April 6, 2025 • 29 mins
In this powerful episode of Bleeding Daylight, Reverend Dr. Alvin Sanders shares his transformative approach to urban ministry as President of World Impact. Drawing from personal experience with poverty and three decades in ministry, Sanders challenges traditional church models by advocating for a "neighbourhood-as-parish" approach where churches become institutional assets to their communities. He reveals how World Impact's "glocally urban" strategy equips untrained pastors in 19 countries through innovative programs like their "seminary in a backpack."
Sanders unpacks the true nature of poverty beyond finances and outlines practical strategies for churches to engage their communities authentically. From creating "third spaces" that combat loneliness to implementing Asset-Based Community Development models, he demonstrates how churches can move beyond paternalistic charity to foster genuine community flourishing. His stories of transformation—from Cincinnati neighbourhoods to closed countries experiencing revival—illustrate how trained urban leaders can catalyse lasting change when churches approach ministry with humility, genuine care, and a commitment to meeting people at their point of need.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Are you ready to hear another powerful story of hope?
If you're inspired, you can help others discover Bleeding Daylight by sharing on social media or simply by telling a friend.
(00:35):
Who will you share Bleeding Daylight with today?
If you're a part of a church, do people in your area see that church as an asset to the neighbourhood?
How can churches contribute to the flourishing of the community around them?
Today's guest points us towards the answer.
(01:03):
My guest today is a man whose life's work embodies the intersection of faith and social transformation.
As the President of World Impact, Reverend Dr. Alvin Sanders leads a remarkable organisation dedicated to empowering urban communities through church-based initiatives.
With a unique approach that bridges both local and global needs, his work includes initiatives from church-based seminary programs to transformative prison ministries.
(01:33):
Under his leadership, World Impact is revolutionising how churches engage with communities experiencing poverty, moving beyond simple charity to create lasting systemic change through theological education and leadership development.
Alvin, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well, thanks for having me.
Glad to be here.
Now, I know that as soon as we mention that word poverty, people have their preconceived ideas of what it means and even how we should be responding to it.
(02:03):
Can you help me get a fuller understanding of what poverty actually means?
Well, at its root, I would say poverty means lack of.
You have a lack of something.
There's spiritual poverty and there's all kinds of other types of poverty, but for today, we're focused on financial poverty.
Working with people who are living in the condition of poverty or they're experiencing poverty.
(02:27):
And I make it very clear to say that because we have a tendency of making people's social class their identity.
And just because somebody is living in the condition of poverty, that doesn't define who they are.
It just means that they just have a lack of finances.
And that's interesting.
You've mentioned that there are various forms of poverty and we are dealing very much with financial or economic poverty with what you're dealing with.
(02:54):
But I imagine that wherever there's a lack, the answer is often very similar.
And how do we deal with that?
Because you deal with things very differently.
I know that if we're going to see different results, we need to act differently.
And I understand that, for instance, going back some years, your response to a shooting in a violent neighborhood was very much aimed at holistic change.
(03:16):
Can you tell me about that time all those years ago?
Yes.
In the year 2000, there was a shooting in the neighborhood called Over the Rhine in Cincinnati of a young African-American man by the name of Timothy Thomas by a white Cincinnati police officer.
And for a while, there was a lot of civil unrest.
That actually happened to be about the six month mark of a new church that I had just started called River of Life Church.
(03:42):
And it was a church that was aimed to reach people from all walks of life, different ethnicities, different races, different social classes.
And so we found ourself in the middle of a pretty much a firestorm, stuff that they don't teach you about seminary.
Right.
But we had aimed to be at that neighborhood because traditionally speaking in Cincinnati, that was a neighborhood of economic poverty.
(04:03):
So we wanted to engage it.
We wanted to make it a better place as best we possibly can from a Christian perspective.
So we went into there.
It was a baptism by fire.
But God is gracious.
God is good.
I no longer pastor there.
I haven't pastored there since 2007.
But that church, 25 years later, is still going strong, still a place of multi-ethnicity, still a place that's serving the community and people from all walks of life.
(04:26):
It's interesting you talking about the way that you worked in that area and you had specific goals in that area.
We know that when God works with us, he works on the specific things that we need work on.
And yet so often churches that are planted wherever they may be, we seem to take this cookie cutter approach of this is what church looks like.
(04:47):
How important is it that we ensure that church actually looks like the neighborhood and at the same time is encouraging people to reach towards something else that God has planned for them?
My view when I was pastoring was the view that I wasn't pastoring a congregation.
I was pastoring the neighborhood.
(05:08):
The neighborhood was my parish, so to speak.
So I wanted that church to be an asset, an institutional asset to the neighborhood, which entailed, number one, to be a welcoming space, a place where people can come and feel welcome from whatever background that they may be coming from.
And for a place where people can determine their own self-agency, where they can participate in not only spiritual uplift, but whatever type of uplift that they wanted to.
(05:39):
We helped people in a holistic manner.
Not only did we have a food pantry, but we also would help pay for people to get vocational training or help them enter into college.
But whatever it may be to help them have a higher quality of life.
Sometimes I joke that sometimes Christians can be so heavenly minded or no earthly good.
So we wanted to be earthly good.
(05:59):
We wanted to meet people at their point of need of where they were at and engage them and help them in whatever situation that they needed help in.
You've touched on something very important that we want people to have some kind of self-determination, to be able to have some skin in the game of this is how we want things to go.
(06:21):
Because so often we can get this idea that just because people are living in a situation of poverty, those of us who have stuff know the answers and we can come in and bring them the answers.
And yet those people who are living in that condition of poverty often have a lot to say.
(06:42):
They have that potential.
They just don't have the means to reach that.
