During my recent visit to L.A., I visited Macarthur Park with my classmates. It was originally built in 1880 as a vacation destination for the rich, but then it degraded into a gang banging, drug filled, crime scene from the 1960’s-1980’s. Now, it is a cleaned up multicultural neighborhood that is predominantly Mexican and Central American.
While I was there, I visited Innerchange, which is an incarnational Christian order among the poor with locations across the world. They are communities of missionaries who are intentionally choosing to live in marginalized neighborhoods in order to live out the Gospel there, in both word and deed. It’s because of their presence in that neighbourhood, along with Mama’s Hot Tamales, that MacArthur Park is now what it is.
What impacts me the most about this experience is how Innerchange is not just in the neighborhood to temporarily fix a problem, but that they are there living in the neighborhood with the people.
They are ministers amongst the poor who are critically thinking about how to transform problems into assets.
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