia de Restauracion does not show up on any denominational scoreboard; it has not been part of any formal studies. It is emblematic of signs of renewal throughout the larger church.
The percentage of Christians in the world (about one-third of the global population) is holding steady. The composition has changed, with the bulk of Christians now coming from or living in the Global South and East. Those who decry the death of the church often miss the new life bursting through. The church is dying; the church is rising. The church is being renewed. Praise be to God!
Alexia Salvatierra is academic dean for Centro Latino, associate professor of mission and global transformation, and founding developer and coordinator of the Diplomado en la Respuesta de la Iglesia a la Crisis Migratoria (Professional Certificate in the Church’s Response to the Immigration Crisis). An ordained Lutheran pastor, she has over 40 years of experience in local, national, and international ministry, including church-based community development programs, congregational/community organizing, and legislative advocacy. Dr. Salvatierra is the co-author of Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World and of Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities.
The great motto of the Reformation was “ecclesia semper reformanda” (church always reforming). When I think about the renewal of the church, I have a flood of images from stories and experiences of churches experiencing renewal in various forms. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the church is renewing. However, that good news is invisible to many church authorities, perhaps because it is happening primarily on the margins of institutional and established churches. The margins are wide; they include swaths of the Global South as well as communities of color in the US. Some of these renewing churches are small, without the energy to publicize and document their work. Others are not small but are relatively uninterested in reporting their achievements to traditional channels. What does a renewing church look like? What are the marks of a renewing church?
My daughter, a typical millennial in many ways, came back to Christian faith one summer in college when she started attending a Pentecostal Hispanic church in the barrio led by a second-generation former gang member. She visited the church one day because she was interested in an internship with a group doing activist community art. The church was known for inviting local graffiti artists to paint graffiti on its walls. In fact, they had put up additional walls to make room for all the graffiti. The church had also initiated a project involving local youth and church members to redo a street mural which had been defaced. The pastor told my daughter that she was welcome to intern but that she had to become part of the life of the church. She started regularly attending services and experienced that, on a regular basis, someone came to Christ out of the gangs—with great tears and laughter, and with much joy for the whole community. She saw people healed after years of addiction and hopelessness. She also saw these renewed people engage in bringing new life to their community through programs for children, partnerships with neighbors in projects to improve their community, and participation in anti-gentrification campaigns and police dialogues. The crowning moment was when her trans friend came out to the pastor and was fully welcomed—in spite of the fact that some of the church leaders disagreed. The pastor said, “We are all family in Christ, forgiven beyond anything we deserve or could have hoped for. We have to learn to love each other.”
When my daughter went back to school in Western Massachusetts, she looked for a church. She called me one Sunday afternoon, sad and confused. She said, “Mommy, we went to a church with a rainbow flag in the window, but it was just a political club for old White people. No one talked personally about Jesus, and no one got healed. If I want a political club, I can find one with young brown people at school.” I dare say that if she had gone to a church that was a different kind of political club, she would also have been equally disappointed. We know what a renewing church does not look like.
Another story: a Hispanic immigrant church during the pandemic. The rules for COVID assistance for small businesses excluded anyone with an undocumented family member. Many undocumented workers also lost their jobs and did not have any access to unemployment benefits. Each citizen family at this church took responsibility to care for a family who couldn’t get help. Some of these citizen families were also economically struggling; it was not a wealthy church. Can you smell the aroma of Christ? People who experience new life in Christ brought new life and hope
to others.
Daniel Rodriguez, in A Future for the Latino Church, describes the immigrant churches he researched who are attracting and engaging the second generation.1 It is not surprising that these churches are vital on multiple levels; a church that is attracting young people is likely to keep going and growing for years to come. The common characteristics of these churches include:
None of this can happen without significant and ongoing investment of energy, enthusiasm, dedication, and discipline. Churches that are renewing are passionate places, full of people to whom the church matters, not for its own sake alone but for the sake of a hurting world that needs the holistic redemption of the whole gospel. They are places where people depend on the power of the Holy Spirit to carry out and sustain their work and where people experience that their trust is well-placed.
Rev. Brandon Wrencher and I recently completed our book, Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities.2 In it, we study two renewal movements that were led by poor and marginalized people: the base Christian community movement in Latin America and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s and the hush harbors, the independent slave churches in the United States. These small Christian communities shared much in common with the churches described by Rodriguez. We identified a list of five common characteristics shared by the two movements:
Kinship refers to the profound sense of being part of a healthy extended family in which people care for one another on every level, even when it is not easy to do so. In the base Christian community (BCC) movement, they moved their weekly gatherings from one home to another. When a family could not receive the community because the roof needed repair, they all fixed the roof. When members joined a march to support neighbors fighting to save their small plots of land from land grabs by the powerful, other members took responsibility for their children so that they could take the risk without fear. The following quote from the Philippines says it well:
Each community saw itself as a sharing community responsible for the sick, the oppressed, the lonely, the dying, the children in their community. When
they prayed together on Sunday, they brought these concerns vividly into the prayer of the community. When they left the chapel, it was frequently straight to tackle some new problem that had been brought to their notice at the assembly: to help plow the field of a man who had TB, to collect clothes for a family whose house had been burned, to investigate rumors of a child being maltreated. If there was another community with a problem, someone would be reporting and asking for volunteers to help in a rally or a long walk.3
The level of kinship practiced in the BCCs often required sacrifice. Another example: The marketplace women were organizing against the moneylenders and working to set up a cooperative. Salvador, a member of the BCC, wanted to help. For all of Lent, he skipped his breakfast of a hard biscuit and juice to be able to give the women his ten centavos—even though his family regularly suffered from hunger.4 This kind of sacrifice was not an unusual occurrence.