Tell me a little bit about that.
First off, the number one reason why people in poverty, they were born into it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
They were born into that situation.
For those who decide that they are going to raise out of that, there's usually a couple of things that are present.
(07:02):
One is an adult or someone who cares for them in a very, very deep way, whether it's a parent or a coach or a teacher.
It's someone who cares very deeply about them and has decided to invest in them, put some resources behind them.
And any other thing is the person's desire to want to change their situation.
(07:25):
That's the thing that they control.
The third thing, then, is they develop a skill that's going to help them make a livable wage.
So when those three things are present, the person wants to have economic uplift.
There's somebody who has resources for them to help them achieve their goals, and then they develop a skill set, whatever it may be, that helps them earn a livable wage.
(07:50):
I want to explore the work of World Impact in a moment, but I think it's probably helpful for people to know that you're not coming in as that outside expert.
You've lived in a world of poverty.
You've actually experienced what it's like, haven't you?
I've been in ministry for 30-something years now, and there was a definite season in my life where I was definitely in poverty.
(08:13):
My wife actually grew up in inner-city Cleveland.
Yeah, there was a season where we definitely were incarnational to the neighborhood, to the community.
So, yes, I'm not only coming from an academic perspective, from a perspective that I have also lived.
Tell me a little about World Impact and where it began.
World Impact began in 1971.
It was started by a man by the name of Dr. Keith Phillips in urban Los Angeles, the Watts neighborhood in particular.
(08:39):
The famous story goes in our folklore is Dr. Phillips was working in Watts, and he asked the kids to teach him about the neighborhood, and he would teach them the Bible.
So it started as kids clubs, and it spread across the country as kids clubs, and then over the years, it's evolved to different things.
Where we do now is work to solve the problem that 95% of the world's pastors have no ministry, formal ministry training, I should say.
(09:05):
We make that training affordable and accessible.
We help them to be able to be equipped so that they can develop healthy churches because we believe that trained urban pastors leading healthy churches leads to healthy community engagement, and then that contributes to the flourishing of the neighborhood.
Having been operating for so long, you've had the opportunity to see whether this works or not, whether this is just a great theory or not, and you've seen transformation in various places, haven't you?
(09:35):
Yes.
In fact, about 18 months ago, we had a study done with BARDA group, and the study was produced was called Inside the Urban Church.
That study proved that our theory of change definitely works, and it's actually what the non-Christians in the neighborhood look for.
They are looking for the church to be an asset to the neighborhood, to engage the community in a way for the common good.
(10:00):
Tell me about some of the countries that you work in because I know that while you certainly are working in areas around the U.S., you're working in various countries around the world, aren't you?
Yes, we are what's called glocally urban.
So the word global is that we're global and local at the same time.
From the beginning, World Impact has always believed that if you reach the American city, then you get the world because the American city is so diverse.
(10:28):
We focus on major U.S. cities.
But for instance, like if we do a training in Dallas, we know without having to do anything else, it's going to go to Mexico, it's going to go to Central America, and it may even go to South America because of the relational highways in the American city and the people that we have trained.
So we try to get behind the grassroots leader and support them as they do the work of the ministry throughout the world.
(10:55):
I believe our last fiscal year, we had programs happening in 19 countries.
We have the Urban Ministry Institute, which is our seminary in a backpack that we call it.
It's unaccredited, but we give you the same level of quality of education as a seminary.
We have our church planting where we'll train people to start churches in communities experiencing poverty.
(11:16):
We also have our prison ministry program, which is our TUMI program, the Urban Ministry Institute, our seminary backpack, but it's just behind bars.
We also have our trauma healing program where we train churches that can engage people who have been affected by trauma, not only in their congregation, but in the neighborhood.
And I'm very aware that the difference between normal seminary training and what you're doing here, like you mentioned earlier, there are things that they do not teach you in seminary.
(11:43):
And yet when you're talking about this sort of a program, it's actually happening in the situation where it's going to be outworked.
The things that come up are not just going to be theoretical, but they must impact the neighborhood.
They must have a connection to what's happening because that's what the people who are going through these courses are living, isn't it?
(12:04):
Yes, that's why it's church-based seminary.
Everybody who's in our programs are the ones who are outside the prison ministry program.
They're engaged in ministry.
This isn't ivory tower stuff.
We're teaching in the academics, but they're bringing the practicality of what they're doing in their own neighborhoods to the classroom.
So it's a very real-time teaching.
Can you perhaps think of a place or two where you've seen a real turnaround?
(12:29):
And tell me about some of the stories that come out of this sort of methodology.
Well, our stories are found in the people.
They had tests that turned into testimonies.
So we have many of those.
I mean, if you go to our website at www.worldimpact.org, you'll see a lot of these stories.
But I'll just give a brief story of a gentleman by the name of David Hernandez, who is doing phenomenal work throughout Latin America.
(12:58):
But he started in pastoring and doing ministry in the Los Angeles area.
And then he became equipped with our resources and had a vision.
And that's what we do.
We get behind people with their own vision.
He ended up moving to Mexico City so he could be more centrally located to do his work throughout Latin America.
And now he's training hundreds of thousands of pastors.
(13:20):
And he's getting into even closed access countries that I won't name what it is, but it's definitely a closed access country.
And he's got really a mini revival going there.
It's just exploding in growth of how many people we're equipping there.
We've trained over 100,000 people in three years in that particular country.
Through resourcing and equipping David Hernandez.
(13:40):
When you pour into a leader in that area and they're able to then pass that on and continually creating new leadership opportunities, aren't you?
Yes.
We just follow the biblical pattern of Jesus of discipling people.
We resource them.
We get behind them.
