Before we share our exciting news with you, we want to give you a bit of history and context on the journey of our church for the last five years.
We opened our church on September 30, 2018 in the Northview Shopping Center on Commercial Street. We opened with a clothing closet and food pantry next door called Kyla’s Kloset- through that outreach, we built relationships with our neighbors. We learned from those with lived experience that there was a need for a place to serve dinner, and offer warmth and shelter in the winter while people waited for the cold weather shelters to open at 8 PM. So in the winter of 2019, we were asked by the Ozarks Alliance to End Homelessness to be that location and we agreed. During that time, we also added amazing partnerships with Springfield Street Choir (that practiced in our building), Gathering Friends (that provided Tuesday night meals), and many others that came to volunteer.
When the pandemic hit, and everyone was closing down, moving virtual, and sheltering in place… we felt strongly that we needed to find a way to continue to love out loud. So, we moved all of our outreach efforts outside to the sidewalk. We served a nightly meal, provided clothing, offered pop-up medical clinics, and rented porta potties and hand-washing stations to put throughout the city. While these efforts helped hundreds of our neighbors in need… other neighbors in the neighborhood, businesses, and city officials pushed back on our actions.
In July 2020, during the height of the pandemic, we were told by our landlord to “change the dynamics of your ministry or change your location.” We did not feel that we could abandon the work we were doing, and our landlord terminated our lease. We had faith and trusted that a new location would come that would allow us to continue to find and fill the gaps in our community that impacted vulnerable neighbors. While we waited, we purchased a box truck to make our outreach efforts mobile to check on individuals and get food and supplies to those without shelter.
We were blessed when only a few weeks later, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) offered us fellowship and a building to invest in and renovate so that it could be used once again. We got to work on the Family Connection building immediately to be able to have a space for our Family Connection Program for parent-child visits in the foster care system to restart in person in the midst of the shutdown. We also worked hard to get out Outreach Center open and running to meet the needs of our unsheltered neighbors. During that time… a weekly worship space was not our priority… loving out loud was. We did not have the time or the funding to renovate the worship space that was given to us.
We happily worshiped online and in parking lots during that season while we focused on the work of outreach, family connection, and meeting needs.
An unexpected gift in 2021 made it possible for us to renovate the worship space that had previously been unusable and we held services in it for a few months before we converted it into a crisis cold weather shelter to be used when the temperatures fell below 32 degrees.
We came back to our building for the spring-fall months with a heavy burden for the lack of family shelter in our city. So for the winter of 2022, we willingly chose to return to online services as we attempted to open a family shelter that was open every night. However, the extremely small size of our building limited us to only 4 families that we could help at a time. We were turning away dozens of families a week so we changed our model and found ways to support hoteling families for the remainder of the winter while our building returned to being used to provide shelter to adults.
When the spring of 2023 came, we knew that we could not go back to using our worship space as normal when there were thousands of people with no subtitle shelter in our city. So we asked the city for permission to use our spaces as a year-round transitional shelter that was approved and now houses 12 individuals total at one time. To date we have had — 31 individuals who have stayed with us. Ten of them have already moved into housing, one moved into a different program, and currently all of our spaces are filled with amazing humans working hard towards achieving goals and breaking barriers in their lives.
Our amazing friends at Brentwood Christian Church extended an invitation to us to be able to use their basement for our Saturday night services and we were very grateful to be able to return to meeting in person again! We have been there since March and we have been beyond blessed by the space and the hospitality that has allowed us to do dinner at 5 PM each week and then worship at 6 PM. They have allowed us use of the basement, playground, kitchen, and a kid’s classroom upstairs. We have been honored to use this space and it confirmed for us that a space sharing model could work well for us- not just for the short-term… but the long-terms as well. Our hope was to find a situation similar to Brentwood’s partnership with Trinity Presbyterian that would allow both of us to grow for the long-run in a cost-effective and collaborative way.
We began having conversations with a church that we have known and loved for some time and as we were processing the possibility together, we learned that Asbury United Methodist Church will be unable to open as a regular crisis cold weather shelter this coming winter. Brentwood has been one of the partner churches that help to support and supply volunteers to the Cooperative Cold Weather shelter that Asbury hosted. We felt that our possible move could be the perfect timing for Brentwood and other partner churches that support that shelter determine how to best use their spaces this winter to save lives. We will meet at Brentwood through the remainder of September and will conclude our time there with our annual birthday party celebration on Saturday, September 30th.
After that celebration, we are thrilled to announce that The Connecting Grounds will move one final time as we partner with St. John’s Chapel United Church of Christ to space share their building, and collaborate on outreach projects. Together we will work to provide overflow cold weather shelter in the event of extreme winter weather when code blue shelters are asked to open.
St. John’s Chapel UCC is located at 4344 S. Fremont Ave, Springfield MO just south of Republic Road. Starting Saturday, October 7th we will continue to have our weekly dinners at 5 PM followed by a weekly worship service at 6 PM at our new church home. We will also be moving our Sober Support Meetings to this new location on Wednesdays at 5:30 PM followed by Coffee and Questions at 6:30 PM. Our Springfield Cooperative Youth Group will move their weekly processing group meeting on Wednesday nights at 6:30 PM to St. John’s Chapel as well.
Please know that this move will not impact our outreach center, street outreach, respite houses, or our transitional shelter efforts… this allows our faith gatherings to have consistency and space to continue to grow.
We are humbled as we reflect on the journey of the last five years. We could have never anticipated the twists and turns and ups and downs that we would face working to love out loud in our city- but through it all, God has been faithful. We have struggled. We have learned. We have renovated. We have grown. We have trusted.
We want to thank our community for all the love and support over the last five years- we can’t wait to see what the next five years bring to our city and church!