New Creation Lutheran Church / Iglesia Luterana Nueva Creación: The Empowering Gospel

New Creation Lutheran Church / Iglesia Luterana Nueva Creación: The Empowering Gospel

Worship services at New Creation Lutheran Church typically close with the small congregation holding hands in a circle and singing the simple song, "God Is So Good." Like everything else in the service, the song is bilingual, and the circle symbolizes the diverse congregation's unity in Christ. In his benediction, Rev. Patrick Cabello Hansel charges the congregation to spend their week "inviting others who do not know Christ and working for peace and justice."

The sanctuary space surrounds the congregation with affirmations of the church's mission. Hanging in the sanctuary is a banner with the church's butterfly logo and theme verse, "En Cristo Somos Una Nueva Creación / In Christ We Are a New Creation." Behind the pulpit is a colorful hand-made quilt with urban and biblical scenes intermingled, an updated echo of the pastoral biblical images in the church's old stained glass windows. Another prominently displayed banner depicts a dove surrounded by olive branches hovering over a city skyline, with Jesus' well-known saying from Luke 4-with a slight change in the words to claim Jesus' mission as their own: "The Spirit of the Lord has anointed us to preach good news to the poor ..."

New Creation's community cries out for good news. The neighborhood is plagued by generational poverty and family dysfunction, and accompanying high rates of violence, single parenthood, and substance abuse. A lack of structure and stability, at both the family and institutional levels, keeps people's lives in a state of chaos. Deportation is a constant threat to many undocumented immigrants, adding to the high rates of unemployment and transience. The booming population of children and youth cry out for positive role models and productive activities. Insidious racism has lowered residents' expectations and demeaned their self-esteem. The neighborhood suffers from neglect by police, elected officials, and city services such as street cleaning and trash pick-up. Rev. Hansel has noted that unlike many Hispanic neighborhoods, the people in his community tend to be second or third generation secularized Catholics and lack a strong spiritual foundation.

In this setting, says Rev. Hansel, "The mission of the church is not simply to save souls but to transform the community." Although the church is relatively new, and its membership and resource base are still small (literally-over half the members are under age 18), the church has developed a reputation for helping the community. Rev. Hansel believes the role of the church is to sustain a compassionate, empowering, transformational presence in the midst of poverty and hopelessness. As people experience God's love through the church's demonstration and proclamation of the Gospel, they are freed and empowered to work for change. Rev. Hansel explains,

Transformation generally takes place first within the individual coming to an awareness of being loved and forgiven by a gracious God, and then being transformed and the evil or oppression taken away from them. ... That individual transformation leads to involvement in justice and the building of a community.

New Creation helps people come to know God's love and grace both through incarnational witness, and through more direct evangelistic forums such as flyers, street festivals, Bring a Friend Sunday, and culturally traditional celebrations like Three King's Day and First Communion. The church also shares the gospel in the context of social programs-for example, the summer camp celebrates "Christmas in July" each year, giving the counselors an opportunity to tell children the story of Christ. Prayer is a regular feature in all of the church's ministries.

Rev. Hansel believes that social ministry can be disempowering when it focuses on "responding to need, rather than energizing what people's gifts are." People came to Christ deaf, blind and leprous; Christ invited them to follow Him and become evangelists and healers. The people who come to New Creation to receive ministry are recruited to minister to others. People who are aided by the church's food ministry find it hard to refuse the coordinator when she urges them to spend a few hours volunteering for the church. "We're giving to you," she coaxes. "You can at least give your time." Through the church, residents come to view themselves as community assets, and learn the power of working together to accomplish common goals.

One innovative grant-funded ministry, the Pre-Work program, exemplifies this empowerment approach. The program simultaneously tackles unemployment, community decay, and a lack of wholesome activities for youth by hiring pre-teens and adult supervisors (some just leaving welfare) to work in various community service and entrepreneurship projects. Youth tend a garden cultivated in an empty lot, work at the church's summer day camp, maintain the church and community center, paint flowers over graffiti at local playgrounds, write for the community newspaper, and run a small snack food business. The youth also learn how to advocate for change-for example, how to report abandoned cars to the police station.

Rev. Hansel looks for opportunities to raise the youths' awareness of justice issues. For example, on a field trip to an arboretum, their van got stuck behind a garbage truck in an upscale neighborhood. The kids were surprised to see the garbage workers put the cans back where they found them, instead of throwing them into the street, and pick up garbage that they dropped. Rev. Hansel led a discussion of why this does not happen in their neighborhood, and what they might do to change things. But the program also encourages youth to focus on personal development by training them in conflict resolution, integrity, and other matters of character. They learn the value of prayer and church fellowship, the necessity of seeking forgiveness from God and forgiving others. The youth also learn to integrate faith with service. When asked what the program taught them about God, one young girl responded: "When we help people, we're doing something God wants us to do."

Community beautification is another important expression of the church's mission. Rev. Hansel's wife, Louisa, explains,

One of the more aggressive ways that people express themselves, their anger, their dissatisfactions, is through graffiti. ... When we first saw the church and all the walls around covered with graffiti, that was a sign of a lack of hope that our children were going to see everyday. ... Painting flowers and butterflies, signs of hope, is giving the children a message that life can be better than what they used to see. This is absolutely part of our spiritual life.

Even when the murals painted by the church have no explicit religious content, they are still a form of witness. Similarly, the community garden is a living symbol of the new creation the church is becoming through Christ. Rev. Hansel attests, "When you take care of the creation, the creation responds. We planted our garden, and birds came back, butterflies came back, wildflowers came back. It's like it says in Romans 8: 'The whole creation is waiting for the revealing of the children of God.'"

New Creation's transformational vision looks beyond their neighborhood. Through an ecumenical coalition called Philadelphia Interfaith Action, New Creation joins with other churches to work for change on social issues that affect the entire city, such as community policing, affordable housing, and welfare reform. Their involvement reflects a belief that God loves the whole city and desires to see it flourish. As one church attender expressed it, "Social change comes from an understanding that we are all children of God, and that this is not the way God wants things." Even though the congregation may not immediately see specific improvements in their neighborhood or personal circumstances as a result, the effort helps them realize a sense of empowerment and reinforces the church's message of hope in God.

Hope sustains Rev. Hansel through times of discouragement and weariness. "God is going to transform the world, and we plant little seeds of that, and the church is a gardener. The youth in the pre-work program, the murals, or getting a few people jobs - those are all signs. The same way that people forgiving each other is a sign. And it's a long process, but I do believe that transformation's coming, and it's coming here."

[chap. 1, pp. 29-32]