Last Week of Karis Internship

INTERN NEWS - November Newsletter

INTERN NEWS - November Newsletter from Jacob Gonzales on Vimeo.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Douglass Park Neighborhood Association

It has been a long time since I last wrote something on here, so look for that REALLY soon... :)

For now, check out the website for the Douglass Park Neighborhood Association. I am the Secretary of the Association, and we just had our first meeting since May last night. It was a great opporunity to meet others who deeply care for the well-being of our neighborhood. 

Please pray for continued opportunities to get to know others. 

Please pray for dedication and steadfastness in my role as Secretary and Ali's role as Treasurer. 

Please pray for courage to share the gospel in a loving and challenging way.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

October Newsletter - VIDEO UPDATE

INTERN NEWS - October Update from Jacob Gonzales on Vimeo.

To Support DPMC: CLICK HERE

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Neighborhood Accident

Hello,

This is very unformal post, but please pray for my neighbors. A house near mine was struck by a car flying down the road and did some damage to the front of the house. No one was hurt, but they need our prayers.

Thanks!

Let's all be thankful to God that no one was hurt!

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

FEATURED ARTICLE - With new building, Karis Church deepens roots in Columbia

By: VICTORIA TRAMPLER

COLUMBIA — In 2005, the members of Karis Church fit around the kitchen table of lead pastor Kevin Larson. The cars were all parked neatly in his driveway.

"I told Kevin, 'You know, there's going to be a day when I'm going to have to put on a little traffic orange vest and I'm going to have to go onto your street and help navigate parking. This is such a beautiful thing we have here that it's going to grow," Executive Pastor Rob Gaskin said.

Now, the parking lot behind Karis: Westside, formerly Bethany Baptist Church, fills up on Sunday mornings. More cars park up and down Spencer Avenue in northwest Columbia.

"I just remember joking with him about parking, and here we are at Westside. It was the parking that was just a little bit sentimental for me," said Gaskin, who was a graduate student at MU when Karis got started.

Inside the church, the floors are still unfinished and some walls have yet to be painted. The basement renovations haven't started. But this doesn't stop the congregation of Karis from gathering there every Sunday morning at 10.

After nine years, the church has gone from an idea to a congregation of 220. The recent addition of a building is a brick-and-mortar testament to the church's deepening roots in Columbia and will provide a launching point for continued growth.

"There are three elements that sort of make up our DNA: gospel, community and mission," Gaskin said.

The church is independent, but has received guidance and is affiliated with Acts 29, a network dedicated to helping "plant" gospel-based churches, which will in turn plant more churches.

Karis received its new building at 1703 W. Worley St. as a gift from the Bethany Baptist congregation, which decided to disband a few months ago. This is the first time Karis has had a permanent home, though it also rents out The Bridge on Walnut Street for Karis: Downtown, the Sunday evening worship at six.

"With a space comes the potential to get in a rut where you think the building is the church and not the people," Larson said. "But at the same time, as we looked at it, we were a people that gathers together regularly for worship, and these people were gracious enough to pass it on to us."

A new opportunity

Although the building was a gift, Karis also raised $50,000 for renovations. The renovations included updating the flooring, installing carpeting, installing a new stage for the worship band and painting the church.

Volunteers, including congregants, friends and people from other churches across Missouri who wanted to help, have done almost all the renovations.

The goals of the changes were to make Westside both welcoming and well-functioning, Gaskin said. He estimated the volunteers put in more than 3,000 hours working on the building, which would have cost the church about $250,000 to do through a company.

"My first thought was, 'Wow, this place has potential, but it’s going to take a lot of work. It doesn’t look like us,'" Gaskin said. "We’ve always been a mobile church. We’d meet in nontraditional places, whether it's another church building, The Tiger Hotel, Missouri Theatre, the basement of our pastor's house."

The Westside building includes much more room for Karis Kids, the children's ministry, as well as for storage. In addition to working better for the congregation, Karis also hopes Westside will help serve the neighborhood around it.

"Because we own this building, there are things down the road that we can do during the rest of the week. We would obviously love to be a place where we can open up to the community," Larson said. "It is right next to public housing in a neighborhood that we’ve been at for a while, so I think it provides some opportunities throughout the week to do some really cool things."

