Outreach events produced opportunities to pray with local residents.
“We got to see God working even when there was a language barrier and we had no way of communicating except through the phone,” the young woman said to a crowd of nearly 100 students and adults gathered at Elmwood Park Community Church in the western Cook County suburbs.
Her story of using the Google Translate app to share water bottles and the Good News of Jesus with a Spanish speaking mother and child is just one example of teens experiencing how to meet needs and share the gospel in an urban environment at the Go Chicago mission week.
The long-running IBSA student missions event, held annually in late July, provides middle and high school students one week of rotating service opportunities alongside Illinois Baptist church plants and Christ-centered non-profits in Chicago.
This summer was the first year that Go Chicago was held as a partnership between IBSA, the Chicagoland Baptist Association, and the North American Mission Board’s Send Relief Chicago Ministry Center.
Church plants partnered with teams to hold car washes and block parties during the week.
IBSA Mission Director Shannon Ford said that the Send Relief partnership added new opportunities to an already great event. Months before teams arrived in Chicago, the network was at work making sure they would experience purposeful missional activities that met real needs and created opportunities for sharing Christ. “Working with Send Relief and the Chicagoland Baptist Association really displayed the strength of cooperation,” Ford said.
Chicagoland Baptist Association and Elmwood Park Community Church housed students, with the church serving as the evening and worship spot for all students. During the days the youth divided into eight teams serving at a different location each day.
The service locations saw participants doing things like neighborhood canvasing in the Lakeview neighborhood with Chicagoland Community Church, passing out water bottles and engaging people about their faith at a local “L” train stop, and painting and cleaning at By the Hand Club in the Austin neighborhood.
The missional engagement has kept students coming back year after year. Rachelle Cox, a senior in college from Joppa Missionary Baptist Church was back for her sixth year, now serving as a leader for younger girls.
Rachelle Cox (2nd from right) and other Southern Illinois teens distribute water and prayer at a local “L” station.
“So, I really love missions, and I’ve always been drawn to hometown missions and staying near home in the United States,” she said. “I’ve been on an international mission, and I loved it. But Chicago to me, is like a hometown mission and an international mission trip because of all the nationalities and all the different communities.”
Cox’s team could be found on the Thursday morning of “Go Week” sorting donated clothing at Breakthrough, a multi-faceted Christ-centered non-profit in Garfield Park. Several of their staff are members at nearby Chicago West Bible Church, an IBSA cooperating church. The clothing was sorted by size, season, and style, with an eye toward current fashions. She explained that the clothing distribution is “set up like a boutique. So even though they are donations, we want the clothing to be what you would wear.”
Each team also spent a day of their rotations learning at the Chicago Ministry Center. This interactive classroom time helped them better understand the different aspects of the culture and needs that they would experience among the people of Chicago.
The 87 student missionaries from four churches fed over 400 people and had 200 Gospel conversations.
Carrie Neely, an adult leader from First Baptist Metropolis, really appreciated learning more about the people, needs, and approaches to ministry in Chicago from locals who are serving there year-round.
“I think it’s been great this year. I like the way it’s been ordered,” she said. “We’ve had some education, more about the needs in Chicago and the people of Chicago, and then we do projects after that.”
Neely, who works with the youth in her church on a weekly basis, said that the Chicago mission experience helped the teens live out their faith in spaces outside of their comfort zone, like talking about Jesus and praying with people they have just met.
“We have done a lot of training over the last four or five years to help prepare them to be more comfortable in difficult situations like that,” Neely said. “So, they really did great.”
Izabela Kacaleck, an intern at Send Relief’s Chicago Ministry Center, serves alongside students at a block party during Go Chicago.
A city the size of Chicago, with its diversity of languages and cultures, can seem very intimidating to students and churches who come from smaller communities downstate. But after spending a week learning and serving alongside pastors and leaders from the city, their perspective on this Illinois mission field changes. It also helps them grow in how they think about reaching their own communities.
Ford said that learning about some of the various forms of hurt experienced by Chicago residents experiencing poverty leads to students seeing people made in God’s image, not just a city with the problems all cities face.
And the lessons learned at Go Chicago extend beyond the city limits and mission trip calendar. Jason Stuckey from the Chicago Ministry Center closed the week by encouraging the students to apply this experience to their local mission field. The hope is that each student is inspired to “go home” with new skills and enthusiasm that they gained at Go Chicago.