McCORDSVILLE — Once the ministry began renting a house in the neighborhood, Mike Wilkins knew it was time to plant some flower bulbs.
“We really try to act like neighbors,” he said. “I wanted people to know we’d be here.”
The last few years have been a time of ever-increasing involvement in a neighborhood around 42nd Street and Post Road in Indianapolis: tutoring for children, a flag football league, a Christmas store where parents could buy toys and gloves for their children at deep discount.
Volunteers from Outlook Christian Church helped staff those events, often working in partnership with Crossroads Bible Church on 42nd Street. They formed a non-profit, Renewal Neighborhood Ministry, to continue the work of meeting needs in the area.
Now the McCordsville church plans to start a church in the neighborhood sometime next year. A team of people from Outlook will commit to be part of the church to be planted there.
Ron Hulet, a Renewal board member, is one of them. A year ago, he was among those helping distribute food to families of Charles Warren Fairbanks School 105 students when schools were closed to in-person learning amid the coronavirus quarantine.
“I love that the vision of this new church is to expand on the relationships that we have developed with our friends in the neighborhood,” Hulet said. “I look forward to worshiping with and learning from our neighbors as well as continuing to develop a holistic approach of meeting the emotional, physical, educational/vocational and spiritual needs that people have.”
Wilkins, missions and outreach minister at Outlook and president of Renewal’s board, will be pastor of the new church. He’s already been sharing messages during occasional worship nights at the Renewal building, which serves as a hub for after-school tutoring and other aspects of Renewal’s ministry.
Outlook leaders say the Crossroads church supports the plan to plant a new church and that Outlook and Crossroads will continue to engage together in work that benefits the neighborhood. They also say the new church on Renewal’s block won’t compete with other congregations, in part because of its unconventional approach.
Rob McCord, senior minister of Outlook, calls it an incarnational or missional model.
It’s “a church more spread out … and serving-focused,” McCord said, “not what everyone might first think of when they think of church.”
Wilkins envisions small groups meeting in the Renewal office. He said the monthly worship nights are very informal, often with grilling food and some worship music, “kind of a worship service (that) breaks out in the middle of this little cookout,” he said.
Some neighbors to the Renewal building carry their food back to their homes. Some sit in their yards and sing along; Wilkins can hear some “amens” from across the street. Still others have showed up with a bowl of fruit or a pasta salad to offer.
“It’s a sign to me that people want to be engaged, one of the signs to me that we were really being well received by the community,” Wilkins said. “When folks are bringing food … it tells me they want to be a part of what we’re doing.”
Outlook’s involvement in the area began several years ago. Volunteers from the church began tutoring children at the school through a ministry that sought to pair suburban and inner-city churches for cooperative ministry.
The ministry hub later faded, but Outlook’s relationship with Charles Warren Fairbanks School 105 — and with Crossroads Bible Church north of it — continued. The churches worked on summer reading club sessions for Fairbanks students in a multi-purpose building on the Crossroads campus. The Christmas store for parents was set up in the same building.
In 2014, the area around 42nd and Post was designated by then-Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard as one of six areas needing extra police patrols. When Mayor Joe Hogsett took office in 2016, he continued focusing on those areas.
Meanwhile, McCord and Wilkins printed out some news articles and maps and pondered the place less than 15 minutes from Outlook’s front door.
“We started dreaming and praying and thinking,” McCord said. “Maybe our heart for what could happen there was going to be larger than the tutoring program.”
The years have included progression as Renewal has become more and more part of the fabric of the neighborhood. There’s also been a personal progression for Wilkins, a one-time attorney who joined Outlook’s staff in 2013 and is now poised to pastor a church.
“The whole ministry thing has been a very long road,” he said. “I love being where God is at work … the more I enjoyed it, the more I wanted more of it.”
There’s no way he’s cut out to do this, he’s thought, yet he feels God has brought him to this step and he’s surrendering to the idea.
“Now that I am it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened — to me, anyway,” he said.
And if the job includes planting flower bulbs and flipping burgers, that’s OK with him.
“We’re here because of Jesus,” he said. “I’m happy to sweat for the Lord if that’s what it takes for people to hear the Gospel.”
