Last year, Chinese Christian Union Church, a trilingual church located in Chicago’s Chinatown, decided to take action after the murder of George Floyd. They cleaned up the streets after protests destroyed property in the area. They participated in a march called “Asian Americans for Black Lives and Dignity”. While the pandemic ravaged the city, they found ways to serve the community through food drives and other local initiatives. But now, the church wants to turn its efforts into a more permanent, community-driven, and community-loving ministry.
For this purpose, CCUC launched its Chinatown Peace Project in which the church hopes to support the local community through prevention, justice, and mercy, and addressing root causes. While this will utilize time, resources, and volunteers, the church believes that by serving its neighbors, the community can experience His love.
The SOLA Network conducted this interview via email with Chris Javier, who is helping to lead the program. We encourage you to also view CCUC’s video explaining their ministry, which is at the bottom of this page.
SOLA Network: What is the ethnic makeup for your church?
Our church is trilingual (Cantonese, English, and Mandarin). Sometimes, multiple language ministries are viewed as a hindrance to effective ministry, but in serving the community, it is a strength. Our English-speaking congregation sometimes has more vision and is able to draw from more resources. But we are totally lost in trying to communicate with recent immigrants, who make up the majority of the residents in Chinatown and are the people who are trying to bless.
SOLA: In what ways has God worked through the physical location of Chinese Christian Union Church?
CCUC is a 106-year-old church that is located in the heart of Chicago’s Chinatown. Our proximity provides us an intimate look at the needs of our neighborhood. We are able to go door-to-door to meet our neighbors and hear their concerns. In recent years we have had a front-row seat to a lot of pain in our community. Safety concerns, economic drought, even basic food needs have all weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of our neighbors.
As Christians, we often pray that our hearts would break for the things that break God’s heart. God has used our location to break our hearts for the things that are breaking our neighbors’ hearts. This has been a great starting point for the leaders at CCUC: shared brokenness with our community.
SOLA: What is the CCUC Chinatown Peace Project, and how did this come about?
The Chinatown Peace Project came about from just that: broken hearts. Our hearts were broken by reported incidents of hate and violence against the AAPI community that have been increasing around the country, and Chicago’s Chinatown has its own share of scars. Three murders in the past two years sent shockwaves through our community. Our hearts broke with our people nationwide and our own right here in our neighborhood, and this was a clear call for the church to take action.
We dedicated ourselves to learning. So many groups in Chinatown have already been doing such great work on behalf of the community so we started by learning from them. We began regularly attending meetings led by community organizations, local police, and neighborhood watch groups. We then went outside of our community to gain different perspectives and strategies. Church leaders from surrounding neighborhoods gave us great insight into their own ministries and helped us by checking our blindspots, filling in gaps in our plan, and encouraging us on our own unique ideas.
As we learned the lay of the land, the needs began to show themselves and as we learned more, the solutions became clearer. We built as we learned, and we’re keeping that rhythm. Learning and building, learning and building.
Through this learning process, we arrived at the current plan for the Chinatown Peace Project, which is a whole church effort. Our teams are comprised of members from every level of leadership as well as every congregation of our church. It is truly a collaborative effort.
The long-term goal of the project is to promote peace in Chinatown and peace between Chinatown and surrounding neighborhoods. Every one of our strategies drives us toward those long-term goals. The project consists of three prongs, each with its own set of strategies. The three prongs are prevention, justice and mercy, and addressing root causes.
To work towards preventing violence in our community we are doing door-to-door safety walks. We walk the streets of our neighborhood with police officers, educating residents about the rise in violence as well as scams that have been used against our elderly. We also equip them with best safety practices and take time to hear out their needs and concerns.
We are working to make home surveillance accessible to our neighborhood. In addition to securing discounts from Amazon Ring, our church is raising funds to support those with financial needs and we have an installation/education team ready to help our neighbors install the equipment and learn how to use it. We are working with the local government to advocate for strategic lighting in higher-crime areas. Finally, we are working with senior care facilities to plan safe walks and trips with the elderly once COVID restrictions allow for it.
For justice and mercy, we are forming a court advocacy group to support victims of crime when it comes to trials. Language barriers, fear, and intimidation can prevent victims from appearing in court, which can lead to offenders being released. We will support our victims and our neighborhood by advocating for just ruling and sentencing.
