According to the Joshua Project, the definition of an unreached people group is “a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without outside assistance”. In numbers, the Joshua Project says any people group that is “less than or equal to 5% Professing Christians” are considered unreached. Many of these people groups live in secluded parts of the world in third world countries and hard to reach places.
But what if I told you there was an unreached people group right here in North America? In fact, you probably live only a few miles from one of these groups of people. These people groups are found in apartment communities. Did you know that 95% of people in North America who live in multi-dwelling properties (apartment communities, high rises, public housing, etc.) do not attend a local church? In addition, in the United States, while only 16% of the population (roughly 55 million people) lives in rented apartment communities, they make up for over 20% of the unchurched people in this country.
These statistics reveal that the church in North America is either not doing anything to reach people in apartment communities with the Gospel, or what they are doing isn’t working. So how do we effectively reach these communities?
First, we must understand that these communities are different from your typical neighborhood. Each of these communities has its own subculture. People in these communities don’t need to leave to get some of the other amenities someone living in a single-family home might. Many apartment communities have their own pools and playgrounds, not to mention their own gyms, dog parks, laundry facilities and car wash stations. If you were hoping to see apartment people at the local park or gym, you may be out of luck when it comes to reaching them with the Gospel. Additionally, these communities are designed to be closed off to people who do not live there. Many communities have gates or access codes to gain entry to the area or building. This makes door knocking and leaflets a difficult thing to do.
My wife and I partnered for 4 ½ years with a missional organization (referred to from here on as Missional Organization) that plants missionaries in apartment communities across the Unites States. We have had the privilege of being apartment missionaries in the same community in Fort Worth, TX, during two different phases of our life. Our experience in both has brought us to understand what reaching at least some of these communities for the Kingdom may look like. We have had the rare opportunity to not only learn from our mistakes, but also to come back and get a “second chance” in the same mission field. My hope is that our experience can help all of us learn what does and does not work and how a shift in mindset is necessary if the North American church is going to make any positive impact on the 95% statistic stated above.
When my wife and I first started as a missionary team at our complex I worked full time in ministry as a youth minister at a local church. We had been married for three years and all of these years had been spent in apartment communities. Both of us felt a strong sense of calling to reach out to our apartment neighbors so we could build relationships and share the Gospel with them (also known as inviting them to church). Of course, the logical place to start would be the complex we currently lived in. Conversations with management, however, proved that this was not going to be a place we could do this. We were so confident that apartment ministry was where God was calling us, we gave our notice that we would not be renewing our lease and began to look for the complex where God might want us to be.
We first began looking to move into a local apartment community where our church held events. Initially, the management and owner were onboard with the idea, but, as conversations continued, we began to find roadblocks to this approach at every turn. Time was running short on where we were going to move and we still had no idea where we were going to land. Fortunately, when visiting our alma mater, we came in contact with the organization we currently are partnered with. We went through their vetting process and within 1 week were approved and had a complex 1.5 miles from our current home that was ready for us to move into.
We had agreed to a 2 year term with our Missional Organization. We spent those 2 years doing community events as an Event Team to get to know our neighbors. This, of course, was a strategy we used to build relationships with people so we could share the Gospel with them. Our strategy for sharing the Gospel and making disciples, however, was mostly to connect people with local churches and let those in the church do the work once inside the church doors. As a full time minister, this apartment ministry was a “side gig” that split my focus between ministering at the church and ministering where I lived.
We hoped to use our church as a resource to help us reach the people in our community, but this was an effort in futility for two reasons: (1) the people at our church were often too busy or unwilling to help serve at events and (2) the people in our complex saw anyone that came to help as an outsider. This made it difficult for connections to be made and was, in some instances, seen as offensive that someone else needed to come “take care of” our community. We were shielded from this mindset because we were a part of the community and lived on property. However, as any missionary will tell, doing missions work without support or a team is difficult.
In our entire time in our first 2 years as a team we invited multiple people, couples and families to church. We were successful in having one couple attend church on Easter with us and one father and son come to a father and son campout. Outside of that, most of our invitations were met with awkward no’s or maybes.
What we found is that people knew us better than maybe we knew ourselves. We were the “bait and switch” couple that got to know you so we could get you to church. We didn’t do life with these people. They weren’t really our friends, and we honestly didn’t care much about being their friends unless they came to church with us. We didn’t have them over for dinners and we didn’t involve them in our lives. They were simply a mission to be achieved, and a body to invite to church. There wasn’t really any thought of a relationship beyond that.
After our 2 years were up, I took a position as a senior minster in Houston to help restart a dying church. Thinking our days of apartment ministry were behind us, we bought a house in North Houston. Unfortunately, one and a half years into our ministry in Houston, the church restart failed and we found ourselves back in the Dallas/Fort Worth area living with my in-laws and working jobs in the professional world.
We felt a tug back to the Fort Worth area and began praying about opportunities for us to church plant in the city. As we prayed, the idea of becoming apartment missionaries came up again. It would be a great way to get to meet people in our community while we lived missionally and might be the springboard we needed to plant a church.
We contacted the Missional Organization we had worked with before and found that they were more than happy to help place us in another apartment community. In fact, they stated that the old community we were in was oddly in need of another team as the one that took over from us had to leave prematurely. This was a rare occasion, and the opportunity to do ministry and missions work in a community we had worked in was too much of a coincidence to not be from God. We jumped at the opportunity and moved in within months.
This time, however, we decided that things were going to be different. This time, we decided that we were not going to just invite people to be a part of our church, but instead, would invite people in our apartment community to be a part of our lives. To do this, we decided that we would have to make several changes. We knew that we had many friends from our former church in the neighborhoods around us. These were normally the people we spent holidays and special occasions with. These were the people we did life with. If we were going to see a change in the relationships that we had in the apartment community, it would have to start there. In other words, we were going to have to treat our work in this apartment community like we had moved to the other side of the world for missions work. We were going to have to act like we didn’t have “our people” to run to for comfort when we didn’t have to be ministering.
