Gospel Ministry in Northeast Philadelphia (Frankford Section)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Ben Kreps:

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our executive director. If guys are following along in the podcast, we recently had one with Dan Birkholz while filming from the Regional Elders Retreat and this is our second one with another pastor. We take advantage of being with these guys and being together. So why don't you introduce our guest.

Mark Prater:

I would love to Ben, and again, we kind of look like we know what we're doing rather than just using the iPhone. We've got these really nice mics that we didn't have to set up or do anything. <laughter>

Ben Kreps:

Exactly. Alright, this is our friend Stephen Bowne. Stephen is the Senior Pastor of Grace City Church, which is in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. It's a unique neighborhood, it's a unique context where he is doing ministry, where he planted this church. And I wanted to hear just a little bit about what God is doing there. So Stephen, first of all, thank you for your faith to plant this church in Frankford. Just tell us a little bit about what Frankford is like and the context within which you planted this church and are doing gospel ministry.

Stephen Bowne:

Sure, yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm a first time caller, long-term listener. So grateful to be here. Frankford, it's a difficult neighborhood. It's the kind of place that people even in the city say, oh, you're in that neighborhood. It's known; it has a bad reputation, rightfully so. There's a lot of violence, a lot of crime, a lot of drug addiction and just kind of open out in the streets, even with looting and things like that that happened recently. It's all just in our neighborhood, all around where we're at. It's just the way that the neighborhood is. There's a lot of poverty, a lot of broken families. Schools are awful and it's just a very difficult place, a very difficult place to raise a family and have kids and to live.

Mark Prater:

So you've made sacrifices, obviously, to move Abby and the kids there and to plant this church. You did that for a reason. And tell us why you think it's important to have a church in Frankfurt in a place like that.

Stephen Bowne:

Yeah, you look at the problems of the urban poor, you look at the problems of the cities in America and it really breaks your heart and you think there are so many needs, there's so many problems, there's so many layers of issues, there's so many generational things, so many systemic things and individual things that are there. And you just see it. It just oozes over everything. And the thing that we have to offer is what nobody else has to offer.

And that's the gospel. To speak into those situations and to talk about repentance and to talk about living for God's glory and to talk about how we can be forgiven for our sins and to talk about systemic problems and the evils in the world and what Christ has done to address those things and how we can be redeemed and how our dead lives can be made alive again. It's a hope that we can give that really meets people's needs. There are, as difficult as our neighborhood is, there's a ton of agencies, there's a ton of programs, there's a ton of things that are there to help people, whether it be for jobs or whether it be for education or whether it be for feeding them or whether it be job training. There's all kind of programs, but none of them offer life transformation hope and only the gospel does that.

And so as a church, we're able to not just proclaim that but live it out in a community in that neighborhood. So it's different than just coming in on a missions trip and handing out some tracks and telling the people there "Here's Jesus." It's like, come and see how our lives have been transformed and come and live in our midst and be part of our family and be part of our church family and see how this works out in real life. And that's why it's so important to have a church community in these neighborhoods and living in the neighborhood, not just ministering to the neighborhood, but being in the neighborhood and with the neighborhood and having a church there matters so much and it's so transformative in the neighborhood and so life-giving to the neighborhood. So that's why we want to have a church.

Mark Prater:

I'm so glad you're there. So glad you're there. You've kind of spoken to this a bit generally already, but what are some of the unique challenges to do a ministry in Frankford?

Stephen Bowne:

Yeah, it's just that things that are typically extreme are more normal. So it's just expected that someone has served time in jail. It's just expected that someone is battling with an addiction or maybe not even battling with the addiction but just surrendering to it. It's just expected that people have multiple partners and multiple kids with multiple different people. Not even a sense of shame about it. It's just kind of like, this is just how we live. So it makes it hard.

On one sense, it is nice because people are open and they'll say, this is my life, this is where I'm at. It is what it is. Philly already has a reputation forever for being blunt and just saying what they are, and our context is Philly--but even more extreme, so just like, this is who I am, I'm a real person and this is what it is. And then it comes with all the, here's my mess. So there's a difficulty in that. There's a niceness in that because people aren't hiding and acting like they're perfect and things, there's not a self-righteousness in it. But it's also hard because it's like here's all this mess and how do we know what's going to be dealt with in the long-term? How do we know what to hit right now? How do we know what needs to be cleaned up before we can baptize you? What needs to be cleaned up before you can become a member? And what is just your culture and this is where we're at. And so there's a lot of challenges that way.