Karis has a partnership with Love INC, an organization that works to help churches provide needed services to the community. It also provides classes to help develop career skills, which Westside may offer in the future, Larson said.

"I just want Westside to be an active, flourishing gathering for the people, living among and caring for the people in that area of town," Larson said.

A dedication to serve

For the people of Karis Church, their motto of "In the city, for the city" means more than just the building's location.

Jacob Gonzales and his wife, Ali Gonzales, moved to their Worley Street home specifically to serve their neighbors. 

"It’s not something we have to do — it’s something we get to do," he said.

The couple recently started the Douglass Park Missional Community, which meets Wednesdays at their home. It is one of 14 missional communities Karis has. They are meant to be small gatherings of the congregation throughout Columbia and Jefferson City to serve different neighborhoods.

The second meeting of the group drew six people, including two other Karis members and two neighborhood children. Laughter rang out as Ali Gonzales served pasta and steamed vegetables. After dinner, Jacob Gonzales gave a lesson to the group about how to best serve the area.

"The only way we know what needs to be done is if you know the people," he said. Trying to meet needs without knowing them lacks humility, he said. At the end of the lesson, Ali Gonzales let the children pick out school supplies that had been purchased for the neighborhood residents.

Jacob Gonzales cautioned against what he called "drive-by evangelism," where Christians serve a community for a bit and then leave. He believes Christians are called to invest their whole lives into serving others.

"I think that investment is rare — because it's hard," he said.

Before the missional communities were created, congregants met in small groups. But in some cases, the groups drifted away from their purpose: investing in people outside the church. This led to the change in name to missional communities three years ago and reaffirmation of their key reason to exist.

"We just felt like the further we went, those groups were about just coming together with your friends," Larson said. "That group is not meant to be an end unto itself. It’s meant to point out to the city, to the world."

Earlier this year, Karis started an additional gathering in Jefferson City and, more recently, sent a member to plant a church in Fayetteville, Ark. The hope is to plant another church in North Carolina soon.

At the older Southside Missional Community, the gathering looks quite different than the Douglass Park one. Aimed at serving the people of southern Columbia, especially families, the members of this community are all parents. On a recent Saturday, 10 children ran around the house until their parents called them to the living room for the sermon.

Scott Schilb, the leader of both Southside and Karis Kids, calmly spoke to the group as his three daughters crawled over him. The children tried to remain attentive, taking turns to pray for the church's health and growth.

"This group is hard," Schilb acknowledged. "It is really challenging to have all the toddlers and all the activity distracting us."

Nevertheless, he thinks it's important to have this family-centered gathering because faith should be a family affair.

"I think that church has become so program-oriented that we've forgotten how to worship as a family unit," he said.

At Southside, members have helped each other financially, he said.  At one point, the larger church even helped a family with the costs of adopting a child.

"One of the things that's so evident is that the people truly love each other: genuine, sacrificial love," Schilb said. "I feel like it's rare and it's hard."

A look into the future

The new building means more stability for Karis. Since the church's founding, the congregation has moved six times. In key ways, though, that created internal stability for members.

"If I had to leave my family every time I had to move out of a house, it would destroy me," Gaskin said. "But moving is not that big of a deal because we’re doing it together. And when I go in new house it’s still me, it’s still my wife, it’s still our family."

Gaskin said the metaphor fits the church because "the house doesn’t make the family, the family makes the house. The church is not a building."

In the future, the members of Karis hope to continue reaching out into Columbia by creating more missional communities.

"We’re a people that is fully convinced of our brokenness and our need for grace," Larson said. "We’re called Karis — we mean grace — and we’re a people that are constantly aware of our sin and our need for a savior. We want to extend that grace to other people in our community."

To see the article online -- Karis and Douglass Park MC Article

Saturday Prayer Request: Basketball Courts

Today I would like you all to pray for the basketball courts at Douglass Park. This is a place where infants to the elderly hangout and spend quality time together. We see this as a beautiful and fun place to make friendships and opportunities to share the gospel.