God has given them gifts and talents and abilities.
And we try to fan that gift into a flame so that it spreads.
(14:03):
I'm wondering how the local church in the U.S. is responding to what you're doing.
Because I imagine that there's a couple of different ways.
One is, yes, we believe in what you're doing and we'll get behind it.
But are there other churches that are saying we don't quite understand this?
The churches who don't understand us, we probably never meet.
(14:24):
I mean, I guess they're out there, but that's not who we engage, right?
There is a growing market of suburban churches.
Because suburban churches are experiencing urban dynamics within their neighborhoods and they're trying to figure out how to deal with it.
We're finding ourselves more and more utilizing the expertise that we've developed in urban context to help suburban pastors and ministries deal with the neighborhood dynamics that are happening with them that they hadn't seen before.
(14:51):
There have been some suburban places where there hasn't been a growing pocket of poverty.
Now they're like, oh, OK, so these pockets are out here.
How can we engage them?
How can we be the hand and feet of Jesus amongst them in a way that's not very paternalistic, demanding and controlling?
So I would say that's probably the most interesting thing that's happening with us next Tuesday.
(15:12):
I'll be going down to a large suburban church in the Louisville, Kentucky area that does a dynamic outreach in the city of Louisville.
They have this initiative called Love the Ville.
And I'm going to be doing a presentation for them and their leadership staff on Inside the Urban Church.
And they're located in the richest county in Kentucky.
(15:35):
And you're like, well, why are you going there?
Because they have urban dynamics and they want to be part of making the city of Louisville a better place.
So shout out the pastor, Tyler McKenzie.
I love him to death and he's trying to do something different.
And that's sort of like our growing niche, so to speak.
We're starting to engage churches in places where you wouldn't think they'd be interested in what we have to offer.
(15:56):
And when we talk about different churches across the world, there are those who are going to be in a situation where the economic, the financial poverty is very obvious and they can work with that.
There are the others that you've mentioned where they're starting to see pockets around them within their own neighborhood where there is that poverty.
But I imagine there's going to be other churches as well that they don't see any financial or economic poverty.
(16:23):
But as you mentioned, poverty can take various forms.
For instance, we know that there's this growing epidemic of loneliness.
How do we reach out and touch that kind of poverty in our churches?
It's funny you say that, because the research that we did with Barnard Group, the biggest finding that we found is particularly in the urban context, but I think this is true in all contexts.
(16:47):
The non-Christians as well as the Christians who went to churches in their neighborhood, they both wanted the same thing engaged, and that is loneliness.
They both wanted the church to provide a place of belonging for them.
What belonging meant to the non-Christian, though, didn't necessarily mean they wanted to come in for our Bible studies and our worship services.
(17:10):
But they were willing to engage Christians in something that they felt like would make the neighborhood a better place.
So whether it's a church sponsoring a basketball team or a church doing a coffee house, it could be anything.
You know, there was a sociologist years and years ago that came up with the concept called the third space.
His name was Ray Oldenburg, and he talked about the third space, the third communal space.
(17:34):
It's not home.
It's not work.
It's that space in between.
Churches that can engage people who are lonely and looking for belonging by creating some sort of third space, whatever that third space will be, they'll find that they'll be embraced by the neighborhood in the community.
I'm wondering, how do we switch from using that third space, using those sorts of activities that will engage people in our community?
(17:59):
How do we move from just a bait-and-switch type operation of just, okay, now we've got them, to start to truly love our neighbor, and so that we're starting to have these initiatives, these third spaces to alleviate the loneliness because of our love for them?
And obviously, we still want to draw them to Christ, but that it's drawn from a place of love for them rather than chalking up another, chalking up another.
(18:28):
Yes, it's finding out what's something that the neighborhood needs that the church can provide that's for the common good of the community, the common good of the neighborhood.
So, for instance, going back into my ministry background, when I was pastoring the church, we did a mapping of the neighborhood, and we found out that the neighborhood needed a food pantry, but not for the down-and-out, but for the working poor, because most of the poor in America are working poor.
(18:55):
So, they have enough money for like three weeks, but it's that fourth week that gets them.
So, we created a unique type of food pantry for the working poor that gave what we called emergency food assistance.
So, it'd be a week's worth of groceries.
And so, you could come and get these groceries, no strings attached.
We just opened up the church space.
You filled out some forms to show that you were eligible, and then we would give the groceries.
(19:20):
The funniest thing is people wanted more than groceries.
They wanted to hang out.
They knew they were coming into a church, and they say, hey, Rev, can you pray for me?
We didn't ask them.
They just said, hey, can you pray for me?
And then we partnered with Xavier University in Cincinnati, and they had the nursing students.
They would come over, and they would give health tips and health screenings.
(19:41):
And if they found people had something wrong, like diabetes, they'd refer them to the local hospital.
So, it just became this sort of community hub.
You could come to church if you want.
We weren't trying to proselytize people.
It's like, hey, it's this third space.
We're utilizing the asset of our building.
There have been people who came to the food pantry and never came to church, but then a family member died, and then they'd say, hey, can you do a funeral for my family?
(20:03):
We'd say, sure.
Come on on.
So, the whole key, the whole glue, Rodney, is just meeting people at their needs.
There was a man by the name of Jesus who kind of did that, didn't he?
Woman at the well, ring a name, right?
You just meet people at their point of need, their felt need.
Where is it at?
And you find out what it is.
From a communal standpoint, you utilize your resources to meet that need, and wonderful things happen.
(20:27):
And I'm very aware, as you're talking, you're not just discussing this idea of meeting a simple need and helping people get by, but you're more and more wanting people to flourish.
