I began to meet with local community leaders, one being the principal of the Tulakes Elementary School that was located on Lyrewood Lane. This guy was the real deal. He was an African American man named Lee Rowland, and he happened to be a minister as well. Lee was as sharp as a tack and a great man of God. He also had his thumb on the pulse of this community and a heart to truly make a difference. I remember my first meeting with Lee. I made a simple statement and asked him a simple question. Statement: We want to make a difference in this community. Question: What can we do to make a difference? That statement and question combination still remain at the core of our campus’s relationship with Tulakes and the Lyrewood community to this today — nearly five years later.
I believe that the most important opportunity for a new ministry in a local community is to identify the top 10 community stakeholders and begin to develop a relationship with them. Some of these stakeholders will generally include local school leaders, elected officials, neighborhood associations, business leaders, and other community leaders. Ministry leaders should go to the stakeholders and see how they can help and how they can serve. Before the doors of our church ever opened we had the keys to the city, if you will, and definitely had potential to have the keys to the schools in our area. People in the community were excited and so were we. When the doors opened, we kicked off with a bang and saw little snippets of potential to make some positive headway in creating a culture that embraces diversity. Over the months we worked hard to reach the community, and within the first year we began to leverage our relationships with the local schools to impact their students. We invited the community and put a sign on our door that truly read Everyone Welcome.
We had evangelistic bring-in events that would draw from 600 to 900 students on a Wednesday. That’s right — 600 to 900 students at a campus that may have been running a couple thousand at the time. Those numbers were not the norm, as 400-plus students was a common occurrence. The kicker is that our student ministry was, for all intents and purposes, racially split down the middle — 50 percent black and 50 percent white, give or take a few. To top it all off, we had students from Lyrewood Lane and other areas walking to church, while we had students getting dropped off in Hummers and S550 Mercedes. This, my friends, is what you call an eclectic group for a ministry that is used to ministering to white suburbanites.
Our youth pastors were enjoying the challenge and had pure hearts; however, they had to face the harsh realities of herding elephants and realizing that they were going to have a lot to learn. They were forced to ask themselves questions about their life stories and upbringing. My associate youth pastor, Anna Meadows, was a 19-year-old young lady who was anointed and gifted far beyond her years — oftentimes referred to as a young Beth Moore. Anna was home-schooled by some amazing parents. They were cool, relevant Christian homeschoolers. Anna had zero experience dealing with the Ray-Rays of the world (translation: boyz from the hood) and was heartbroken by the struggles these students from our community faced. It was disheartening for her that the pizza we served was the only evening meal that some of these kids would eat. Although her heart was pure, the realities of embracing this new paradigm would require some adjustment and learning. My other youth pastor was Tony Cobb, who had a huge personality and was the mastermind of throwing the big “bring-in” event to get the students through the doors. The challenge for Tony was that the only experience he had dealing with minority kids, according to him, was when he was a youth pastor at Fellowship of the Woodlands, which is a huge church similar to LifeChurch.tv, in the suburbs of Houston. The minority kids included NBA basketball coach Avery Johnson’s kid, which is a little bit different demographic than most of the kids who were rolling through our doors. To top it off, Tony opened up about some of his family history and how his grandfather was the grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, the one that wears the upgraded dunce suit — he wore the red one. Our discussion wasn’t about Tony being part of a racist heritage; the fact of the matter was that when you begin to herd elephants, your life story becomes part of the process. You begin to notice little things inside of you and others that you would never have thought of before or would just like to forget. You begin to have “aha moments” — race is a real issue and you don’t exactly know what to do about it. Have you had those aha moments? If not, there is a good chance you are avoiding confronting the brutal facts.
Over the months it became evident that we had some work to do in blending this culture of students to get them to worship, hang, play, and pray together. Our youth pastors/leaders dug in and began to develop relationships with students, which ignited a heart and passion to reach this new community and new demographic of students. The challenges we faced were not with the students; for the most part the challenges came from the parents and the leaders. Some parents were uncomfortable dropping their students off at a place that — in their mind —looked like the scene from an inner-city street basketball movie. On the other hand, we had leaders who were used to working with the suburbanites and didn’t know what to say or how to address certain students.
