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Bridge of Peace Community Church, Camden, New Jersey

To advance the development of lay worship leadership in a multicultural setting by training lay leaders, creating a model for worship leadership training that can be applied in other multicultural settings and offering congregational workshops on worship.

• Interview with Rev. Wolfgang Herz-Lane: Audio / Transcript

You've just marked thirty years of ministry in Camden. Tell us a little bit about the background of your ministry and the founding of Bridge of Peace.

Bridge of Peace itself is only five years old, but the thirty years is my being in Camden.   I came in 1975 from Germany, where I was born and raised.   I was originally a volunteer who was sent to Camden to work for eighteen months as a youth worker with one of the Lutheran churches here in the city.   It's an organization called “Action Reconciliation Services for Peace” that works a little bit like the Peace Corps. Young Germans are sent into foreign countries for a year, year and a half to do different types of social services, and so that's how I got to Camden.  

The plan was for me to be here for eighteen months and then to kind of go back home and pick up my life where I had left off, and of course that didn't happen because I fell in love with Camden and the kind of work that I was doing here and the church that I found here.   So here, I still am here, thirty years later.   I've worked during that time—for a time, I was running a social services agency called the Good Samaritan Center because I am a social worker by training and also was the administrative director of the Camden Lutheran Parish, which is a coalition of four or five different Lutheran congregations here in the city of Camden.   Then I worked for a time as a staff person of our national denomination, the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, working as the mission director for New Jersey on the bishop's staff.   And then five years ago after having gone to seminary kind of part time on the side, got ordained and became a pastor, and started Bridge of Peace Church.

Your wife is also a minister in the area.   What's it like to be a married couple both invested in the ministry?

It's not always easy.   I mean, for one thing, what you kind of give up is the idea that you actually go to church together, because that never happens.   She has a congregation in North Camden, which is on the other side of town, and that's actually the congregation where I was the youth worker all those years ago and where I pretty much was a member for most of these years.   She came there in 1981 first as an associate pastor and later as the pastor and she has been there now for twenty-four years herself.  

What led you to found Bridge of Peace five years ago?

Well, as I mentioned, I was working as the mission director of our ELCA here in New Jersey and part of my job was to kind of scout out places where we might want to start new congregations.   Now here in Camden we had a congregation in this place that was called Christ Lutheran Church.   They had been around for ninety-five years.   They had dwindled away as the neighborhood changed and had closed in 1996, and the church building came to our New Jersey Synod, so we had this empty church building sitting there and the question was, do we sell the property, do we try to start something new here, what should we do?   It was part of my job to help the larger church make those kinds of decisions.  

The background of this is that the building that was left by this closed congregation sits next to a little bridge, that's why it's called Bridge of Peace.   And the little bridge connects two neighborhoods in the city of Camden that historically have been very, very different.   Fairview, one of those two neighborhoods, for a very long time was all white and quite exclusive; it was always called “white Fairview .”   In fact, in 1990, not all that long ago in the census, that neighborhood was 92% white.   In the city, the rest of Camden for decades now has been a majority of African-American and Latino population.   And on the other side of this little bridge is the community of Morgan Village, which is one of the historic African-American neighborhoods in Camden that in 1990 was 0.9% white.   So you have these two neighborhoods, one is 92% white and the other one is 0.9% white, and the little bridge in between, and the church sitting right there.  

I think part of the reason that our church died that was here before was they understood themselves very much as part of “white Fairview.”   It didn't occur to them to reach across that bridge and invite other folks to come into the congregation.   So as the neighborhoods began to change and people started moving out and the demographics shifted, the church died.   People just basically moved away.   So when Bridge of Peace began, it was really with the mission to really begin a multicultural church that would intentionally reach out into both of those neighborhoods, that really would be a bridge at the bridge to attract folks from both sides of that historic divide and bring people together in a multicultural congregation, where everybody would be welcome whether they are black or white, Anglo, Latino, gay, straight, young, old, I don't care, rich, poor, and just build a congregation that would reflects whoever happens to be in the neighborhood.  