You're wanting the community to flourish and looking at what does it look like, not just to help my community to get by day by day, but what does it look like for my community to flourish, for the people in my community to flourish and become all they can be.
(20:57):
Talk to me a little about that.
I think the Bible teaches that when it comes to dealing with people in poverty, it's long-term care.
Jesus said the poor will be with you always.
He said that because of the fallen nature of the world that we're in.
So because we know that, then we should have a long-term view of how we want to care for them.
(21:17):
I mean, even in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, there were all these laws that were laid out of how the church of Israel was supposed to engage with people who had a lack of financial resource, because they would be there.
And the church is the only institution that's been charged by heaven to be able to engage these folk.
Other institutions can do it, and it's not that other institutions are excluded, but the church is charged to do that.
(21:40):
It is part of our Christian responsibility to do so and to engage those who are in communities experiencing poverty and help them have a better life.
You've talked about finding this work actually effective in areas that you wouldn't even imagine there is financial or economic poverty.
(22:00):
I imagine there's people listening who think, no, I live in an area where there is no poverty.
How do we actually lift the lid a little and recognize where those pockets of poverty in our own area might exist?
Any demographic study, however you want, you want to pay for it, you want to get it for free, but if you do a demographic study of your particular neighborhood, it will show you where the pockets of poverty are.
(22:24):
And people will be shocked.
I mean, there's very few places that have no pockets of poverty.
It just isn't.
You can actually drill down and see the different ethnicities of people in the area, so you can start to understand what might be the need here.
Once we discover that there are those areas, this comes back to one of the earlier points, is self-determination.
(22:48):
How do we engage people in the first place and say, what do you see is your need?
What is the felt need in this area that we, as a church, as a people of God, can actually help you with?
How do we do that?
There's a very practical call that people can use called the Asset-Based Community Development Model, ABCD.
(23:09):
There's actually an Asset-Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University in Chicago.
And you can actually be trained on how to map your neighborhood.
That's exactly what I did when I was a pastor.
You could do an asset mapping of the neighborhood to figure that very question out of what's the connection point, the intersection point between the church and what we have to offer and what the neighborhood needs.
(23:33):
That's actually how I started my church.
I did an Asset-Based Community Development Model for the Over the Rhine neighborhood.
And we figured out the need was that what I talked about earlier, that working class food pantry.
And that was what would determine what we offered as an outreach to the neighborhood and the community.
So you can utilize that tool.
And then you can also do the old school, just build relationships in the neighborhood.
(23:56):
Come in as a learner.
Come in to serve.
You spend enough time with people.
You get to learn and know what's the heartbeat of the neighborhood is, what the heartbeat of the citizens are and what the needs are.
Because this isn't a flyover type of ministry.
You have to get your hands dirty.
You have to get in there.
You have to get to learn people and know people.
The biggest mistake churches make is they think they can determine what the neighborhood needs and they don't take the time to build relationships and learn people and learn what the needs are and then meet that need.
(24:28):
Instead of coming in with a predetermined supposition of, well, we know what you need.
That's called paternalism and mission circles.
And that's terrible.
And you don't want to do that.
You've mentioned a couple of times that often a church can be seen as quite different from those outside.
If there's a need that the church is starting to fill.
(24:51):
I guess that there have been many opportunities you've seen of churches that have taken on a very different reputation in their neighborhoods when they start meeting the needs of the people that are there.
Are there any stories of how those outside the church have started to view church when they see a relevance that they haven't seen before?
(25:12):
Well, yeah, I think most people are open, are open to churches.
I think there's this falsehood that people are against the church or they're angry at the church or things of that nature.
And that's they're pretty neutral.
They're pretty neutral when it comes to the church.
And what determines whether or not people come on the good side, so to speak, or the positive side, is the posture that the church takes and the things that we've been talking about.
(25:38):
Humility, coming as a learner, engage, seeking the common good of the community.
Those are the things that the people of the neighborhood value.
I've frankly never been part of a church that was negatively viewed by the neighborhood.
I just have it.
There are churches that have reputations for, oh, they're not real.
(26:00):
Those aren't real people.
They don't really care about us.
But those churches were renamed nameless.
So I'm not going to do that.
Not going to throw them under the bus.
But it's a church that carries itself very arrogantly and looks down upon the people.
People know when they're being looked down upon.
And it seems that all the things that you're talking about are just those things that are written in the pages of the scripture.
(26:24):
Amen.
Exactly right.
That is such a great manual for how do we live?
How do we interact with others?
How do we give everything to loving God, heart, soul, mind, and then loving our neighbor as we love ourselves?
If we take that seriously, as Jesus said, it's the greatest commandment.
We can't go too far wrong, can we?
That's right.
If you only had 30 seconds and you said, what's the meaning of Christianity?
(26:47):
It would be Matthew 22, 37 through 40.
Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind.
I love your neighbor as yourself.
First and second greatest commandments.
If you only had 30 seconds, you'd say, hey, read this.
This is what it's about.
And then you do your best to follow that.
And when you do that, great things happen under the power of the Holy Spirit.
And there's a huge attractiveness to people who may never have considered stepping into the doors of a church if they believe that they are truly loved and not just another conquest or another project.
(27:18):
Yes.
Nobody wants to be made to feel like they're a project.
People come into the faith through other people.
So if other people think that you truly care about them, period, regardless, and you're living a spirit-filled life, there are going to be people who are going to be attracted to that and say, hey, tell me more about that.
Most people don't just wander into a church.
(27:38):
By the time they get to a church, there's been a season of relationship building with someone somewhere throughout their life.
And then that makes them open to want to attend the church.
But I've only found that the most people who if they just wander into a church for the first time, they're probably going through some sort of crisis.
And that's OK.
