AEC2000

Pastor, North Baltimore (MD) Mennonite Church, and Member of the New Life Ministries Board of Trustees

In 1983 our family moved to Fresno, California, where I pastored Mennonite Community Church. The congregation was founded in the mid-1950s and the average attendance was 60 when we moved there. The congregation had gone through some difficult experiences but survived and at that time had two outreach programs. One was a Boys and Girls Club that met at the church each afternoon and Saturday and the other was a Mennonite Voluntary Service Unit that staffed the Club and also worked in other social service programs in the city.

When I arrived I discovered that there were about 30,000 Hmong refugees who had moved to Fresno from the hills of Laos. The Hmong had fought for the CIA in Laos during the war in Vietnam and after the war were forced to flee to Thailand to refugee camps. About one-fourth of the Hmong moved to Fresno because they had been farmers in Laos and in the similar climate of the central valley they could continue that vocation. They also liked to live near their clan groups. Our church responded to these refugees' needs by starting garden plots on the church land, doing advocacy, and starting English as a second language class at the church. We were able to use a voluntary service worker to oversee these ministries.

I thought it was also important for us to share the gospel with the Hmong people and I shared this vision with our congregation. Probably the majority of the members were not particularly excited by my vision but they gave permission for us to try. We primarily raised funds outside of the regular budget. After consultation, we started looking and praying for a church planter. It took a couple of years but eventually the Lord led us to find Shoua Moua.

We first met him through a contact with the Lao Evangelical Church. It was unaffiliated with any American denomination and that church asked to rent our building. We learned to know some of the people and one young man told me he had a brother in Australia that might be interested in church planting. When he traveled to Fresno to visit relatives, I interviewed him. We decided to help him go to the Hesston College pastoral ministries program for study. After two years, he and his family came to Fresno to plant a church. For the first three months he visited three non-Christian families everyday, telling them what he wanted to do and inviting them to the first service. For the first Sunday service and meal, 256 persons showed up. The second Sunday there were about 100 present and the church had a strong start. Many people became Christians.

We started out with a joint children's Sunday School and Vacation Bible School program. We also planned one Sunday a year to have a joint service with communion. Everything was translated and most people at Mennonite Community Church had positive feelings for this new worshipping community.

There were challenges along the way. I was very idealistic and thought that everything that our church owned should be freely shared with the new congregation. We soon found, however, that some changes needed to be made. For instance, in the nursery, the children's toys were getting broken and became unusable. We found that it worked better if we put locks on toy cupboards and supply rooms. Then keys could be shared with responsible adults and it worked much better. Another challenge was that we had hoped the church could become self supporting in a relatively short time, but that did not happen and eventually the pastor had to take a part-time secular job to supplement his support.

After we got that church started, I thought God had opened the door for us to immediately start a number of other churches among Cambodians, Lowland Lao, Vietnamese and Spanish speaking people. The congregation, however, said, "No, we have to take care of what we have already started and we can't take on anything new."

About four years later, however, there were members of the church interested in working with Spanish speaking people. Those interested met together and prayed and eventually God sent a church planter from the Amor Viviente church (Mennonite related group) in Honduras. In 1995 Oscar Solarzano and family came to Fresno and planted a new church. That group now is self supporting and God is blessing their efforts.

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Taken from A New Humanity: Anabaptist Ministry Among Many Peoples (© 2000 New Life Ministries). Permission to reproduce for local church use only is granted. Provided by New Life Ministries, 6404 S Calhoun St, Fort Wayne, IN 46807, through its web site at www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org

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