Transformation City Church is a four-year old Wesleyan church plant, in Milwaukee, WI, and recipient of a Hope & Holiness Trust Grant. The church recently launched a new non-profit it named Inhabit.
Milwaukee is the fourth poorest city in the United States and Transformation City Church (TCC) senses a calling to invest in the city in creative and sacrificial ways in order to bring hope, healing, restoration, and salvation to individuals. Last year, this new ministry was born as the church began to pray about its next step to engage the city.
Inhabit exists to bear witness to the Kingdom of God by recruiting Christians to live intentionally in under-resourced neighborhoods. Its vision is to obtain foreclosed and abandoned homes in hurting neighborhoods, rehab those homes, and then recruit Christians to live in the homes in order to show love to their neighbors in a very practical way.
Inhabit’s vision is to acquire five homes in five years, impacting five different neighborhoods with the gospel of Christ. Through TCC’s first house purchased three years ago, they now have a neighborhood Bible club which draws 60 kids every week. TCC also hosts a community garden, links church members to kids through mentoring relationships, and offers tutoring and music and art classes in these homes for the kids living in neglected neighborhoods.
Last week Bank of America donated a foreclosed duplex to Inhabit and the rehab work has begun. Four people are ready to move in and begin ministry in a new neighborhood in October.
“These neighborhoods are hurting and this ministry is directed and changing lives and futures,” says TCC pastor, Rev. Jason Butler. “The kids living here do not have proper access to educational opportunities, these neighborhoods are surrounded with crime, and homes are abandoned and foreclosed. This ministry is dangerous and risky, but we believe Jesus is calling us to follow him into these dangerous places. There are hurting kids and families there and we should be there too. Jesus is there and we simply want to follow Him into the city.”
Learn more about this new ministry at www.inhabitmke.org.
The Hope and Holiness Trust is designed to create capacity for The Wesleyan Church to reach the lost through evangelism, church planting, and compassionate ministries. Currently, grants are focusing on urban ministries.