Another big major challenge is mental illness and that's often combined with drug use and even just trying to figure out level of comprehension that people have and how much they can understand and how much can you hold them accountable. And just working through that on an individual level and then it's so many people like that.

It is overwhelming all the time. It can be. You're always overwhelmed and I'm constantly reminded, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know how to help. I don't know what to say. I don't know, I'm just overwhelmed. Every Sunday I'm overwhelmed. And it's just a reminder that it's God, he has to work. God has to be the one to do it. God's the one that's going to make a difference in their lives and he has to change their hearts and take people that are dead and make them alive again. And so the glory of it is being able to have a front row seat to it, but it's very messy.

Mark Prater:

Tell us about how you see God at work and include there a building you just recently put work into.

Stephen Bowne:

So we see God at work in so many neat ways, in all kinds of individual stories and all kinds of neat pictures of people that their lives have been just a train wreck their entire lives and God is just redeeming them and stuff.

But we also see God in the fact that we're even there, existing, and were able to get a building in the last couple years. We were renting a space and then we bought a building just right down the block from where we were renting before. And it was just God's provision in all of it. God providing the money, God providing work teams, God providing the resources to be able to do it. And then every time we'd come across something that was like, oh no, this is going to be another so many thousand dollars, then another person would step up from some random church somewhere or the region would step up and it just kind of kept coming and kept coming and kept coming and you just see God making it happen. And now that we're in our space, it's just such a neat place to be.

We're right underneath the L. So if you think about any of the Rocky movies you've seen Rocky running underneath that elevated train line, that's where we're at, underneath that blue train thing. <laughter> There's so much traffic, and foot traffic. And so one of our ministries that we have is to have the church open on Mondays from 10 am to 2 pm and we had put out a sign that says coffee, prayer and conversation, come on in. And we just have people that come in off the street continually every week and it's just such a need. People are hurting. And sometimes people just want coffee, or if it's hot they want to get cool, or if it's cold they want to get warm.

And it's just an opportunity to pray with people and talk with people and you just see God at work. So many people just come in crying and just laying their burdens out and it's so intense, just the amount of things. But God is just working and it's so neat to see those people then come to church on Sunday and get plugged in and get fed and get well. So it's really neat to see God at work in that way.

Mark Prater:

Thanks for being there. Bonus question for you. Tell us one thing you've learned as a pastor in doing ministry in the Frankford section of Northeast Philly.

Stephen Bowne:

The one thing that I learned when I was studying urban ministry and was going to go into urban ministry, I assumed that a major part of that was going to be a lot of mercy works that we would do. And so we would have food pantries and soup kitchens and clothing giveaways and all these kinds of job trainings. And I thought that would be kind of what we would do and that would be the thing that would get people to come in. What we've found is that there are already several churches in the neighborhood doing stuff like that that aren't preaching the gospel. And those churches don't get people to come and people aren't changed by those churches. They come in, they use their services just like they would the corner store or use their bank like, let me get this service, but it's not connecting them to God.

And so the one thing that I knew, we need to be about the gospel, and we need to be about preaching the word. And obviously we're still helping people, so we do a lot of mercy ministry type stuff, but it doesn't have the accent that I thought it would have, because what people really need is the word of God. And what people really need from the word of God is Jesus and for him to save their souls. And so the message and the importance of solid biblical teaching and the importance of proclaiming the gospel over and over again in all different kinds of ways to try to get the word out being the main thing that we do as a church. That's the thing that I think I've learned, especially doing urban ministry, that the word is the thing that should matter the most, the thing that we should accent the most, even in the midst of such a hard, physically hard place.

Mark Prater:

That's a compelling lesson.

Ben Kreps:

Yeah. And for you to go and plant in a hard place where there is a famine of God's word and bring the bread of life with you is a beautiful saying as I said to Dan in the last podcast, if you haven't seen that podcast or read it, please go back and read Dan's testimony.

'Just want to commend you and thank you for your example in a world full of celebrity pastors and selfish ambition. You did not plant in Frankford for the glory or for the money of which there is little of both, but you did it to see Jesus glorified in a hard place of Philadelphia. So, thank you for your example. And thank you to those who are watching or reading this podcast.  We’ll see you here next time, Lord willing.  Bye for now.