Today while Ed and I are walking through Virgil Village (our section of East Hollywood) we ask God to protect us and direct us to someone he wants us to meet.  We enter a local motorcycle shop / coffee bar to meet the owner of this new business.  He tells us about the stabbing that happened across the street from his business a few weeks ago, and the all-day stand-off that ensued between the LAPD and the stabber who holed up in his apartment.  After this discussion and some more chit chat about motorcycles we tell the young owner why we moved into the neighborhood and offer to pray for his business.  We thank God for this interaction and commit ourselves to come back in a few weeks to see how things are going. 

Our prayer: Who next, Lord?  We go around the block and run into two youth sharing a forty on the front steps of an apartment complex.  After clearing up some initial confusion about who we really are (this is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for a cop), we begin a really good conversation with our neighbors.  One kid is celebrating freedom after 14 days of jail “for crystal meth”.  The other is drowning his sorrows because his mother, who has been on life support is about to die any day.  Ed and I offer our condolensces and offer to pray and give the kid a ride to the hospital in East LA where his mom is located.  The kid gives us his cell phone number.  Ed tells them we’re Jesus-followers and why we’re here to start up new churches in homes.  They say that’s cool.  After a few minutes we leave, thanking God for these two precious kids, and commit to praying for them.  I wonder what will happen when we call tomorrow to offer the kid a ride to the hospital to visit his mom.

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The focus of our ministry is not on people who are chronically or perpetually homeless (our focus is on the working poor population of East Hollywood).  Still, homelessness is a regular part of life here. 

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Thank you to my parents for pampering me for my birthday!!!

I just spent a much-needed getaway weekend with my family.  They live in a well-lit quiet community of southwest Bakersfield, CA (2 hours north of us).  This evening I arrived home in East Hollywood where the street lamps don’t provide as much lighting as they do in southwest Bakersfield, a car won’t stop honking in front of my apartment, ghetto birds (helicopters) are hovering in the distance, intimidating-looking young people are gathered on front steps and smoking bongs – I nod to one of them as I pass by and pray for an opportunity to know him (never give up on God’s prodigals). 

Meanwhile a grandma is trimming her flower garden and she tells me about her undying love for her grandaughter. 

I give plums (picked off my parent’s tree) to six Guatemalan ladies and introduce myself to them in Spanish.  They love the plums and tell me I look too young to have be married 11 years and have three sons… they also think Meri and I should try for a girl!

I can see multiple Latino families pushing strollers and going for their usual dusk-time walks – I love this tradition.

A family we are sharing Christ with has just expressed their excitement to get back into God’s word together now that we’ve returned. 

…Ah, I’m back in the hood and it feels so good! 

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 To U.S.-born Christians visiting their own country’s immigrant-saturated urban centers, I say, “Behold, foreign mission fields.” 

 Since we are living and serving cross-culturally among immigrants from multiple countries, we are treating this gospel planting ministry in East Hollywood, CA as we would a foreign missionary adventure.  What does this mean?

To help me talk about this, I’m using some terminology I picked up from missionary David Watson a few weeks ago…

It is the missionaries’ task to de-culturalize the gospel when sharing the message with peoples of other cultures – that is, we do our best to remove our own cultural biases from the message, thereby reducing the gospel to its irreducible minimum.  We would be fooling ourselves if we said we could achieve this with perfection (but then there is no aspect of our ministry we are doing with perfection).  I believe that just the fact that we are faithfully attempting to distinguish the gospel from our own cultural ways of living it out will convey an important lesson to the new believers. 

Then it is up to the new believers (not the missionaries), empowered by God’s indwelling Spirit, to determine how best to contextualize the gospel – that is, they will decipher how to faithfully live out the message in their own cultural contexts.  Missionaries can guide this process of contextualizing the gospel but never short-circuit it by taking it into their own hands!

Categories: the how
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One thing I’ve discovered about myself is my fear of putting the bible in new believers’ hands and trusting God’s Spirit to reveal something to them as they read it. 

Or perhaps the fear is more that they’ll read the same passages and conclude something different than I have.  Wouldn’t it be better to just tell them what the bible means and what to do in response?  But then what am I teaching that person to put their trust in – God’s word or my commentary about it?     

I’m challenged again by this statement in David Garrison’s book Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming A Lost World:

“When modern day practitioners of Church Planting Movements refuse to counsel their converts with words of wisdom or time honored doctrines, but instead direct them to God’s word, they are living out the New Testament model initiated by Jesus and transmitted through the apostles” (2004:206). 

God’s Word interpreted by average people.  How scary.  How wonderful!

Categories: the why
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As people move into Hollywood from all over the world, they bring with them their religious and spiritual backgrounds. 

In addition to the multiple “flavors” of Christianity offered, we are surrounded by people from Buddhist and Hindu backgrounds.  A Jewish school is located blocks away. 

East Hollywood also has its share of adherents to New Age, the Church of Scientology, Twelve Tribes, and various other cults.

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Here is a typical sight in East Hollywood, to be seen a short walking distance from our home.  Notice the Virgin of Guadalupe painted on the wall.  A seemingly inseparable part of the common people’s form of Catholicism, visiting this psychic advisor is one of several “just in case” measures neighbors are taking to obtain a reasonable amount of safety and security.

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