Less than seven miles separates Community Christian Church (CCC) in affluent Naperville, Ill., from the impoverished East Aurora School District #131, and yet demographically these areas are opposites.
Money Magazine ranked Naperville as the Third Best Small City in 2008 based on the town’s “plentiful jobs, excellent schools, and affordable housing.” Additionally, Naperville has a low crime rate and high average income (the highest for cities over 70,000 in 2000).
Compare those numbers to the mostly Hispanic community of East Aurora.
- 68 percent of students in the East Aurora school district are considered low income
- 25 percent of residents in the school district live at or below the poverty line
- 60 percent of residents aged 25 or older have less than a high school education
Once Kirsten Strand, the director of Community 4:12, saw these injustices she knew she could not pretend that these issues didn’t exist. She began the long process of aligning her family life to this cause and began petitioning that Community Christian Church reach out to East Aurora.
The purpose of Community 4:12 (based on the strength of a cord of three strands) is “Uniting people to restore communities.” Kirsten believes that if resourced communities are united with under-resourced communities, then a more just society will be created.
“When we started Community 4:12,” Kirsten recalls, “CCC had not been doing much in the area of local missions. There was a lot of openness and receptivity on leadership’s part, but nonetheless, it was not something that was built into the culture of this church.”
After several years of commuting to East Aurora, Kirsten and her family have left their comfortable suburban lifestyle. They sold their Naperville home to live among the families they were serving in East Aurora.
“As much as I resisted relocating,” Kirsten admitted, “things have skyrocketed since we moved. The level of investment from the church as well as the partnership with the community has increased.”
Kirsten and her team take a unique approach to ministering to the community of East Aurora. Based on material from Christian Community Development Association, the Community 4:12 team strongly believes in utilizing the talents and culture that already existed in East Aurora. They offer support and encouragement for local programs instead of assuming under-resourced communities have nothing to offer.
The women who participate in their new Parent-Mentor Program learn better English, become more active in their child’s education, learn life skills, and provide the under-resourced teachers with much needed assistance. This simple change in perspective has been a catalyst of change for the school system in East Aurora – all through the hard work of local residents.
Armed with a vision to transform the abandoned Masonic Temple in East Aurora into a community center, Kirsten continues to build bridges between Community 4:12 programs, the CCC congregation, and Naperville businesspeople.
“I saw this building as a symbol for the community,” Kirsten explained. “(Like the empty Temple) this is a community that people believe is not worth investing in. Developers don’t want to be there, no one wants to provide the resources, but these are kids, they are God’s children!”
Community 4:12 has embraced missional ministry in a way few Christians can fathom. Opening their eyes to the social injustice in their community, they have reached out to provide assistance in radically new ways.
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
Thanks for a great overview of what we are doing, Ed. You captured the essence and the vision of what we are doing and dreaming very well. We still have so much to learn, so much to do, and so far to go, but we are confident that God is “on the move,” and we just want to be faithful to following Him. I am convinced that the Church has to be about this kind of community development if we want to live up to our calling of being “the hope of the world.”
Kirsten,
Your welcome. It’s wonderful to see God on the move. You’ve been an inspiration!
Thanks Allen…please come back and share your thoughts!
[...] To gain moral authority in our communities, the church must be a “sent people.” We must add a new Sending Model of ministry to the already popular Attractional Model (build it and they will come). We must send people to help in the public schools, the broken families, with the lonely business people, in the storm-damaged neighborhoods, the coffee shops, and those parts of town that you just don’t go in. Jesus’ love must become incarnate in every corner of our communities through us, His disciples. Kirsten’s efforts with Community 4:12 are a wonderful example. [...]