InnerCHANGE is a Christian order composed of communities of missionaries living and ministering incarnationally among the poor. We seek to follow the Lord God’s injunction “to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God” (MICAH 6:8).
InnerCHANGE is a ministry of Novo and subscribes to Novo’s overall vision and sense of purpose. As Novo’s apostolic order among the poor, InnerCHANGE operates with singularity of focus unique to ministering among the poor. This introduces a complimentary set of values as well as a common practice of community critical to life and service in a poor neighborhood.
InnerCHANGE aims to catalyze movements of God’s kingdom among the poor, model holistic ministry for the mainstream Church, and recall the broader body of Christ to God’s tender heart for the marginalized. Our staff seek to exemplify a style of community life befitting an order, placing the well-being of people and the quality of their relationships before programs and purposefully providing for the lifelong formation of those called to share themselves with the needy.
The early history of InnerCHANGE can be traced to God’s work in the background of each of our staff. As a missional community, InnerCHANGE was birthed in idea form in South Central, Los Angeles in 1983 when John Hayes waved good-bye to a van-load of volunteers from a mainstream suburban church. John was living and ministering in South Central at the time, designing programs and points of contact to match volunteers with families in need. As John watched the van pull away, he experienced a moment of frustrating clarity and conviction. He saw that good-hearted Christians doing “commuter” ministry were conveying little impact, that driving down and driving into people’s lives were two very different propositions.
In the summer of 1984, John relocated to Orange County to begin a ministry that based its people in the inner city to minister from the inside-out, not just flirt with the edges. InnerCHANGE began by sharing Good News in word and works through personal relationships and by drawing a sharp distinction between serving and providing services. In July 1985, InnerCHANGE became a part of CRM in order to gain the company of like-minded brothers and sisters and enjoy a larger, more fleshed-out learning environment.
From its beginnings in Santa Ana, California, InnerCHANGE has grown to many staff serving in a number of cities nationally and internationally: Los Angeles, Modesto, Minneapolis, New York, Cambodia, Scotland, England, East Africa, South Africa, Columbia, Honduras, and Guatemala.
InnerCHANGE ministry flows within our three defining currents: missionary, prophetic, and contemplative. These three currents correspond to the instructions of Micah 6:8. The pursuits of justice, mercy, and humility do not encompass all that the prophetic, missionary, and contemplative circles contain. But they do solidly point the way towards the desires of God named in Micah 6:8
InnerCHANGE is a Missionary Community Among the Poor
As missionaries, we proclaim the Kingdom of God among the poor, one neighborhood at a time, through the raising up of leaders for church planting, church renewal, and community transformation.
Our Challenge
The challenge before the Church is that 60% of the world is poor by U.S. standards, 20-30% desperately so. Yet only a tiny fraction of missionaries serve incarnationally among the poor. These figures constitute a “math problem” that is difficult to justify. In an age that is quick to speak of the need to minister to unreached people groups, the poor remain, ironically, the single most under-reached people bloc in the world. Said another way, poverty is keeping more people out of the Kingdom than any peculiarity of geography, language, culture, or ethnicity.
We believe Christ grieves over this disparity and is busy addressing it. InnerCHANGE is simply one effort to follow our missionary God as He compassionately builds His Kingdom among the poor.
Our Privilege
Certainly ours is a missionary calling of compelling need. A side-street journey on foot through the average mega-city confirms the gravity of that need, and brings it up close and personal. But ministering among the poor is also a life-sustaining privilege. The Bible states repeatedly that the person who works among the poor is blessed (Proverbs 19:17, 22:9, 14:21) and enjoys an enduring credibility in Christian witness (Isaiah 58:6-12).
So despite the enormity of the task, the InnerCHANGE community does not pursue this missional lifestyle with a long face. Rather, we rejoice in our opportunity to be messengers of the King as He invites the poor to His banquet table (Luke 12:12-24).
We believe Christ when He says, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom.” That being said, we do not romanticize the poor or sentimentalize poverty. Neither do we join with those who imply that poverty might somehow mysteriously excuse people for not knowing Christ. Poverty has spiritual merits, but in and of itself it cannot redeem. In InnerCHANGE, we do not make the poor our first concern because they are best. We make the poor first because the world makes them last.
This is the urgency which compels us as missionaries in InnerCHANGE—the poor and downtrodden consistently remain the people least touched by the Good News of Christ.
InnerCHANGE is a Prophetic Community in the Church
Prophets in Lifestyle
The lack of proportion in missionary deployment that awakens our mercy and compels us as missionaries provokes our sense of justice as well and compels us to go forth as prophets. In the same way that we do not sentimentalize poverty, we do not gloss over our Church’s neglect of the poor either. Neither do we throw pietistic paint over the materialism we see encroaching upon us as God’s people.
Our prophetic expression is sometimes verbal, but more often it’s one of lifestyle. In choosing to live simple lifestyles appropriate to our poor neighbors and pursue the values of the Kingdom of God, we find ourselves modeling “downward mobility” when our culture is upwardly mobile.