Maintaining the intimacy of kinship among an unrelated group of people is never easy. It is even more difficult in the context of a civil war. But the BCCs learned to practice reconciliation. Instead of seeking to punish those who betrayed the community or otherwise harmed the community, they actively sought the repentance and transformation of the offender.
Being leader-full—sharing leadership to a very wide extent—was evident
in every aspect of both the base Christian communities’ life and the hush harbors’ life together. The main positions rotated, and they celebrated everyday tasks as sacred duties. No one was left out; everyone was expected to contribute their gifts. This was founded on a fierce belief in the equal value of every person—in direct contrast to the messages that they were given by their societies. It was underscored by shared decision-making practices involving all members of the group.
Consciousness (conscientizacion) meant intentional awareness of all aspects of the daily reality experienced by members of the group—including the sociopolitical and economic realities of their lives and the roots of the problems that they faced. It also involved the practice of seeing these realities through the lens of the liberating Word, of the Scripture read from the perspective of the marginalized. The Magnificat, Mary’s poem in Luke 1:46–55, speaks differently to those who live under a form of feudalism dating back to the Spanish conquest than it does to an upper-middle-class North American. Does God really mean to give food to the hungry and send the rich away empty? Is there hope that the people who are taking the lion’s share of the produce of their small farms will stop and let the farmers feed their children well? That is truly good news, almost too good to be true. The members of the hush harbor also faced the realities of their lives as slaves in the light of the Word; they took the Exodus story as their own.
The thorough commitment to the horizontal application of the Word did not lessen their vertical connection and commitment. Both the BCCs and the hush harbors were known for their experience of the joy, peace, and healing power of the Holy Spirit. Spirit-uality is a spirituality full of the Spirit. Ana, a base ecclesial community (BEC) leader from El Salvador, tells the story of her initial encounter with a BEC as a college student. “What drew you to come back?” I asked her. “The joy,” she answered. “People were so full of joy, so excited. You could feel the Holy Spirit in the room, moving us, everyone hoping for a great change.”5 The hush harbors were also powered by mystical experience: “The prayer warriors of hush harbors were prophetic contemplatives, those who saw moments of stillness as a chance to encounter the sacred, to be set free, and for the experience of that spiritual freedom to invoke their deepest conviction in a liberated world.”6
Lastly, the combination of their analysis of their reality and their experience of the power of the Spirit led to liberating action, to faith-full organizing. They fought for a better life, for a more abundant life, for all. They did not place artificial limits on the realm or call of God. Their faith made a difference not only for themselves as individuals but also for their communities and societies. The phrase from Gaudium et Spes (the 1965 document on the church produced in relationship to the Second Vatican Council) for the church is “soul and yeast of the society.” The base Christian community movement took that seriously.
When my daughter was in high school, she brought a friend to the house who had grown up in a family with no religious tradition or commitment. She said to me, “I am kinda interested in Jesus but only if he actually changes the world.” I was struck by the extent to which that is the heart cry of many millennials (and in a slightly different voice, Generation Z). These new generations that are leaving the church in the West by droves are interested in Jesus. However, they are only interested in a Jesus who actually makes a difference in our daily lives and in our hurting communities, a Jesus who actually changes the world. The base Christian community movement and the hush harbors changed the lives of those who participated, giving them healing, strength, and hope. Those who received these gifts seamlessly moved into action to change their communities toward the greater availability of abundant life for all. Their leadership by marginalized, poor people of color is a testimony to the reality of the God revealed in 1 Corinthians 1:26–29: “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential, not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him.”
The experience and quality of the base Christian communities and the hush harbors continue to exist in the lives of Christian communities led by a wide variety of pastors of color and their extended families all over the world. Iglesia de Restauracion in Los Angeles, for example, is led by Rev. Rene Molina Sr. and his millennial son, Rene Jr., along with the rest of their extended family. The two Rene Molinas love and respect each other, working together to serve the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking congregations within their several thousand-member church in a low-income area of South Los Angeles. They each bring their respective gifts and capacities, typical of the gifts of their respective generations to a ministry that integrates evangelism and community development. The church is known for the Spirit-filled love for God and each other that pervades all their activities. Iglesia de Restauracion does not show up on any denominational scoreboard; it has not been part of any formal studies. It is emblematic of signs of renewal throughout the larger church.
The percentage of Christians in the world (about one-third of the global population) is holding steady. The composition has changed, with the bulk of Christians now coming from or living in the Global South and East. Those who decry the death of the church often miss the new life bursting through. The church is dying; the church is rising. The church is being renewed. Praise be to God!
Alexia Salvatierra is academic dean for Centro Latino, associate professor of mission and global transformation, and founding developer and coordinator of the Diplomado en la Respuesta de la Iglesia a la Crisis Migratoria (Professional Certificate in the Church’s Response to the Immigration Crisis). An ordained Lutheran pastor, she has over 40 years of experience in local, national, and international ministry, including church-based community development programs, congregational/community organizing, and legislative advocacy. Dr. Salvatierra is the co-author of Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World and of Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities.
Tod Bolsinger, associate professor of leadership formation, considers what faithful leadership looks like when the future is uncertain.