We will also show mercy to our victims by meeting with them, assessing their needs, and connecting them to available governmental victim assistance programs. Our church can then fill in the gaps in care, such as providing access and financial assistance to language-equipped, culturally sensitive mental health therapists.
Finally, as Christ-followers, we are called to love those who have committed offenses against our community. We will demonstrate God’s love and mercy by offering connections to mentors, education, and career resources and supporting jail and prison chaplains with financial, material, volunteer, and prayer support.
To address root causes, we will support schools that are facing extreme challenges. During our research, we learned that private prisons use elementary school reading levels to plan where to build a prison. Researchers have found that if 3rd and 5th-grade reading levels are within a very low threshold, there is a high correlation with future high school dropout rates. Then those dropout rates have a high correlation with increased criminal activity. This means today’s 3rd and 5th graders are seen as future criminals who will need a facility for their incarceration.
As an educator and as a father, and maybe even just as a human being, this breaks my heart into a million pieces. Our response to this heartbreak is that we will work to support those who are breaking this cycle. We will flood struggling schools with love through financial, material, volunteer, and prayer support.
SOLA: How has your church community, including the leadership, responded to this effort?
My confidence is not in myself, or even the calling of the ministry, but the One who calls. I also draw a great deal of confidence from my church. We are so blessed; our people are amazing. We needed people who are media-savvy — a team steps up to do website, social media graphic design, photography, videography, everything. We needed translators — our multi-congregation church has it covered. Collectively, we have all the skills, connections, money, talents, and more to make a plan like this really take off. It’s been easy to build knowing just how blessed our church is. And at the same time, it is that amount of blessing that also drives our desire to build. What do we have that we haven’t been given? And we have been given to give.
Our leadership is what makes this tick. It’s very important that our community care team is comprised of every congregation of our church. Bringing in multiple cultural lenses to analyze the problem and the plan has covered our blindspots and led to a completely unified and unifying approach to addressing the pain in Chinatown.
SOLA: How can people in the Chicagoland area get involved? How about people in other places?
Right now, connecting us to personal needs is our highest priority. Currently, we are working on equipping our neighbors with affordable home surveillance. We have been going door-to-door to educate our neighbors about safety practices and also gauge their interest and needs in-home surveillance: Do they need financial assistance? Can we help them install it? Do they want us to teach them how to use it? If there are individuals in the Chicagoland area who have these needs, please connect with us so we can do our best to help.
For people in other places, prayer and donations are always welcome to help support and fund these initiatives.
SOLA: What encouragement might you have for anyone in bilingual Asian churches hoping to be involved in similar ministries?
My encouragement for those in bilingual Asian churches hoping to be involved in similar ministries would be to start at home and start small. It would be an easy thing to add us as a prayer meeting item or to write us a check. But what if you use that time to meet and pray for your own neighbors? And what if, instead of donating to us, you used that money to buy home surveillance for an elderly neighbor, taught them how to use it, shared a meal with them, and invited them to church? It will take more time, definitely, but it will be such a blessing for you.
If you’re a church leader reading this, my encouragement to you would be to start now and start big. Leaders, bring the zeal! (Romans 12:8) Plan wisely and build carefully. But dream big for your church! Our efforts started with big plans that just grew bigger as God continued to open door after door. My prayer is that your church would be a blessing to your own neighborhoods, but I am confident that you will find yourselves the most blessed.
Indeed, in this process, I am confident that nobody has been blessed more than me. In reflection, I often say to myself, “If only more people in my church could see and experience what I have!” Through this work, I get the very best view of my God at work in my community.
God has placed us in our neighborhoods so that they can experience His love through us. And this is the power of the local church. Nobody knows your community better than God, and nobody loves it more. As His church then, let us seek to know our communities and love them well.
I think on Acts 5 (referencing Acts 5:12-16). The church was so well-known for the wonders and signs they were doing among the people. They were blessing their neighbors and proclaiming the gospel and as a result, crowds gathered, bringing their sick for healing. We are called to this, to bless our communities so well that they see the church for what it truly is: a people of blessing, a people of healing, a people of peace.
Grace and peace to you from Chinese Christian Union Church.