While our culture aspires to an exaggerated independence, we find ourselves seeking interdependence in community with our neighbors and fellow staff. Finally, we find ourselves seeking out the powerless, ‘the moved and shaken,’ when our culture obsesses with the movers and shakers.
God’s Special Identification with the Poor
InnerCHANGE functions prophetically to call attention to specific aspects of God’s character, that although He is “the high and exalted One,” dwelling in a “high and holy place” (Isaiah 57:13), He also “humbles Himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in earth. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap” (Psalm 113:5-6).
We believe God uses InnerCHANGE to remind His Church that God specially identifies with the poor, that the one “who is gracious to the poor man lends to the Lord” (Proverbs 19:17).
Justice and Mercy Restored to Priority
InnerCHANGE also exercises its prophetic gifting in calling for the agenda of the church to take priority over
the structure of the church. We live in a “church growth age,” an age when the Church has been encouraged to preoccupy itself with structural concerns—configurations of small groups, dimensions and aesthetics of rooms, and mechanics of worship services.
“I hate, I reject your festivals.
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies…
Take away from me the noise of your songs…
But let justice roll down like the waters…”
– Amos 5:21-24
“… give yourself to the hungry,
And satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
Then your light will rise in the darkness…
And the Lord will continually guide you…”
– Isaiah 58:10-11
We remind ourselves that acting in the role of prophet does not entitle us to be critics; that prophetic expression must be distinguished from passing judgment. Neither is the prophetic exercise overwhelmingly negative. It is our privilege to recall the Church to the promises that attend working with the poor, as well as the task.
The ‘Other Miracle’
One of the most striking messages we feel compelled to declare is that ministering among the poor is the ‘other miracle,’ the overlooked sign of the Kingdom. In Luke 7:22, Christ cites various signs and wonders to verify that He is the expected Messiah, the Son of God:
“Go and report to John what you have seen and heard, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
This passage suggests that working among the poor is by nature so “upside-down”, so contrary to the world’s impulse, that it has the ability to impact and convict the same way dramatic healings do. Isaiah 58 and other passages offer a similar message, that if we minister to the needy, our “light will break out like the dawn,” and we will be called “the restorer of the streets.”
Compassionate concern for the poor is also a favorite way our Lord identifies Himself. Again, this is evident in Luke 7:22 when Christ in effect recounts His “resume.” As members of Christ’ body, ministry among the poor should also be part of our authenticating process.
If ministry among the poor is both authenticating and soaked with the supernatural, it should occupy a more central or strategic place in our efforts to embody the gospel in a postmodern culture. Historically, much has been made of the role of prayer in revival—deservedly so. On the other hand, compassionate ministry among the poor is not often cited as a factor for Kingdom expansion despite evidence that this has been the case.
InnerCHANGE is a Contemplative Community in the World
Our Need for Intimacy
Neither the missionary task nor the prophetic message should be allowed to replace the Lord God Himself,
and walking humbly with Him. We remind ourselves that we can do nothing apart from intimate relationship with God. Without that intimacy, we are driven to seek identity in task, and become harassed missionaries and cheerless, cynical prophets.
With so many unreached poor and so few missionaries who will live among them, it is easy to feel like five little loaves and two fish in the face of five thousand. The contemplative current encourages us that He will multiply our lives as He sees fit.
We are fortunate in that the work itself naturally fosters intimacy with God. Jeremiah 22:16 suggests that we know God more fully as we advocate for the poor.
Justice and Mercy Restored to Priority
his isn’t to say that knowing God and knowing about God are the same. To be contemplative is not to be confused with knowing a lot of good theology. In fact, what we know about God can often interfere with knowing God because it can lull us into a reflexive spirituality in which we know God into a rut and form rigid expectations of how He will behave. Contemplative spirituality, in contrast, is a responsive spirituality in which we wait on God moment by moment.
Contemplative spirituality helps us stay tuned to the Spirit and avoid such relational miscommunications as celebrating the victorious Christ when He is at that moment grieving for the people of the city (Matthew 23:37).
Perspective from Pain
Many of us have been pressed to contemplation by pain. Like Job, we have found that pain, our own or our neighbors’, cries out to be reckoned with. Job cried out:
“Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book…
engraved in the rock forever.”
-Job 19:23-24
Most InnerCHANGE staff have found journaling in God’s presence an outlet for pain that cannot be contained yet cannot be heard.
Disappointment, too, has driven us to seek God’s presence in the form of contemplative, and sometimes active prayer. Unmet expectations of living and ministering among the poor have pushed us out of our theological paper houses. Left unsatisfied by the shallow comfort of answers, we have developed a hunger for the comfort of God’s constant company.
Further, God has invited us into the contemplative life by giving us special glimpses of the Kingdom from the perspective of the poor. All of us in InnerCHANGE, at one time or another, have walked streets and been startled by a powerful impulse to “remove shoes” in the deepest parts of our hearts because God has transformed the poverty landscape to holy ground.
Finally, like the apostle Paul, we have found that living simply has pressed us further in intimacy with God. Paul wrote:
“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ…”
– Philippians 3:7-8
