Faith-based communities are fascinating to me. At their best, they reflect the heart of Christ in action. At its core, it’s the church, the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Here’s a story of an amazing community that is making a difference. It’s called Adopt a Building and is led by Francis Chan:
The Tenderloin district of San Francisco is one square mile. There are 37,000 people in that one square mile living in 586 apartment buildings. And San Francisco City Impact wants to plant a church in every single one of those apartments.
Francis Chan, author of Crazy Love and former pastor of Cornerstone Community Church, is working with the new initiative, called Adopt a Building. SFCI provides food, clothing and housing for those in the San Francisco area. Christian Huang, operations director for the new initiative, told The Christian Post that Adopt a Building is filling a need in the community that wasn’t being met before. It was the “missing component of City Impact,” he said.
The idea is simple. First they pick a building and get a prayer team together to start praying for residents in the building. Then a “grace team” is assembled to knock on the doors of every residence in the building.
Those on the grace team ask residents if there is anything they need: food, school supplies, prayer. In a video about the ministry Francis Chan says grace team members are really there to say, “We don’t want anything from you, we just want to give.”
After the grace team has a list of needs from residents they will come back the next week to deliver what they requested. In doing so, the teams continue the dialogue that they started the week before with those in the apartment.
In an interview in Christian Post, Chan said that in the initial stages of the ministry, the idea is to start making connections, to ask people if they want to learn more about God and read the Bible. The end goal is to find leaders in the apartment that can begin pastoring a church in the apartment building.
To read more about Adopt a Building in the Christian Post, click here.
Do you have a story of a faith-based community that is making a difference? I’d love to hear about it.