(27:58):
But most people, it's a step-by-step stage process of how they come to know the Lord.
Alvin, you mentioned before the website for World Impact.
Is that the best place for people to discover more about the way that you're working with people around the world?
Oh, absolutely.
Worldimpact.org is your spot you want to be at.
I will make sure that I put links to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily.
(28:25):
But Alvin, I want to say thank you for our conversation.
Thank you for what you're doing.
And thank you for taking time to be on Bleeding Daylight today.
Well, thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(28:46):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Are you ready to hear another powerful story of hope?
If you're inspired, you can help others discover Bleeding Daylight by sharing on social media or simply by telling a friend.
(00:35):
Who will you share Bleeding Daylight with today?
If you're a part of a church, do people in your area see that church as an asset to the neighbourhood?
How can churches contribute to the flourishing of the community around them?
Today's guest points us towards the answer.
(01:03):
My guest today is a man whose life's work embodies the intersection of faith and social transformation.
As the President of World Impact, Reverend Dr. Alvin Sanders leads a remarkable organisation dedicated to empowering urban communities through church-based initiatives.
With a unique approach that bridges both local and global needs, his work includes initiatives from church-based seminary programs to transformative prison ministries.
(01:33):
Under his leadership, World Impact is revolutionising how churches engage with communities experiencing poverty, moving beyond simple charity to create lasting systemic change through theological education and leadership development.
Alvin, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well, thanks for having me.
Glad to be here.
Now, I know that as soon as we mention that word poverty, people have their preconceived ideas of what it means and even how we should be responding to it.
(02:03):
Can you help me get a fuller understanding of what poverty actually means?
Well, at its root, I would say poverty means lack of.
You have a lack of something.
There's spiritual poverty and there's all kinds of other types of poverty, but for today, we're focused on financial poverty.
Working with people who are living in the condition of poverty or they're experiencing poverty.
(02:27):
And I make it very clear to say that because we have a tendency of making people's social class their identity.
And just because somebody is living in the condition of poverty, that doesn't define who they are.
It just means that they just have a lack of finances.
And that's interesting.
You've mentioned that there are various forms of poverty and we are dealing very much with financial or economic poverty with what you're dealing with.
(02:54):
But I imagine that wherever there's a lack, the answer is often very similar.
And how do we deal with that?
Because you deal with things very differently.
I know that if we're going to see different results, we need to act differently.
And I understand that, for instance, going back some years, your response to a shooting in a violent neighborhood was very much aimed at holistic change.
(03:16):
Can you tell me about that time all those years ago?
Yes.
In the year 2000, there was a shooting in the neighborhood called Over the Rhine in Cincinnati of a young African-American man by the name of Timothy Thomas by a white Cincinnati police officer.
And for a while, there was a lot of civil unrest.
That actually happened to be about the six month mark of a new church that I had just started called River of Life Church.
(03:42):
And it was a church that was aimed to reach people from all walks of life, different ethnicities, different races, different social classes.
And so we found ourself in the middle of a pretty much a firestorm, stuff that they don't teach you about seminary.
Right.
But we had aimed to be at that neighborhood because traditionally speaking in Cincinnati, that was a neighborhood of economic poverty.
(04:03):
So we wanted to engage it.
We wanted to make it a better place as best we possibly can from a Christian perspective.
So we went into there.
It was a baptism by fire.
But God is gracious.
God is good.
I no longer pastor there.
I haven't pastored there since 2007.
But that church, 25 years later, is still going strong, still a place of multi-ethnicity, still a place that's serving the community and people from all walks of life.
(04:26):
It's interesting you talking about the way that you worked in that area and you had specific goals in that area.
We know that when God works with us, he works on the specific things that we need work on.
And yet so often churches that are planted wherever they may be, we seem to take this cookie cutter approach of this is what church looks like.
(04:47):
How important is it that we ensure that church actually looks like the neighborhood and at the same time is encouraging people to reach towards something else that God has planned for them?
My view when I was pastoring was the view that I wasn't pastoring a congregation.
I was pastoring the neighborhood.
(05:08):
The neighborhood was my parish, so to speak.
So I wanted that church to be an asset, an institutional asset to the neighborhood, which entailed, number one, to be a welcoming space, a place where people can come and feel welcome from whatever background that they may be coming from.
And for a place where people can determine their own self-agency, where they can participate in not only spiritual uplift, but whatever type of uplift that they wanted to.
(05:39):
We helped people in a holistic manner.
Not only did we have a food pantry, but we also would help pay for people to get vocational training or help them enter into college.
But whatever it may be to help them have a higher quality of life.
Sometimes I joke that sometimes Christians can be so heavenly minded or no earthly good.
So we wanted to be earthly good.
(05:59):
We wanted to meet people at their point of need of where they were at and engage them and help them in whatever situation that they needed help in.
You've touched on something very important that we want people to have some kind of self-determination, to be able to have some skin in the game of this is how we want things to go.
(06:21):
Because so often we can get this idea that just because people are living in a situation of poverty, those of us who have stuff know the answers and we can come in and bring them the answers.
And yet those people who are living in that condition of poverty often have a lot to say.
(06:42):
They have that potential.
They just don't have the means to reach that.
Tell me a little bit about that.
First off, the number one reason why people in poverty, they were born into it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
They were born into that situation.
For those who decide that they are going to raise out of that, there's usually a couple of things that are present.
(07:02):
One is an adult or someone who cares for them in a very, very deep way, whether it's a parent or a coach or a teacher.
It's someone who cares very deeply about them and has decided to invest in them, put some resources behind them.
And any other thing is the person's desire to want to change their situation.
(07:25):
That's the thing that they control.
The third thing, then, is they develop a skill that's going to help them make a livable wage.
So when those three things are present, the person wants to have economic uplift.
There's somebody who has resources for them to help them achieve their goals, and then they develop a skill set, whatever it may be, that helps them earn a livable wage.
(07:50):
I want to explore the work of World Impact in a moment, but I think it's probably helpful for people to know that you're not coming in as that outside expert.
You've lived in a world of poverty.
You've actually experienced what it's like, haven't you?
I've been in ministry for 30-something years now, and there was a definite season in my life where I was definitely in poverty.
(08:13):
My wife actually grew up in inner-city Cleveland.
Yeah, there was a season where we definitely were incarnational to the neighborhood, to the community.
So, yes, I'm not only coming from an academic perspective, from a perspective that I have also lived.
Tell me a little about World Impact and where it began.
World Impact began in 1971.
It was started by a man by the name of Dr. Keith Phillips in urban Los Angeles, the Watts neighborhood in particular.
(08:39):
The famous story goes in our folklore is Dr. Phillips was working in Watts, and he asked the kids to teach him about the neighborhood, and he would teach them the Bible.
So it started as kids clubs, and it spread across the country as kids clubs, and then over the years, it's evolved to different things.
Where we do now is work to solve the problem that 95% of the world's pastors have no ministry, formal ministry training, I should say.
(09:05):
We make that training affordable and accessible.
We help them to be able to be equipped so that they can develop healthy churches because we believe that trained urban pastors leading healthy churches leads to healthy community engagement, and then that contributes to the flourishing of the neighborhood.
Having been operating for so long, you've had the opportunity to see whether this works or not, whether this is just a great theory or not, and you've seen transformation in various places, haven't you?
(09:35):
Yes.
In fact, about 18 months ago, we had a study done with BARDA group, and the study was produced was called Inside the Urban Church.
That study proved that our theory of change definitely works, and it's actually what the non-Christians in the neighborhood look for.
They are looking for the church to be an asset to the neighborhood, to engage the community in a way for the common good.
(10:00):
Tell me about some of the countries that you work in because I know that while you certainly are working in areas around the U.S., you're working in various countries around the world, aren't you?
Yes, we are what's called glocally urban.
So the word global is that we're global and local at the same time.
From the beginning, World Impact has always believed that if you reach the American city, then you get the world because the American city is so diverse.
(10:28):
We focus on major U.S. cities.
But for instance, like if we do a training in Dallas, we know without having to do anything else, it's going to go to Mexico, it's going to go to Central America, and it may even go to South America because of the relational highways in the American city and the people that we have trained.
So we try to get behind the grassroots leader and support them as they do the work of the ministry throughout the world.
(10:55):
I believe our last fiscal year, we had programs happening in 19 countries.
We have the Urban Ministry Institute, which is our seminary in a backpack that we call it.
It's unaccredited, but we give you the same level of quality of education as a seminary.
We have our church planting where we'll train people to start churches in communities experiencing poverty.
(11:16):
We also have our prison ministry program, which is our TUMI program, the Urban Ministry Institute, our seminary backpack, but it's just behind bars.
We also have our trauma healing program where we train churches that can engage people who have been affected by trauma, not only in their congregation, but in the neighborhood.
And I'm very aware that the difference between normal seminary training and what you're doing here, like you mentioned earlier, there are things that they do not teach you in seminary.
(11:43):
And yet when you're talking about this sort of a program, it's actually happening in the situation where it's going to be outworked.
The things that come up are not just going to be theoretical, but they must impact the neighborhood.
They must have a connection to what's happening because that's what the people who are going through these courses are living, isn't it?
(12:04):
Yes, that's why it's church-based seminary.
Everybody who's in our programs are the ones who are outside the prison ministry program.
They're engaged in ministry.
This isn't ivory tower stuff.
We're teaching in the academics, but they're bringing the practicality of what they're doing in their own neighborhoods to the classroom.
So it's a very real-time teaching.
Can you perhaps think of a place or two where you've seen a real turnaround?
(12:29):
And tell me about some of the stories that come out of this sort of methodology.
Well, our stories are found in the people.
They had tests that turned into testimonies.
So we have many of those.
I mean, if you go to our website at www.worldimpact.org, you'll see a lot of these stories.
But I'll just give a brief story of a gentleman by the name of David Hernandez, who is doing phenomenal work throughout Latin America.
(12:58):
But he started in pastoring and doing ministry in the Los Angeles area.
And then he became equipped with our resources and had a vision.
And that's what we do.
We get behind people with their own vision.
He ended up moving to Mexico City so he could be more centrally located to do his work throughout Latin America.
And now he's training hundreds of thousands of pastors.
(13:20):
And he's getting into even closed access countries that I won't name what it is, but it's definitely a closed access country.
And he's got really a mini revival going there.
It's just exploding in growth of how many people we're equipping there.
We've trained over 100,000 people in three years in that particular country.
Through resourcing and equipping David Hernandez.
(13:40):
When you pour into a leader in that area and they're able to then pass that on and continually creating new leadership opportunities, aren't you?
Yes.
We just follow the biblical pattern of Jesus of discipling people.
We resource them.
We get behind them.
God has given them gifts and talents and abilities.
And we try to fan that gift into a flame so that it spreads.
(14:03):
I'm wondering how the local church in the U.S. is responding to what you're doing.
Because I imagine that there's a couple of different ways.
One is, yes, we believe in what you're doing and we'll get behind it.
But are there other churches that are saying we don't quite understand this?
The churches who don't understand us, we probably never meet.
(14:24):
I mean, I guess they're out there, but that's not who we engage, right?
There is a growing market of suburban churches.
