Cody Lorance doesn’t knock. He just pushes the door open and ambles into the apartment. A little girl runs to hug him and the rest of her family filters into the room to greet their guest.
They give each other a traditional South Asian greeting — the palms of their hands pressed together in front of them — but what they say in Nepali is anything but traditional: “Jay Masih,” which means “Victory to the Messiah.”
Lorance is a church planter in Chicago. Since 2005, he and a five-member team have been working among immigrants in the city. Since they started meeting as a house church, they have seen the Lord pull together congregations among Nepali, Ethiopian and Karen people who live in rundown little apartment buildings scattered around Chicago’s western suburbs.
Lorance makes himself at home, dropping casually onto the couch and peppering family members with questions in their heart language. He may be a pastor making a ministry visit, but he’s also part of the family.
Back on the street outside, Lorance gestures at the nearby businesses and homes. “This is a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, but these little apartment buildings are chock-full of refugees. So many church people pass by every day and have no idea what’s going on here.”
The refugees come from all over the world, and some churches are reaching out to them. Most of the visitors, however, don’t spend the time necessary to develop a real relationship with the refugees.
“This is not a superficial, drive-by ministry,” Lorance said. “You’ve got to be willing to move beyond the American 30-minute visit. … You have to get to the point where you run out of the Nepali phrases you know and they run out of English — and you still stay with them. You become more a part of their lives — a fixture, a part of the family.”
“Chicagoland” is a gateway to the ends of the earth, Lorance said. Its 9.6 million residents speak a couple of hundred languages — 147 officially documented by the public schools — and many of those are the heart languages of overseas people groups that have never heard the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.
The work Lorance and his team are doing is helping forge a new path for North American missions, said Keith Draper, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association.
“When the International Mission Board tells us the first church among an unreached people of the world could begin in Chicago, we are overjoyed and looking for partners,” Draper said. “Cody is doing that kind of groundbreaking work.”
What began as a house church in 2005 was followed by an Ethiopian congregation in 2006 and an English as a Second Language ministry and Karen congregation in 2007. The Nepali congregation began meeting earlier in 2009 and have baptized 18 so far this year, including 12 reflecting rare instances of high-caste Hindus publicly declaring their faith in Jesus alone as Savior.
Lorance sees the Lord opening doors with refugees in the most unexpected ways.
He was working in partnership with Exodus World Service, a refugee ministry based in Bloomingdale, Ill., to help refugees from Burma’s Karen people group. The first family he met had been commissioned by their refugee-camp church to start a church in the United States when they arrived.
“We have prayed a lot and … started a home Bible study two years ago and have gone from house to house as others arrived,” Lorance recounted. “We had the first worship service here in December 2007 and a few months later helped start a church among Karen refugees in Rockford that had 300 in attendance for their first anniversary service.”
In a city the size of Chicago, with its millions of lost souls, the opportunities are boundless to see God replicate the kind of Kingdom advance Lorance and his team are experiencing, said Charles Campbell, who directs church planting initiatives for the Illinois Baptist State Association.
“We need more Codys to come to Chicago,” Campbell said. “My prayer is that as people see what he is doing, they will catch a vision for coming to Chicago and joining Illinois Baptists in the work there.” (BP)
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