Hebrews 11 and 12 remind us that “we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” South Main is a church body where we have a palpable sense of the saints who have gone before us. There is a legacy we stand on, and that legacy is a starting place for each generation. We have been gifted a solid foundation and a place from which we continually begin again.
In the mid-1970s, South Main formed a committee to think about who we were and how we fit into the community. From that committee came some guidance that still resonates within our collective church DNA. These nearly 50-year-old words sound as though we wrote them yesterday. “The loving, caring, compassionate church reaches out to a lost world.” In doing so, the church should make a special effort to “reach out to the elderly, those with special needs, to respond to the needs of the world’s international community, and to lift the quality of biblical education.”
We are still very intentional about biblical education, so much so that we provide new teachers the resource of quality, seminary-level, biblical education. We pair them with seasoned teachers, capable of being quality mentors. In other words, we still stand upon our church heritage and do so in a way that pushes us to constantly rediscover how we are connected to one another while also encouraging us to grow.
Another set of efforts that grew out this guidance some 50 years ago was a commitment to respond to a more multicultural world. From South Main, a Korean church was formed and launched, as was a Chinese Church, a Hispanic-American Church, and a Cambodian congregation. We also established a program called SMILE (South Main’s International Learning Experience), a program to help recent international transplants to Houston by providing basic language skills and cultural guidance.
We celebrate that each of those congregations stepped forward and began to walk in their own way. Similarly, SMILE grew from passion, expertise, and the specific needs of our community at that time, also something to be celebrated. We celebrate a program because it made our calling clear, and it asked us to respond to what is in front of us today. That calling is to be responsive and to rediscover how South Main can be engaged with vitality in a community and a world that is increasingly multicultural while also standing upon a firm foundation laid before us. While SMILE as a program no longer responds to the needs of our community in the way it did in the past, South Main still has a commitment to being engaged with those who come from a different place and speak a different language. We’re called to do so with care, compassion, and love. Today we have the capacity and expertise to reach around the world and respond in Peru and in Kenya. We have friends all over the globe through CBF Global partnerships. At home we’ve recognized the needs of refugees and asylees, people who have often been dislocated by force from dangerous and unstable homelands. South Main has reached out and provided comfort and a softer landing to families pushed from their homes in Ukraine, Russia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iran. We are helping those who speak Ukrainian, Farsi, Pashto, and Dari. In other words, the world looks different than it did when SMILE was developed. So, our response doesn’t look like SMILE from 50 years ago, but we are responsive to the needy, the poor, and to those who speak different languages.
We continue to rediscover who we are in new ways, still and always guided by a “great cloud of witnesses.”
