By Ray Waddle

Waves of immigration, economic flux, shifts in city growth -- dramatic 21st-century trends are changing the physical look and ethnic mix of the neighborhood, and that's changing the neighborhood church.

Some congregations embrace change as an exciting challenge; others wish it would just go away. Behind it all stands one big question: Will churches reach out to new neighbors, or will they shrink and die?

"The potential exists for a large number of church closings in the coming years," says the Rev. Sam Dixon, who leads the evangelization and church growth staff of the General Board of Global Ministries.

This happens when an aging church is unable to replenish its rolls with newcomers, perhaps out of fear of a changing neighborhood, and its finances and hopes decline, Dixon says. In many instances, clergy members of past generations were trained for pastoral care, focusing on their flocks, rather than as outward-looking evangelists and community organizers.

It doesn't have to be that way, as many churches attest. They confront the issue of neighborhood flux in various ways. Some changed the name of the church and declared new goals for local ministry. Others embraced the evangelistic passion of a new pastor. Still others called upon specialists at the General Board of Discipleship or the Board of Global Ministries for assistance.

But all discovered a common thread Ð they had to give up old mental habits and welcome strangers and see the movement of God in the sometimes-uncomfortable work of new mission hopes and aims.

"Congregational ethos is so important -- having a sense of mission and wanting to reach out beyond themselves," says the Rev. John Southwick, church-growth researcher at the Board of Global Ministries.

"When that dominates the thinking, that becomes more important than clinging to their old comfort levels."

Others say: Be flexible. Don't lock into any one program. Be alert to fresh winds and Holy Spirit moments, perhaps embodied in the next face that comes through the door.

"We have to love people again," says the Rev. Bob Suter of Crossroads in Sarasota, Fla., which describes itself as "a United Methodist church for the 21st century."

"We want to bring people to Jesus Christ. Period."

The following stories offer a snapshot of four congregations surging into the future after facing the issue of "change or die." Change, they did.

In 2002, the mother church of Methodism in Mobile, Ala., Government Street United Methodist Church, was on her deathbed.

Worship drew 14 people. Everyone was over 50. The treasurer was 91. There hadn't been a full-time pastor in nearly a decade.

"The church was staring death in the face," says the Rev. Rob Gulledge. "It was change or die."

Passers-by figured the beautiful church was closed, a 19th-century monument whose heyday had passed.

Gulledge and others thought differently. On the staff at a growing suburban church nearby, Gulledge knew of Government Street Church, located downtown, and saw potential. The predominantly white church had been known for generations as The Beehive, an image of vitality and action.

The church held off an attempt to shut it down. A $200,000 bequest came in.

Gulledge was tapped in 2002 to be the pastor at Government Street and to help the congregation recover a mission focus.

"You have to be at a point where you're willing to do anything for the sake of ministry," he says.

"You can't settle for anything less than 100 percent love of Jesus and love of people walking through that door."

The church's mission statement today is simple: transform lives with the message of Jesus.

That first year the church decided to host a 9/11 remembrance event to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. The church served notice that its doors and its heart were open to the city.

"The perception of us had been, 'That's a beautiful church; I wonder what it's like inside,'" he says.

"Getting people in the door was essential."

The congregation began a Wednesday "Power Lunch" for the downtown crowd, a good meal for $5. The church started setting out tables of water and refreshments during annual 10K races and invited local school choirs to perform at Christmas. It hosts mission teams doing hurricane relief work.

Lately there's a new wrinkle: a few political refugees from Africa have begun a Bible study there, in French.

"Everyone who walks in that door receives a welcome," Gulledge says.

It wasn't always that way. Membership topped 1,000 in the 1950s, but the dynamics of a changing community eroded the church's rolls and identity. Over time, the congregation turned inward, became a "Methodist club."

"You have to be vigilant against dysfunction," Gulledge says -- the congregational dysfunction of control-freak behavior and prejudice.

Today the church internalizes its mission. Members of the (administrative) board of stewards, for instance, are expected to be tithers or regular financial givers and regular worshippers.

"Change doesn't happen overnight," Gulledge explains. "It was as hopeless as it comes. We just didn't see it that way."

Membership now stands at about 100. People are calling it The Beehive again.

To the Rev. Aaron Mansfield's ears, it's like Pentecost descending on his church -- the sounds are in Spanish, French and English, all praising God.

The Rock/La Roca United Methodist Church, in Lexington, Ky., is an experiment in faith, a work in progress, a growing witness in a changing landscape.

Some 300 people worship here -- Anglos (English-speaking whites) are the majority, Hispanics/Latinos, African Americans and lately two dozen Congolese, French-speaking refugees from Congo -- sharing a spiritual journey in a neighborhood in flux.

"The most important thing to happen in the last six months is we've realized we are living in another time of Pentecost," Mansfield says.

"We're in another golden age of immigration. The church missed an opportunity in the 20th century because we didn't know what to do with many of the Europeans who came over. I don't think the church can afford to miss the next wave of immigration."

The Rock/La Roca is the new name of a church that had existed since the 1890s, Epworth United Methodist Church. In 2002, facing declines in membership in an increasingly multi-ethnic neighborhood, church officials took a dramatic step. Epworth became the first "restart" in the Kentucky Conference. It was renamed The Rock/La Roca after the congregation merged with Capilla Cristiana, a Hispanic church.

There's experimentation in a neighborhood that continues to change. Mansfield says there's no textbook to guide The Rock/La Roca in its two-fold work of ministering to a rising number of foreign-born newcomers and building unity among all who attend.

