Ministries Find Inner City Fertile Ground for Growth
by Allie Martin
August 24, 2005
(AgapePress) - The president of an urban-focused ministry says many larger churches are re-focusing efforts on inner-city ministries. For nearly 15 years, Ted Gandy has led "Here's Life Inner City," an urban resource ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ that works with more than a thousand partner churches nationwide. The national director of HLIC says many large, evangelical churches moved to the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s -- but he says that is now changing.
"It's really about Isaiah 58," Gandy explains. "There, God is chastising His people for going through all the religious activity that God had laid out, and yet they were ignoring the poor. At one point, God says through Isaiah, 'You turn away from your own flesh and blood.' And He's talking about our natural human tendency to move away from the poor."
It is the objective of HLIC to equip churches so they can reach those living below the poverty line in inner cities. According to Gandy, many of the fastest growing churches in large cities are in urban areas.
He explains that as a community begins to change, the people who live there often have a tendency to feel like they need to move out "somewhere else," to a growing community. "There's all that type of thinking [within churches] -- that our fastest growth will come by being in a newly developing area," Gandy says.
But he believes the exact opposite is true. "If you look here in New York," he says, "the largest and newest churches are right in center city" -- the central business district of New York City.
Here's Life Inner City serves in 18 cities with a staff of nearly 200. Under Gandy's leadership since 1991, the ministry has expanded to include cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Louisville, Milwaukee, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
