A Dallas-area church is fulfilling the Great Commission by connecting with the world God has brought to its doorstep
By Mike Ebert
In 2003, pastor Tim Ahlen took a trip that changed his life. He and several North American, urban church planter strategists traveled overseas to learn from International Mission Board missionaries how God was moving among people groups on the international mission field.
The more Ahlen and the group of strategists in attendance saw how God was working, the more they wanted the same to happen back in the United States.
“We looked at each other and said ‘God’s not doing that in North America.’ So we covenanted with each other to find out why and to determine if there was anything we could do about it,” Ahlen says.
God kept stirring Ahlen’s heart to reach the people groups that were making their way from all over the world to North America. Soon after, Ahlen quit his job as director of church planting with the Dallas Baptist Association and became lead pastor at Forest Meadow Baptist Church, on Dallas’ north side. The church had seen rapid decline in attendance as Anglo members died or moved to the suburbs. The surrounding community was becoming increasingly ethnic.
Ahlen began to pray about how the church could more effectively reach the new people that were populating the neighborhoods surrounding the church. He took things slow with the 30 or so current church members who attended regularly.
“I promised I wouldn’t make any changes to the 11 o’clock service if they gave me the freedom to reach out to the community,” Ahlen says.
Today Ahlen’s vision has grown into four generations of new churches, numbering 38 congregations. These churches reach an average of 6,500 in attendance most weekends. Most are Anglo churches, but there are also Hispanic churches reaching Mexican immigrants and churches specifically for South and Central American immigrants. Other churches reach Sudanese people. Another is a Zambian congregation. There is also a network of house churches and a church that ministers to mentally ill adults.
Of course, Forest Meadow isn’t only starting churches in the Dallas area. They’ve planted congregations in Guatemala and the Sudan as well. Four of the churches still meet in the Forest Meadow building, others have their own buildings and some meet in houses. Some are contemporary and some traditional. Some who pastor the churches draw a salary, others are bi-vocational. Many of the 38 congregations were started from the original churches Ahlen and the Forest Meadow congregation began several years ago, and even the second generation churches are starting new works.
Even though the Forest Meadow phenomenon is somewhat unique in North America, Ahlen says the ministry has “not been all that complicated.”
“You have to do a lot of hard work. You have to do a lot of research,” he says. “You have to resist the temptation to go in with a generic, North American method of sharing the gospel.”
Ahlen says a big part of successfully reaching out to a people group is understanding their culture and worldview.
“You learn to identify parts of their worldview that match up with biblical teaching,” he says. “And where you see worldview issues that don’t match up, you have to overcome that by showing the superiority of the biblical story over theirs.
“You have to be able to shift in approaches,” Ahlen says. “A Guatemalan of European descent will respond to principles of guilt and innocence, and so you want to stress that Jesus takes away the guilt arising from their sin. If you’re speaking to a Sudanese, you need to speak in terms of honor and shame. In other words, stress that Jesus will remove their sense of shame arising from their sin. In both cases you are giving accurate, biblical descriptions of what a relationship with Jesus accomplishes. But because of their different worldviews, the Guatemalans will respond to the issue of their guiltiness before God; the Sudanese will respond to the issue of their shame before God.”
And there are more practical considerations. Ahlen says today’s immigrants are much more likely to hold on to their heart language, which makes language more of a barrier. Other challenges are financial. When outside funding for the Sudanese congregation ran out, Ahlen expected members of the congregation to take up the responsibility of paying their pastor’s salary.
“The Sudanese leadership said to me, ‘In our culture, leaders take care of their followers; followers do not take care of their leaders. That is why we do not pay our pastors.’” So the Sudanese pastor now has an outside job that provides for his financial needs.
Are all churches called to reach the world around them as Forest Meadows has?
“I believe from the bottom of my soul that it is the responsibility of the Church to follow the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20),” Ahlen says. “The church is to make disciples of all the ethnic groups it finds, in its Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth. They don’t have to do it using my methods, but they are responsible before God to do it.”
While Ahlen says he doesn’t believe in “models” for how other churches can succeed in ministering to people groups, he has developed, in consultation with personnel from the International and North American Mission Boards, directors of missions and state convention strategists, the Great Commission Initiative, a principles-based training process to help churches develop their own outreach ministry. Those principles and other information about training can be found at www.pantataethne.org. OM
Mike Ebert is publications and media relations coordinator for the North American Mission Board.