1. Pray that God may bring some genuine friendships in this place with those that make up the Douglass Park MC.
2. Pray for boldness to connect AND share the gospel with those that we meet on the courts. The Holy Spirit needs to give us boldness and confidence in Jesus.
3. Pray that we are able to demonstrate a different kind of competition to those we meet and play with. Pray that they see that we live a different lifestyle and may be drawn to God through simply playing basketball with them.

God is good and gracious

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Saturday Prayer Request: Kenneth Ralph Shelter

Today I would like you all to pray for the Kenneth Ralph Shelter at Douglass Park. There has been a lot of talk about a possible alcohol ban in Douglass Park because of the drinking involved under this shelter, but no matter what happens we seek to love, serve, and pray for those who hang out here. Not everyone here is dangerous, an alcoholic, or up to no good! But, there are those who are struggling with addiction that I need you to pray for.

1. Pray for the people struggling with addiction and the lifestyle associated with addiction. Being someone who struggled with this in my past, I know the struggle so please pray for the gospel of Jesus to release the enslavement of addiction.
2. Pray for the children who have parents, grandparents, and relatives that I have seen here. Pray that they might experience the love of Christ.
3. Pray for the very passionate voices who are debating the alochol ban in Douglass Park. Both sides have expressed hostility in some sense, so please pray for the love of Christ to saturate their lives and their speech as they discuss this issue.
4. Pray for Ali and I as we seek to know the people that hang out here so we can love, serve, and pray for them. We need your prayers to make these connections!

God is good and gracious

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Saturday Prayer Request: Frederick Douglass High School

Today is the first day of Saturday Prayer Request!

For the rest of the summer I will be posting a new place, person, or area that I would like you all to pray for. These places, people, and areas are essential for the thriving of our neighborhood, Douglass Park.

Today I would like you all to pray for Frederick Douglass High School. This is a historical part of Columbia, Missouri, and most of the current students comprise of the teens from around the neighborhood. It started off as the only school that black children were allowed to attend until Brown vs. Board of Education, but today it is the alternative high school in Columbia.

1. Pray for the teachers to remain steadfast in educating their students. It can be a hard place to teach at times, but pray for the teachers and leaders to lead the students well.
2. Pray for the students to see and follow godly men and women on staff, in the neighborhood, or in their lives. 
3. Pray for salvation for all people. Pray that God would start a revival in the hearts of the students, teachers, and staff. Pray that God may be known truly through Jesus Christ.
4. Pray for connections to be made with students, teachers, and staff. We desire to connect and serve the people that make up our neighborhood.

God is good and gracious

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Home Improvement - Update (06.13.14)

The grass is looking pretty nice, and the flowers are coming out!

The mailbox is all Ali's work. Awesome way to point people to our house... "Our house is the one with the yellow mailbox."

This is the clearest example of what paint can do to make a porch cleaner!

New porch chairs were added after the porch was painted. I pray that these chairs can be places where great conversations happen!

Photo Update 06.12.14

While playing basketball I cut my eyebrow. The guy did a spin move and bumped me in the face!

The cut brought evidence on my t-shirt...

Mike Griggs, Assistant Director of Columbia Parks and Recreation, came to the Douglass Park Neighborhood Association meeting this past Sunday to talk about the future of the park! Awesome stuff!

Mike Brooks from REDI came to talk about how we can promote small business in our neighborhood. 

The moment when a baby realizes it is not mom and dad... Hahaha.

We Need Co-Laborers

This post was not something that I planned on writing, but after having a couple of conversations on Monday afternoon I felt even more moved to write. I belive that those conversations pushed me into a more transparent vision for what I expect to happen in my neighborhood.

The reality of the situation is that I am unable to muster up enough passion, vision, or desire for my neighborhood to know Jesus as Lord and Savior. I am incapable of articulating convincing and moving words so that everyone understands the burden I have for the Douglass Park neighborhood. And this is okay by me.

God is the One who changes hearts. God is the One who saves people. God is the One who changes lives.

Ali and I moved to this neighborhood trusting that God sent us here with the desire and the vision for seeing a revival in this neighborhood. We hope that not only one Missional Community (small groups at Karis Church) begins in this neighborhood, but we are hoping that multiple MCs are flourishing and thriving. My dream is to see a healthy, biblical, and Jesus-centered local church in the neighborhood.

