Stories of Windsor: Part I

I went to Windsor this past weekend with a team of people from my church. We visited New Song Church, which is located in an industrial area of town. They're surrounded on three side by a river and various factories, resulting in a community that is somewhat segregated from the rest of the city. The area used to be a hot spot for alcohol smugglers back in the day, as this article describes their smuggling tricks into the United States during prohibition.

These days, the area is still a hot spot for illegal trafficing but now it's hard drugs. Last week yet another crack war was heating up between gangs. And I mean that literally - one of the neighbourhood homes was set on fire by suspected arson. Murders are common enough in the area and we were advised that "you get used to it" after the first few. In Sunday morning service, the pastor cracked a joke about how safe we must feel sleeeping inside the church in the middle of this kind of neighbourhood. The congregation thought that was pretty funny.

New Song Church has the motto that they're "a church with the heart of a mission." They don't want to be another mission to the poor. They want to be a church family whose ministry is to care for the poor and whose members are the poor. As a result, they tend to lead the way with regards to this type of ministry, training churches regularly. Sometimes they have groups like us come to visit for a weekend or a week and sometimes it's through annual conferences like the Beggar's Banquet.

We arrived there early Friday evening and stayed until early Sunday afternoon. While there, we participated in the usual tasks that you would expect from a short-term missions/outreach trip. We helped with some of the meals, got to know a lot of the people who visited, painted and cleaned the church and led a couple of services.

On Saturday morning I walked around the neighbourhood with Larissa and Sue, knocking on doors to hand out flyers and invite people to church. I had a few good conversations with people, including one conversation in French as I chatted with a guy that moved there from Quebec.

The church building is actually a converted bar. This building used to have the longest bar counter in all of Canada and is a massive building with five apartment units, two large kitchen areas and one main hall. Many of the members of this church used to live in this area when they were young and they moved back into the neighbourhood after being away for years.

The weekend was a great experience. It didn't strike me as all that different from my visits to Belize back in the day. Granted, the general living conditions are actually better than they were in Belize but the people were still friendly and it was a genuine community working together. I'm not sure what this means for our church as we revisit the purpose and plan of our various ministries but we'll see about that. In the end, we gave a lot to their church and they gave a lot to our church and that's just what we all wanted.

Related: Part II