Articles

Regional Council of Church’s Herchel Sheets Intern helps launch Impact UMC

Nontraditional new-church initiative draws hundreds to multimedia worship and community-oriented ministry in Atlanta’s West End

By John Baker Brown Jr.
Faith And The City e.Newsletter
September 28, 2007

On the stage of a public middle school in Atlanta’s West End, three young women wearing terry cloth robes and reading magazines are seated in chairs around a coffee table. An off-stage narrator explains to the audience that one of the three is treating her friends to a day at the spa in order to share some good news with them. Subsequently, she announces that she has just become engaged to be married. The other two react with predictable and apparent delight – complete with animated gestures, congratulations and, of course, the obligatory group hug.

However, as the moment passes, one friend turns to the audience and roles her eyes in highly dramatic style, as an off-stage voice reveals her thoughts: “He’s only marrying her because she’s a successful attorney with a good income.” The other friend offers a similar gesture to the audience. Her thoughts make it clear that she wants nothing to do with the bride-to-be’s family or marriage ceremony and will plan to be out of town on whatever date the wedding is scheduled.

A school play? A comedy act by a community theater company? Neither. This short skit was one element in a nontraditional Sunday morning worship service for a new multiracial congregation in what is regarded by many as a quintessentially traditional mainline Christian denomination.
This brief performance and an earlier one underscored the central message of the worship service – that people often behave hatefully. For example, some people – like the two characters in the skit – simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. As the players exit the stage, the narrator asks, “Is there a hater in your midst?”

Throughout the one-hour worship period – which included several music selections, scripture readings, and a relatively traditional sermon – a large rear-screen projection system provided visual reinforcement. In addition to displaying scripture read before and during the sermon, along with lyrics when the congregation sang, the video backdrop included images of traffic signs reading “Do Not Hate” and “Caution: Haters X-ing.” A standard “Stop” sign was spray-painted graffiti-style to read “Stop Hating.”

“We call it a worship ‘experience,’ not a worship ‘service’,” explained Edwin Turnipseed, 33, support pastor for Impact United Methodist Church and a Herchel H. Sheets Ecumenical Intern through the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta (RCCA). “We give people an opportunity to experience God, to get to know God in a unique way from 10 to 11 o’clock on Sunday mornings – and if they want more, we’re available.”

Impact UMC’s mission, Turnipseed noted, is not limited to individual worshippers on Sunday mornings. “Our goal is to be relevant to the needs of the people of the West End,” he explained, citing a number of ways the church engages the community. For one, although the congregation’s worship experiences are held on Sundays in the auditorium of the West End’s Brown Middle School, congregation members are present in the school every day of the week, mentoring students, conducting discussion sessions with them, and simply walking the halls between classes. Impact UMC has also contributed more than $10,000 to the school in addition to fees for use of the auditorium on Sunday mornings.

“We don’t want to be just tenants [in the school building] on Sunday mornings,” said Turnipseed. “Our ministry in the West End is a ministry of the love and grace of Jesus Christ.”

In keeping with such a ministry, congregation members have participated in community cleanup and beautification days, and the church has collaborated with a local newspaper, a day care facility, and other neighborhood businesses.

Such partnership building is one of Turnipseed’s key responsibilities as a Herchel H. Sheets Ecumenical Intern. “Through this internship project, RCCA collaborates with Impact to build community in the West End, which includes my meeting with local pastors across denominations and with business leaders to get input on the community’s needs and strengths,” he explained.

Another aspect of Impact UMC’s commitment to the community is expressed in the church’s plans for a future that does not include building a new facility. “We don’t want a new building; we will use an existing facility in the community,” Turnipseed said, emphasizing that doing so is a more effective means of investing in the community and furthering its economic development.

Led by founding Pastor Olu Brown, 30, Impact UMC was established in January 2007. Since then, the church’s Sunday attendance has averaged more than 500, with an Easter Sunday turnout of nearly 1,000. Although mega churches with membership rolls well into the thousands are no longer unusual, the average congregation still numbers under 200, making Impact’s growth impressive if not dramatic for such a young house of worship.

In 2003, as a new member of Cascade United Methodist Church in Southwest Atlanta, Turnipseed met Brown. The two men bonded almost immediately. Both are young and married with children and, even more important, they share a strong commitment to putting their faith to work in the community.