"We're writing the book as we go," says Mansfield, who speaks French and some Spanish.

The church has Sunday morning services in English and a Sunday evening service in Spanish. The evening service offers simultaneous translation in English (worshippers use headsets to hear the translation). The church is experimenting with translating the morning services into French and Spanish.

Mansfield's regular neighborhood rounds reveal other groups -- among them, working-class whites with roots in Eastern Kentucky.

"The more I visit the neighborhood, the more I see of other cultures that middle-class United Methodists don't know," he says.

It all points to The Rock/La Roca's greatest ambition and challenge -- integrating the congregation into a truly multicultural organism, not just separate ethnic groups assembling under one roof.

"We're trying to be one church. Our goal is to get people together, find groups committed to start friendships. It's not easy. It takes patience. We have to be open to the Spirit. We in the church are used to doing things our own way, hearing our own voices. But we haven't been able even to reach white people who are different from us. If we don't reach out now, then at some level God will wonder, 'What on earth are you here for?'"

The Rev. Alan Jefferson (right), superintendent of the Florida Conference South West District, and Mike Bullerdick, the district's oversight committee chairman, unveil CROSSROADS Church's new name. Photo courtesy of Crossroads Church.

CROSSROADS

High homeless rates and despair -- that's one way to describe the transitional multicultural neighborhood in Sarasota, Fla., where North United Methodist Church resided.

After 50 years North Church was in decline. The situation looked dire to many. But to the Rev. Bob Suter, it sounded like the perfect place to revive a dying church.

So in June 2006, North Church relinquished its charter and started over as a mission-status congregation with a new name (Crossroads), a new pastor (Suter) and a new attitude.

Attendance has increased by five times, from 35 to about 190.

"I don't know that we have a model for doing this except being obedient to the Lord," Suter says.

And that means loving an unloved neighborhood.

Suter leads traditional and contemporary services at Crossroads wearing jeans, never robes or a suit. The jeans suggest he's here to work the neighborhood (and fix up the church -- he was formerly a carpenter) and get outside the doors to make connections with hurting people in the neighborhood.

He recalls one grieving homeless man he befriended. The man had endured the deaths of his wife and daughter in two separate car accidents.

"How long can we let these stories pass by?" Suter says.

Every message -- the sermons, the regular devotional e-mail he sends to 250 addresses -- is geared around love of neighbor.

The church is a lifeline to several homeless families. Crossroads endeavors to help such families get started again with money assistance for a motel room or apartment, job help and news of a loving God. The families in this accountability program agree to a serious commitment to turn their lives around materially and spiritually.

"Church should be a place where people are accountable to each other and to God," he says.

"That's what Crossroads means -- a place of decision each moment of our lives, a decision about sacrifice and commitment."

Suter and his wife, Dyana, are people of prayer.

"I try not to have a routine -- I try not to stop praying," he says.

He credits prayer with breakthroughs in their ministry. He prayed for money enough ($1,500) to cover a Christmas give-away of sleeping bags for the homeless last year. Soon a check arrived for the exact amount, a cause of joy and weeping. More came in, so that the church was able to give away 4,000 items -- toys, work boots, food for local people without means.

"Our goal: Love what God loves most -- people. Don't fall in love with programs. Be open to whatever God's doing today."

El Mesias

The Rev. Richard Leggett can tell you about the meaning and beauty of the word "united" in United Methodist Church.

He helped give a declining church a new destiny because two annual conferences in Texas worked together across two languages to find a solution.

Leggett is pastor of El Mesias United Methodist Church in Houston, a Hispanic congregation (El Mesias means "The Messiah") nearly a century old. It is affiliated with the Rio Grande Conference, a "language conference" of Spanish-speaking United Methodist churches that spans the geographic annual conferences in Texas and New Mexico.

Searching for a larger location for El Mesias, Leggett was frustrated at the lack of possibilities until he learned of Rose Garden United Methodist Church, a dwindling congregation of 15 members in the Texas Conference.

"Using the connectional system, which is so wonderful, we brought life to what had died," Leggett says.

Officials of both conferences coordinated efforts to create an unusual merger: In 2005, the Texas Conference gave the Rose Garden property (worth $600,000) to the Rio Grande Conference, and El Mesias moved in.

The merger was a natural. Rose Garden Church was a tiny white congregation Ð seven attended worship -- that was unable to connect with its mostly Hispanic/Latino neighborhood in North Houston. Now, as El Mesias, it's a congregation of 100 with a renewed sense of a future in a neighborhood it hopes to reach.

"I told people at Rose Garden: you won't lose anything. You gain a church," Leggett says. "This experience teaches us again that the church isn't the building. It's the people."

The bilingual Leggett leads an early worship service every Sunday in English, then a bilingual service.

"At that service, we mix the songs -- some in Spanish, some English -- and the sermons are in English, with Spanish worked in." He explained that the Spanish-speaking worshippers want that exposure to English for themselves and their children.

There is an all-Spanish service on Sunday afternoon.

Leggett says the newly merged church is still finding its way. With four acres allowing room to grow, El Mesias is planning to build an education building. But it takes time to combine two cultures and grow into a new identity in a changing neighborhood.

"There are no easy answers, but neighborhoods change, and the church has to be willing to go with it."

El Mesias' Web site (www.elmesiasumc.org) declares, "We are a new creation, born of the heritages of Anglo and Latin cultures to meet the needs of the children of God in this neighborhood."