Small Church Conference: David Mack, inner-city ministry in Monrovia

My summary/notes of David’s presentation at the Southern California Coalition of Community-Based Christian Churches.

First Christian Church of Monrovia started in 1904, peaked in growth with over 500 in the 1950s, and then gradually became a very small congregation of older adults with an average age in the 70s. During the 1990s, under new leadership, the church began to thrive and grow to about 150 people. David Mack came through the church’s recovery ministry and was called into ministry in 2002.

In 2004, just two weeks after David started his ministry degree, the senior pastor retired suddenly, which created a shock wave in the congregation, and the church quickly went from 34 to 17 people. He now serves as a bi-vocational pastor.

The church has opened its doors to other congregations to share space with them — sometimes four different congregations are meeting in the same building, including Arabic, Latino, and Anglo gatherings. They turned the empty parsonage into a recovery home; host a recovery ministry with over 1000 in weekly attendance; feed, clothe, and offer showers to the homeless in their community; and started putting 10% of all income into local and global missions.

The church’s motto comes from Matthew 25:31-40 about serving “the least” in their community.

The Small Church Conference: David Mack, inner-city ministry in Monrovia by Church Planting Journey, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.