For all of this to happen, Ali and I need a significant amount of prayer. Sincerely pray with us for these things:

1. Co-Laborers
2. Financial Support
3. Salvation and Revival
4. Faith, Courage, and Boldness

Right now in this post, we need all of you to pray that other people catch the vision that we are casting for the neighborhood. We need your prayer for brothers and sisters in the faith to come next to us and practically and sacrificially love the people in our neighborhood.

This passage from Scripture comes to mind when I think of our situation in the Douglass Park Neighborhood:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”(Matthew 9:35-38 ESV)

Please pray that Ali and I would have others come next to us and faithfully live out the gospel in a radical, biblical, and Christ-like way so that Jesus may be known, loved, and worshipped! We need laborers.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Be Faithful, Be Passionate, Be Uncomfortable

For those who might not know, I am an intern at Karis Church in Columbia, Missouri. There have been a lot of twists and turns when it comes to who God is calling my wife and I to reach out to, but only as of late do we feel like we truly know where God is calling us to live and pour out our lives.

Ali and I started the internship just starting the transition to a group that focused on the center of the city, but after about 6 months we decided it was best to multiply into multiple Missional Communities (small groups), so Ali and I chose to go to a Missional Community called Ethnos, which translates to “For the Nations.” We have now been focusing our time and effort to making connections with Latino men and women at the University of Missouri. Things have been going well, and only as of late have we started seeing relationships forming. But – as it normally happens - we are now moving to an area of Columbia that we truly believe God is calling us: Douglass Park.

There might be some questions that are arising in your mind, and honestly we have had or still have all of those questions. But, Ali and I are called to follow God wherever He is calling us to live, and we are attempting to follow God as best as we can and that might include bouncing around in the same city. What we have learned in the past year comes to down to sticking to three principles:

Be Faithful

God has called Ali and I to follow Jesus Christ, our Savior, God, King, High Priest, and our Lord over all creation.

The most important responsibility that we have is not each other. Our highest calling is to love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our might. I have found through trial after trail that what I am called to do is to follow Christ and seek to be faithful. When followers of Christ genuinely seek Him, He will reveal His grace and glory.

God has called Ali and I to be faithful to our calling as children of the living God.

Be Passionate

God has called Ali and I to be passionate about loving people in any area, any people group, and in any situation to show God’s love.

We are to be passionate about Jesus and in turn we are to be passionate about loving people. When Jesus was asked to tell the crowds what the most important commandment was He said to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said that we are to love God and that in turn makes us passionate about loving everyone in our lives. Neighbor doesn’t always mean your direct neighbors, but that doesn’t excuse the people that live in your immediate neighborhood. Ali and I are intentionally living in a dangerous neighborhood in Columbia so that we can love broken families, drug addicts, single moms, wandering men, and anyone else that God puts in our lives.

God has called us to passionately love Him and passionately sacrifice our lives so that men, women, and children may come to know our loving, holy, and beautiful Savior.

Be Uncomfortable

God has called Ali and I to be comfortable being uncomfortable so that Jesus may be known deeply in the hearts of who God is calling us to share the gospel with.

Honestly, we have struggled with comfort and complacency. We would rather stay in our house and keep to ourselves, but we are called to be lights to the world. We can’t help but go around and share the hope that is only found in Christ. We can’t help but go and sacrifice our comfort so that we can build relationships, disciple men and women, and boldly preach the gospel in any context. If we are comfortable, we are not being faithful and we are not being passionate – at least that’s what I have noticed in our lives. Being uncomfortable should be so normal that we become comfortable being uncomfortable. Sacrificing our preferences, our habits, and our norms so that people may love Jesus is worth it.

God has called us to be uncomfortable so that our friends, families, and neighbors might come to know the One True God.

These findings go for you all too. God has called you.

Go. Preach. Disciple. Love. Believe.

Be faithful. Be passionate. Be uncomfortable.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

If We Die, We Die

While I do not completely agree that giving Chicago good weather is a test, I believe that this Facebook status should reveal the need of the gospel of Jesus Christ to be known throughout each neighborhood in Chicago. I love my hometown, and Jesus needs to be preach boldly and lovingly in the areas of most need.