Because suburban churches are experiencing urban dynamics within their neighborhoods and they're trying to figure out how to deal with it.
We're finding ourselves more and more utilizing the expertise that we've developed in urban context to help suburban pastors and ministries deal with the neighborhood dynamics that are happening with them that they hadn't seen before.
(14:51):
There have been some suburban places where there hasn't been a growing pocket of poverty.
Now they're like, oh, OK, so these pockets are out here.
How can we engage them?
How can we be the hand and feet of Jesus amongst them in a way that's not very paternalistic, demanding and controlling?
So I would say that's probably the most interesting thing that's happening with us next Tuesday.
(15:12):
I'll be going down to a large suburban church in the Louisville, Kentucky area that does a dynamic outreach in the city of Louisville.
They have this initiative called Love the Ville.
And I'm going to be doing a presentation for them and their leadership staff on Inside the Urban Church.
And they're located in the richest county in Kentucky.
(15:35):
And you're like, well, why are you going there?
Because they have urban dynamics and they want to be part of making the city of Louisville a better place.
So shout out the pastor, Tyler McKenzie.
I love him to death and he's trying to do something different.
And that's sort of like our growing niche, so to speak.
We're starting to engage churches in places where you wouldn't think they'd be interested in what we have to offer.
(15:56):
And when we talk about different churches across the world, there are those who are going to be in a situation where the economic, the financial poverty is very obvious and they can work with that.
There are the others that you've mentioned where they're starting to see pockets around them within their own neighborhood where there is that poverty.
But I imagine there's going to be other churches as well that they don't see any financial or economic poverty.
(16:23):
But as you mentioned, poverty can take various forms.
For instance, we know that there's this growing epidemic of loneliness.
How do we reach out and touch that kind of poverty in our churches?
It's funny you say that, because the research that we did with Barnard Group, the biggest finding that we found is particularly in the urban context, but I think this is true in all contexts.
(16:47):
The non-Christians as well as the Christians who went to churches in their neighborhood, they both wanted the same thing engaged, and that is loneliness.
They both wanted the church to provide a place of belonging for them.
What belonging meant to the non-Christian, though, didn't necessarily mean they wanted to come in for our Bible studies and our worship services.
(17:10):
But they were willing to engage Christians in something that they felt like would make the neighborhood a better place.
So whether it's a church sponsoring a basketball team or a church doing a coffee house, it could be anything.
You know, there was a sociologist years and years ago that came up with the concept called the third space.
His name was Ray Oldenburg, and he talked about the third space, the third communal space.
(17:34):
It's not home.
It's not work.
It's that space in between.
Churches that can engage people who are lonely and looking for belonging by creating some sort of third space, whatever that third space will be, they'll find that they'll be embraced by the neighborhood in the community.
I'm wondering, how do we switch from using that third space, using those sorts of activities that will engage people in our community?
(17:59):
How do we move from just a bait-and-switch type operation of just, okay, now we've got them, to start to truly love our neighbor, and so that we're starting to have these initiatives, these third spaces to alleviate the loneliness because of our love for them?
And obviously, we still want to draw them to Christ, but that it's drawn from a place of love for them rather than chalking up another, chalking up another.
(18:28):
Yes, it's finding out what's something that the neighborhood needs that the church can provide that's for the common good of the community, the common good of the neighborhood.
So, for instance, going back into my ministry background, when I was pastoring the church, we did a mapping of the neighborhood, and we found out that the neighborhood needed a food pantry, but not for the down-and-out, but for the working poor, because most of the poor in America are working poor.
(18:55):
So, they have enough money for like three weeks, but it's that fourth week that gets them.
So, we created a unique type of food pantry for the working poor that gave what we called emergency food assistance.
So, it'd be a week's worth of groceries.
And so, you could come and get these groceries, no strings attached.
We just opened up the church space.
You filled out some forms to show that you were eligible, and then we would give the groceries.
(19:20):
The funniest thing is people wanted more than groceries.
They wanted to hang out.
They knew they were coming into a church, and they say, hey, Rev, can you pray for me?
We didn't ask them.
They just said, hey, can you pray for me?
And then we partnered with Xavier University in Cincinnati, and they had the nursing students.
They would come over, and they would give health tips and health screenings.
(19:41):
And if they found people had something wrong, like diabetes, they'd refer them to the local hospital.
So, it just became this sort of community hub.
You could come to church if you want.
We weren't trying to proselytize people.
It's like, hey, it's this third space.
We're utilizing the asset of our building.
There have been people who came to the food pantry and never came to church, but then a family member died, and then they'd say, hey, can you do a funeral for my family?
(20:03):
We'd say, sure.
Come on on.
So, the whole key, the whole glue, Rodney, is just meeting people at their needs.
There was a man by the name of Jesus who kind of did that, didn't he?
Woman at the well, ring a name, right?
You just meet people at their point of need, their felt need.
Where is it at?
And you find out what it is.
From a communal standpoint, you utilize your resources to meet that need, and wonderful things happen.
(20:27):
And I'm very aware, as you're talking, you're not just discussing this idea of meeting a simple need and helping people get by, but you're more and more wanting people to flourish.
You're wanting the community to flourish and looking at what does it look like, not just to help my community to get by day by day, but what does it look like for my community to flourish, for the people in my community to flourish and become all they can be.
(20:57):
Talk to me a little about that.
I think the Bible teaches that when it comes to dealing with people in poverty, it's long-term care.
Jesus said the poor will be with you always.
He said that because of the fallen nature of the world that we're in.
So because we know that, then we should have a long-term view of how we want to care for them.
(21:17):
I mean, even in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, there were all these laws that were laid out of how the church of Israel was supposed to engage with people who had a lack of financial resource, because they would be there.
