When I moved to Edmonton, Alberta, to work at the Evangelical Fellowship Church (EFC), it was quite a culture shock. Not only was the city a whole other pace from the countryside I grew up in, but EFC had a strong German cultural heritage that had defined them for decades.
However, things had been changing; they had joined the Evangelical Covenant Church of Canada around the time COVID-19 hit. We were asking questions like, “Who are we now?”
What began as an initiative to show up for isolated church members blossomed into a mission to care for people, even while we ourselves struggled to cope with the changes the pandemic brought. We said, “We can’t do everything, but we have to do something.” And so we took small steps.
We took prayer walks around our neighborhood, Queen Alexandra, and prayed that God would open our eyes to what God was already doing. We learned our neighbours’ names—Mike, Nicholas, Ravi, and Raven. We started showing up at community league meetings and finding ways to participate in the life of the neighborhood. We discovered that “The boundary lines have fallen for [us] in pleasant places; surely [we] have a delightful inheritance” (Psalm 16:6, NIV). These small steps revealed to us that our neighbors were people God had given us to love.
Those steps quickly stretched into bigger ones. We noticed many of our neighbors didn’t speak English, so several church members initiated an ESL cafe “where the personal relationships built week after week have had big impacts on everyone involved,” according to one member. We have seen over thirty neighbors attend the cafe, and most recently, “Nathan” was baptized. He connected with friends at the ESL cafe and was quickly swept up into church life. He grappled with what it would mean to return to China where he knew his faith would hinder his career, but ultimately he decided it was worth it.
ESL Cafe
“Elias,” a founding member of our ESL cafe, found our church as a refugee and has since brought his family and has been baptized. His daughter attends a local Christian school, and his wife is an artist who has hosted art galleries at our neighborhood BBQ. He tells me that God has been with him every step of his immigration journey, and during baptism classes, he connected his baptism to the festival of Nowruz, which celebrates the new year in the Persian calendar. To make room for new blessings, people “shake the house,” a ritual where they clean their homes, wash carpets, declutter, and refresh their living spaces.
Just last week we hosted a funeral on behalf of Jules, whose mother passed away just before she was scheduled to arrive to help him and his wife care for their new baby boy. He brought his entire Cameroonian cultural group to the funeral, and they shook our German timbers with their dancing and singing to Jesus at the wake in our fellowship hall. I was struck by how simply creating space for them to practice their cultural traditions was a gift. Jules messaged me: “How do we say thank you to you? Once again you demonstrated your love. We knew since the first day we were in the right place.” This is a huge change for a church that has been known by our neighbors for decades as “that German church.”
That isn’t to say EFC has abandoned our roots. We still include German in our weekly readings, alongside other people’s mother tongues, and I’ve begun to learn German myself. What we used to see as an obstacle has become a major strength—German immigrants, it turns out, have a lot in common with other immigrants! So our elderly members engage in helpful conversations and share their wisdom on cultural adjustment and raising kids in Canada.
Block Party
Our work in the neighborhood extends beyond the immigrant community too. When a nearby apartment caught fire and burned down, we took up a love offering for the people who had been afflicted, and we even housed one of them. My favorite story is a friendly competition we held with another local church to fundraise for a food pantry at our neighborhood school, where some students experience food insecurity. They sent us cards made by the kids to say thanks.
When I asked one member what he would tell other people about stretching out to the neighborhood, he said, “I would encourage anyone looking to minister locally to just try things. Don’t feel as if you need your ministry planned out—you don’t. Where do you see opportunities? See where they lead. Be willing to change plans to suit the circumstances the Spirit leads you into. And be okay with failure; it’s not all on you. Always listen for God’s guiding; he will use all these things in surprising ways, in his timing, to do great things in the community you share with those around you.”
The good work God has invited us into has not drained us; it has filled us with joy. I’m reminded of Bilbo Baggins saying in The Fellowship of the Ring, “It’s a dangerous business…going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” We have been swept off to wild and unruly places, just outside our parish threshold. We are driven there by a fierce loyalty to this place; it’s the land that God has given to us.
Land to steward. Neighbors to love. An inheritance we are blessed to inhabit.