Ali and I are moving to a neighborhood that is more dangerous than any other in Columbia, the Douglass Park neighborhood, but some areas of Chicago give me a real perspective on violence, drug use, and the brokenness of each and every human being. We are no better than the people that committed crimes, and we all need the hope of the gospel in our lives.

We have all fallen short by sinning against God, and this violence in Chicago demonstrates the reality of our hearts: We need Jesus.

Let's sacrifice to go into the dangerous neighborhoods. People need to know of the life that Jesus lived for us, died the death in our place for our sins, and rose from the grave to defeat Satan, sin, and death.

The gospel sends us into the dangerous neighborhoods because we serve a Savior who went into dangerous neighborhoods, hung out with the rejects of His day, and died a horrific death all for us. We are to likewise go into the dangerous neighborhoods and share the hope only found in Jesus.

If we die, we die, but we die with a certain hope only found in the God that died for us! 

Chicago needs Jesus. Columbia needs Jesus. The world needs Jesus.

You need Jesus. I need Jesus. We all need Jesus.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

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For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. (Romans 14:8 ESV)

Moved to Move: Living Near Douglass Park

I am happy to announce that Ali and I will be moving in May of this year to a new house! Before some of you get the wrong idea, we are still renting the house. We are not buying the house as of right now, but we are not discounting the idea in the long-run.

Some of you might remember that at the beginning of the internship Ali and I were spending a significant chunk of time down at Douglass Park. We ended up transitioning to a new focus for the short-term and we began focusing our efforts on reaching out to the international community of Columbia. We made this transition due to the lack of other followers of Christ being called to the area, but we have never stopped thinking about who God is calling us to reach out to if we were to live in Columbia for the rest of our lives. At this point we are unsure what the timeline will be for us to start a Missional Community (small groups at Karis Church) in the Douglass Park neighborhood, but the timeline is secondary to be faithful to God's calling on our lives.

After plenty of conversations - and honestly some arguments - Ali and I have decided to move to the Douglass Park neighborhood. Many people have given us weird looks whenever we say that Douglass Park is the area that we want to live near and spend a majority of our time. This reaction is largely due to the stereotype of what happens at the park: violence and drug use. 

I do not blame anyone for thinking that Douglass Park is not the safest neighborhood in Columbia, but as a Christian I am called to go to the people that God calls me to. The neighborhood's statistics are quite average as any other neighborhood in Columbia, but Douglass Park gets more attention because it is closer downtown and because of its racial diversity. 

All that being said, here are a couple of reasons Ali and I felt moved to move near to Douglass Park:

Called to Love

Christians all around the world are called to a radical love for others because of the radical love that was shown to us by our Savior Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins. God's death on the cross was a radical display of loving sinners, and if I am to follow Him closely I am to demonstrate His love to the world. Moving to the Douglass Park neighborhood doesn't seem too radical, even if it is the most dangerous place in the entire world, when placed against God the Father sending the Son to die in the hands of those He came to save.

We are called to love as God loves us.

Called to Believe and Proclaim

We are all called to have faith in Jesus - His perfect life, His substitutionary death for us and our sins on the cross, and His resurrection from the dead. Jesus was faithful His entire life. He was faithful to His Father's plan by dying on the cross. He was faithful to send us the Holy Spirit. He will be faithful to come back. I have no reason to not believe Him when He said that He would be with me as I go out to share the good news of Jesus to Douglass Park and the world. God wants us to go out and make disciples, baptize them, and teach them the truth found in Christ. He will be faithful, so this is just me trying to be faithful to what He has called me to do.

We are called to believe in Jesus and go into Douglass Park to proclaim the good news of salvation found only in Jesus Christ.

Called to Christ

 

Ultimately, I am called to love God in all facets of life. I am called to seek to be faithful to following Christ to whatever He might be calling my family to. I am not held accountable to Douglass Park. I am held accountable by God, and I want to see what God will do with Ali and I in this area of Columbia. 

We are called to follow Jesus.

We are very excited to see Jesus known deeply in our own hearts and in the hearts of the people that make up the Douglass Park community.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales