Apartment block disciples

The Tenderloin district of San Francisco is one square mile. There are 37,000 people in that one square mile living in 586 apartment buildings. And San Francisco City Impact wants to plant a church in every single one of those apartments.

Francis Chan, author of Crazy Love and former pastor of Cornerstone Community Church, is working with the new initiative, called Adopt a Building. SFCI provides food, clothing and housing for those in the San Francisco area. Christian Huang, operations director for the new initiative, told The Christian Post that Adopt a Building is filling a need in the community that wasn’t being met before. It was the “missing component of City Impact,” he said.

The idea is simple. First they pick a building and get a prayer team together to start praying for residents in the building. Then a “grace team” is assembled to knock on the doors of every residence in the building.

Those on the grace team ask residents if there is anything they need: food, school supplies, prayer. In a video about the ministry Francis Chan says grace team members are really there to say, “We don’t want anything from you, we just want to give.”

Huang said many might question SFCI’s involvement in this particular district because there is a lot of crime and homelessness, but the real community is represented in these apartment buildings. They house families, single people, and many immigrants who don’t have a lot of people “interested in their lives”, he said.

Those on the prayer and grace teams are volunteers with SFCI and their sole mission is to be interested in those who live there. Since they already had a large volunteer base, SFCI knew that this ministry was a good place to “equip and mobilize Christians,” said Huang.

After the grace team has a list of needs from residents they will come back the next week to deliver what they requested. In doing so, the teams continue the dialogue that they started the week before with those in the apartment. To read more, click here.