Prior to the start of Impact, Brown served as an associate pastor at Cascade under long-time Senior Pastor Walter L. Kimbrough, now retired. The close institutional relationship notwithstanding, the new church has operated since its inception as an independent entity in the UMC’s North Georgia Conference.

“Our orientation is external – a church without walls – with a commitment to community and economic development,” Turnipseed explained, adding that the church continually “reinvents” itself to avoid getting locked into set ways of doing things. “God speaks to us in new and innovative ways every day, and we try to apply that to our ministry. The fact that a ministry concept has not been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

On the Sunday of Super Bowl, Impact UMC borrowed symbols from the football extravaganza to highlight the theme for the weekly worship experience and titled it “Game Time.” The program opened with a “pre-game show” – one section of the stage resembled the TV set of a sports center program. Another section included a simulated tailgate party, complete with a sport utility vehicle, tent, chairs, balloons, Super Bowl decals, NFL theme song, and high school football players in game jerseys. The message? Christians must prepare for victory by experiencing challenge and struggle. As usual, the worship experience provided reiterations of the message through scripture, sermon, song, and skit.

If developing such creative concepts for worship, outreach, and otherwise continually “reinventing” a church sounds like a big, ongoing challenge, Turnipseed would agree. He and Brown meet that challenge by tapping the considerable creativity of a talented ministry staff and congregation.

“The message is always developed by a team that includes Olu, myself, our wives, our music director, student intern, volunteer ministers, and others,” explained Turnipseed. “We are strong on delegation, which empowers people to take ownership of their Christian faith.”

For inspiration, Turnipseed said, the team often turns to one passage of scripture in particular, Ephesians 3:20: “Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope." (NLT)

After graduating from Mount Zion High School in Jonesboro in 1992, Turnipseed attended the University of Georgia in Athens (UGA) where he played football with the Bulldogs his freshman year and went on to earn a degree in secondary education in 1997, with math as a teaching field. During the next six years, he taught at his high school alma mater and later at Fayetteville High. Between those assignments, he returned to UGA for a year as an academic counselor.

“God had been speaking to me for several years,” said Turnipseed, describing his call to the ministry. “It probably began at UGA when I was an academic counselor.” The call led to graduate seminary study at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), a member institution of the Atlanta University Center, where he is currently preparing for ordination as an elder in the United Methodist Church.

One of Turnipseed’s ITC classmates is Rev. Dawn Price, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church denomination and the outreach coordinator for the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta. In 2006, Price put Turnipseed in touch with Roy Craft, RCCA’s then executive director, and Ethel Ware Carter, associate director.

“When we were introduced to Edwin, the internship fit was obvious – a young Methodist seminary student, enthusiastic, committed, and already a leader in the community,” Carter said. “Edwin’s interest in how a mainline denomination can respond with relevance to a specific community meshed with RCCA’s interest in the emergent church movement and how faith is practiced today in life and liturgy. He also had a sense of how the church both reflects and builds its community. Edwin’s work at Impact has functioned as test and affirmation of the role of the church in our world today.”

According to Carter, RCCA serves the metro area by helping Christian clergy, laity, and community leaders to nurture their collective mission in an ever-changing world and region. Believing in the power of unity, the Council seeks to reinforce the worship and work of individual congregations and magnify the leadership of the metro region’s Christian community.

RCCA’s Ecumenical Internship Program is designed to give seminary students hands-on experience as they explore ministry vocations in congregations, community service, or ecumenical social justice work. Carter described Dr. Herchel H. Sheets, for whom the intern scholarship was named, as a beloved teacher, preacher, author, and church historian who has served the UMC’s North Georgia Conference for over 50 years. The scholarship in his name elicited a range of contributions from hundreds of people whose lives he had touched in five decades of servant leadership to church and community.

Given Turnipseed’s vital role at Impact UMC, his service to Atlanta’s West End and the larger metro community, and his promise as a leader in the church, he is an “obvious fit,” as Carter suggested. Indeed, what better recipient for a scholarship that honors Sheets and recognizes the remarkable legacy that he bequeaths to subsequent generations of committed Christians who share with him the path of discipleship with Jesus and servant leadership in the community.

For more information, contact:

RCCA at 404.523.5554, ext 231, or visit www.rccatl.org
Impact UMC at 404.758.7310 or www.impactdcd.org

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