Community Change Prompts New Focus On God’s Mission
With a shifting area demographic, PUMP Church looks to God for new focus and purpose.
by Aaron White

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When a church is established with the goal of reaching a certain community, what happens when radical change alters that community?

That challenge is exactly what PUMP Church in Portland, Oregon, was facing three years ago. In 2000, a team of eight ministry leaders seeking to reach the urban sections of the city chose to focus their efforts on the area surrounding Portland’s Woodlawn neighborhood – notorious at that time for high levels of crime and gang activity. The team rented a house in the neighborhood and the Portland Urban Ministry Project (PUMP) was born.

For a time, the church thrived in the community, with local children and area residents filling up summer reading programs and other outreach events. Before long, though, new phases of Portland’s urban development program started to take hold in Woodlawn, and PUMP began to see the steady departure of the very people they had been hoping to serve.

After seven years of hard work, the leadership of PUMP was at a crossroads with their ministry, facing a choice to either join a fragment of their dispersed community and start over or stay in the neighborhood and work with its new incoming residents. In addition, the church was experiencing some staff transition and burnout.

“We were really suffering from some ‘deer in the headlights’ syndrome about what happens next,” says Ike Graul, one of PUMP’s ministers. “Every option on the table looked labor-intensive, and we weren’t set up for labor intensive. We were stuck.”

Realizing they needed to revitalize their mission, strategy, and methods, PUMP joined with some other local churches to begin the process of Partnership for Missional Church. Now, three years later, Ike says that they’ve learned a lot about leadership and how it differs from their former tactics of mere management. Instead of a small percentage of the church dictating goals and plans to the rest of the congregation, everyone is now included in the process.

“The discovery of God’s future happens with everybody at the table. Not just everybody in the church…it happens with eyes and ears pointed at the community, hoping that God’s purpose is out there somewhere.”

Ike says that the biggest key to their new leadership strategy is the discovery of the importance of listening, and how it leads to discernment of what God is doing in the church and in the community.

“We used to think that if all we were doing was listening that we weren’t doing anything, but that’s not true. Listening is an incredibly active process. It’s the greatest love you can show someone, and it takes a great amount of energy to do it well. Building skills of good listening is just so essential for every church.”

With a new focus on leadership through listening and the desire to follow God’s mission for their church instead of pursuing a mission of their own making, PUMP has chosen to stay in the Woodlawn neighborhood and minister to the people that God is bringing to that area. Although he’s not sure exactly what shape God’s plan will take, Ike Graul is looking forward to living it out.

“[God] has an amazing future…We’re overwhelmed with good opportunities.”