“The neighborhood is just changing!”

Is that an observation your church members, with a discernible amount of fear, have made about the community your church serves?

If so, how can your church respond to the many different ethnic groups pouring into your community? What should your members understand to transform their apprehension into missional action?

Terry Coy, SBTC senior church planting strategist, hopes an SBTC pilot project called “People Group Champions” can help provide answers to those questions.

Coy said: “What we’re trying to do is find churches that have noticed that their community is transitioning—particularly those who have noticed a great influx of people from eastern cultures. We want to help them embrace those people, to learn about them, to champion them, to learn how to share with them.”

People Group Champions is an experimental program with the goal of helping local Texas churches, primarily those in urban settings, do international outreach in their own communities.

“For example, we’ve adopted this people group in Africa, but how about the people just down the street?” Coy asked.

The program presents churches with four levels of involvement:

—Awareness: education about the people group and how to pray for them

—Engagement: developing relationships

—Transformation: developing a church planting strategy

—Modeling: teaching other churches how to be People Group Champions

Currently, two Texas churches have offered to test the program, and Coy is looking for a few more that might be “guinea pigs” over the next 18 months, he said. Kevin Prather, pastor of Eisenhauer Road Baptist Church in San Antonio, said he looks forward to possibly being one of the pilot churches.

Prather told the TEXAN: “Our community is undergoing a very significant transition. It was primarily retired Anglos with a smattering of Hispanics. But it’s becoming a community of young families in starter homes from all over.”

The church of about 175 attendees began offering an ESL program, and Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesians, and South Americans have attended the program. Canvassing their neighborhood, members have been astonished at the number of Asian shops, restaurants, and businesses that have popped up.

“We’re working through the process to understand the dynamics of things. We’ve moved beyond the fear of the unknown to the understanding that we must act and we are acting,” Prather said. “Our church is starting to see how God can use us to impact the world.”

Coy said the ultimate goal of the People Group Champions project will be to spread gospel influence from Texas to different parts of the country and even the world.

“These people we’ll try to reach will have relatives in other cities like Chicago and New York, and in other countries,” he said.

Former IMB missionary Chad Vandiver is writing the training materials and will conduct the training. Vandiver worked with eastern cultures while serving in Madrid, Spain.