And the church is the only institution that's been charged by heaven to be able to engage these folk.
Other institutions can do it, and it's not that other institutions are excluded, but the church is charged to do that.
(21:40):
It is part of our Christian responsibility to do so and to engage those who are in communities experiencing poverty and help them have a better life.
You've talked about finding this work actually effective in areas that you wouldn't even imagine there is financial or economic poverty.
(22:00):
I imagine there's people listening who think, no, I live in an area where there is no poverty.
How do we actually lift the lid a little and recognize where those pockets of poverty in our own area might exist?
Any demographic study, however you want, you want to pay for it, you want to get it for free, but if you do a demographic study of your particular neighborhood, it will show you where the pockets of poverty are.
(22:24):
And people will be shocked.
I mean, there's very few places that have no pockets of poverty.
It just isn't.
You can actually drill down and see the different ethnicities of people in the area, so you can start to understand what might be the need here.
Once we discover that there are those areas, this comes back to one of the earlier points, is self-determination.
(22:48):
How do we engage people in the first place and say, what do you see is your need?
What is the felt need in this area that we, as a church, as a people of God, can actually help you with?
How do we do that?
There's a very practical call that people can use called the Asset-Based Community Development Model, ABCD.
(23:09):
There's actually an Asset-Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University in Chicago.
And you can actually be trained on how to map your neighborhood.
That's exactly what I did when I was a pastor.
You could do an asset mapping of the neighborhood to figure that very question out of what's the connection point, the intersection point between the church and what we have to offer and what the neighborhood needs.
(23:33):
That's actually how I started my church.
I did an Asset-Based Community Development Model for the Over the Rhine neighborhood.
And we figured out the need was that what I talked about earlier, that working class food pantry.
And that was what would determine what we offered as an outreach to the neighborhood and the community.
So you can utilize that tool.
And then you can also do the old school, just build relationships in the neighborhood.
(23:56):
Come in as a learner.
Come in to serve.
You spend enough time with people.
You get to learn and know what's the heartbeat of the neighborhood is, what the heartbeat of the citizens are and what the needs are.
Because this isn't a flyover type of ministry.
You have to get your hands dirty.
You have to get in there.
You have to get to learn people and know people.
The biggest mistake churches make is they think they can determine what the neighborhood needs and they don't take the time to build relationships and learn people and learn what the needs are and then meet that need.
(24:28):
Instead of coming in with a predetermined supposition of, well, we know what you need.
That's called paternalism and mission circles.
And that's terrible.
And you don't want to do that.
You've mentioned a couple of times that often a church can be seen as quite different from those outside.
If there's a need that the church is starting to fill.
(24:51):
I guess that there have been many opportunities you've seen of churches that have taken on a very different reputation in their neighborhoods when they start meeting the needs of the people that are there.
Are there any stories of how those outside the church have started to view church when they see a relevance that they haven't seen before?
(25:12):
Well, yeah, I think most people are open, are open to churches.
I think there's this falsehood that people are against the church or they're angry at the church or things of that nature.
And that's they're pretty neutral.
They're pretty neutral when it comes to the church.
And what determines whether or not people come on the good side, so to speak, or the positive side, is the posture that the church takes and the things that we've been talking about.
(25:38):
Humility, coming as a learner, engage, seeking the common good of the community.
Those are the things that the people of the neighborhood value.
I've frankly never been part of a church that was negatively viewed by the neighborhood.
I just have it.
There are churches that have reputations for, oh, they're not real.
(26:00):
Those aren't real people.
They don't really care about us.
But those churches were renamed nameless.
So I'm not going to do that.
Not going to throw them under the bus.
But it's a church that carries itself very arrogantly and looks down upon the people.
People know when they're being looked down upon.
And it seems that all the things that you're talking about are just those things that are written in the pages of the scripture.
(26:24):
Amen.
Exactly right.
That is such a great manual for how do we live?
How do we interact with others?
How do we give everything to loving God, heart, soul, mind, and then loving our neighbor as we love ourselves?
If we take that seriously, as Jesus said, it's the greatest commandment.
We can't go too far wrong, can we?
That's right.
If you only had 30 seconds and you said, what's the meaning of Christianity?
(26:47):
It would be Matthew 22, 37 through 40.
Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind.
I love your neighbor as yourself.
First and second greatest commandments.
If you only had 30 seconds, you'd say, hey, read this.
This is what it's about.
And then you do your best to follow that.
And when you do that, great things happen under the power of the Holy Spirit.
And there's a huge attractiveness to people who may never have considered stepping into the doors of a church if they believe that they are truly loved and not just another conquest or another project.
(27:18):
Yes.
Nobody wants to be made to feel like they're a project.
People come into the faith through other people.
So if other people think that you truly care about them, period, regardless, and you're living a spirit-filled life, there are going to be people who are going to be attracted to that and say, hey, tell me more about that.
Most people don't just wander into a church.
(27:38):
By the time they get to a church, there's been a season of relationship building with someone somewhere throughout their life.
And then that makes them open to want to attend the church.
But I've only found that the most people who if they just wander into a church for the first time, they're probably going through some sort of crisis.
And that's OK.
(27:58):
But most people, it's a step-by-step stage process of how they come to know the Lord.
Alvin, you mentioned before the website for World Impact.
Is that the best place for people to discover more about the way that you're working with people around the world?
Oh, absolutely.
Worldimpact.org is your spot you want to be at.
I will make sure that I put links to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily.
(28:25):
But Alvin, I want to say thank you for our conversation.
Thank you for what you're doing.
And thank you for taking time to be on Bleeding Daylight today.
Well, thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(28:46):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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