We began having 4th of July cookouts at our community pool instead of at our friends’ homes. We had Christmas dinner on Christmas day at our home and filled our living room with people from our community. We starting having people from our apartments over for dinners to hear their stories and get to know them. We started living life in our community and involved as many people as we could into our lives. We actually started living missionally. Not only that, but members of the community began to step up and help us run the events. We no longer needed to rely on outsiders to do the work. We were able to get the work done internally with neighbors taking care of neighbors.
This made all the difference. We were able to build real and deep relationships with members of our community. Some of them go to church somewhere, others have left the church and still others have never been. Whatever the case, we began with relationships and giving people friendship before we ever started with the “church” side of things. We gave them a place and a people to belong to. But we knew people needed more than just a community of neighbors. Having relationships and friendships with people is not enough to transform a life. You need the Gospel in your life for that to happen. We needed to transform this “community of friends” into a community of the Gospel.
As we began praying more specifically about planting a church, we began to realize a few things. We already knew that people in our community had no real desire to leave the community to go to church. However, as a small group of us began meeting in our apartment living room, we also realized that people outside of this community had no real interest in coming into our community to do church either. And why would they? This was not their community. They were not allowed to use this pool or this dog park. People look strangely at you when you use the playground and don’t live in the apartments. These things were for residents only. The people from outside the community felt like outsiders because they were. Planting a church with people from this community was going to have to look much different than we thought.
And so we made another shift. Instead of planting a neighborhood church with people from our apartments, we decided to plant a community church specific to our apartment complex. During our first attempt at an apartment church plant, we had the opportunity to disciple and share the Gospel with over twenty-five different people in our community. We began having regular Bible studies in our home and were able to start a small Gospel community.
We were missing something though. My wife and I were the sole members of the church plant “core team.” All of the teaching, music, and organization were on us. Additionally, we were also the apartment Event Team! There were so many things to juggle, we found it difficult to keep up a consistent pace. Eventually, our momentum slowed and we found we needed help. But help when you’re already in the middle of a mission field is hard to find. When the regular members of our small house church all told us they were moving away for work, we knew it was time to re-assess where we were and how this needed to be done.
We moved out of the apartment community and began the process of assessing and learning from our successes and failures in our church plant attempt. In our time away from the mission field, we have prayed and searched God’s heart for wisdom and a plan to give apartment church planting a real try. Here are a few of the things we learned:
We realized that for this to work, we were going to have to change the way we viewed what it meant to be a minister or church planter. Apartment complexes are like miniature neighborhoods. Some can have a few hundred residents, others have thousands. Whatever the case, these complexes are transient in nature. People live there for 2-3 years and then move. With smaller communities to minister to and people moving in and out all the time, being a paid minister or church planter is out of the question.
Just as these church plants will be different, so too will church leadership. Instead of a paid staff leading the church, church leadership will utilize the 5-fold ministry model found in Ephesians 4:11-13. Volunteers that have been gifted by the Lord with one of the 5 leadership gifts will, as elders, lead and be responsible for discipling the church. These leaders will be found in two areas: the core teams that move into the community to plant churches and the members of the community that are discipled and identified as having been gifted with leadership gifts.
We learned we will need to lean into the fact that people live in apartment communities for a shorter amount of time. Instead of seeing this as a barrier, we seek to use the transitory nature of apartment living to the advantage of the advancement of the Gospel. If we have been successful in making disciples who make disciples, the Gospel and mission will go with these people as they leave one community and move into another. Thus, new doors for additional churches to be planted will be opened. Essentially, our apartment Gospel communities become not only individual churches, but missional training grounds for new ministers of the Gospel to go out to plant more churches.
Church plants will partner with the same Missional Organization we partnered with. Part of choosing a community to plant in should be done in partnership with the Missional Organization using their understanding of existing communities and apartment management companies to pick a ripe mission field. Event Teams actively live as persons of peace within these communities and are required to create connection and belonging amongst their neighbors. A church planted alongside this mission will be ripe for opportunity to build upon these relationships to both share the Gospel and make disciples.
In order to make these plants successful, core teams are needed. We will create and train a church plant team comprising at least 3 couples that will live onsite, one of which will be the Event Team. The other teammates are not part of the Missional Organization, but instead, supporters of the mission. In keeping the plant separate from the Missional Organization it allows the plant teams to do what they need to independently of housing laws without compromising the relationship the apartment management group has with the Missional Organization.
Successful discipleship within these communities will allow for similar (yet varied) church plants to take place in other apartment communities. This allows for churches to be planted beyond even communities with a Missional Organization already on them. New and existing believers in these churches will be taught to share the Gospel with the lost and make disciples as well, understanding their responsibility as part of the “priesthood of all believers” and will take the Gospel and their ability to make disciples with them wherever they may go. If and when multiple communities arise, we will act as a network of apartment churches that can support one another and use their resources to plant additional churches in apartment communities.
Essentially, our hope is to equip the people we reach to become church planters and leaders themselves so that the Gospel can be spread into more and more apartment communities across North America. It’s a mission field that is ripe for the harvest. All it needs is workers in the field.
STATS and DATA
*95% unreached in apartments stat- -http://www.bpnews.net/33259/most-of-north-america-lives-in-multihousing-95-of-them-lost-without-christ
*Real Page, Inc reports there are approximately 25 million apartment units in the United States with an average occupancy of 2.2 persons for a total of 55 million.
*Church attendance data- https://www.barna.com/research/church-attendance-trends-around-country/

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