Now that started five years ago.   In that five years, we've built still a small congregation.   We have about 160 members and worship about seventy-five to eighty on a Sunday, but our membership is pretty much in thirds: a third white, a third African-American, and a third Latino, which reflects the neighborhood around us now.   Those two neighborhoods are changing themselves.   The neighborhood that was 92% in 1990 by 2000, ten years later was 32% white but had grown by 500 people.   So there has been tremendous change demographically in the neighborhood too, and it's a much more multicultural neighborhood now.   I think we've been really blessed here at Bridge of Peace that our church membership reflects that diversity and that multicultural mix that is in our neighborhood now.

That proportion is striking, to have one-third white, African-American, and Latino, especially since, as we often hear, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.   Can you speak to some of what you've learned about achieving multicultural membership and multicultural worship?

I think the most important thing is that you need to be intentional about it.   I mean, you have to say, ‘We want to be a multicultural congregation.'   You kind of have to worry about how you structure your outreach in order to reach the different groups of people and when one group becomes a little stronger than the other, then you have to make some efforts reaching maybe a little harder for the group that is under that percentage—and always modeling that in your leadership, making sure that as you train deacons and as you train people for leadership and as you appoint people on committees that it's always a mixed group, that you always model that everybody needs to be in the leadership, not just any one group.  

So that's the first thing, the intentionality about it.   I think the second thing is probably just as important, and that is that your worship really has to reflect where the different people are coming from.   So our worship is very—probably the word is eclectic.   It has elements of black worship.   Musically, we do a lot of spirituals and music from the African-American tradition.   We do some Latino stuff, some coritos and other Latino music.   Not so much in the Spanish language because the Latino folks we have are third- and fourth-generation immigrants who actually speak much better English than they speak Spanish.   But it's kind of nice to sing a Spanish song here and there, and certainly in terms of style, musically, to reflect that culture and that heritage.   We do a lot of jazz.   We do quite a bit of contemporary Christian stuff.   So it's a real mix, so that when you come to church on Sunday morning, you kind of find a little bit of your culture represented in there.

And it was this intentional reaching out, particularly to diverse leadership and the congregation that led to this proposal and this grant project for the Worship Renewal Grants Program.   Can you tell us about how you identified that need and put together your proposal for this grant?

We had had a grant before that really focused on building multicultural worship and doing some of the outreach pieces.   So, for example, in the first grant, we had some money to do what we called multicultural worship events, which were a little larger than your general Sunday morning worship like an outdoor festival of some kind that really modeled some of the elements and stuff like that.   That was really quite successful in attracting some new people.  

The second grant came about through that first project; we kind of learned that we really needed to strengthen the leadership, particularly for worship if we wanted that effort to have some kind of sustaining power.   It's one thing to reach out and have a special event and everybody has a great time, but then if you don't follow up on it, if the next Sunday you go back to your same-old, same-old, then it doesn't sustain itself.  

So it was really clear to us that there was a need.   We had already at that time a number of deacons—folks that help with worship, who help with pastoral care, who do occasional preaching, who help with shepherding, keeping in touch with the number of families that are assigned to them.   Through this current project, we really want to strengthen that by training additional deacons so we have some more folks doing that and by making the training itself more intentional, particularly on the multicultural and diversity issue so that our trained leaders really understand what that is about and how here we celebrate diversity.   We don't think of the fact that we have people of different colors and different races and different ethnicity and different languages.   That's not a problem to be overcome, it's a gift to be celebrated.   Our training particularly is geared towards that so our leaders can model that and understand that in whatever they do.

How do you go about training elders and deacons?   What resources did you find that were available, and what did you have to develop yourself?

We kind of developed it ourselves.   We had an original training event that now a couple of years ago where we kind of wrote our own curriculum and came up with a five session training module that focused on things like holy baptism, holy communion, pastoral care, community outreach, all those kinds of pieces that we wanted to put in place.   And because of the grant—this second grant that we're currently in—we were really able to expand that a whole lot.   On the latest try that we had, we had fifteen people involved going through the training.   A couple came from some of the other churches in town.   We opened it up to them.   And those fifteen people went for a two-and-a-half month project this fall where they met every other week and they went through the training sessions.   We brought in some guest speakers, so we had some presenting.   We were able to buy some materials, some books that we were able to give to people, just to have a decent Bible with the kind of commentary that we needed, and for everybody to have the same translation was a very helpful thing.   We used a lot of audio-visual materials.   We got some videos together, found some articles that we were able to share with folks and had those guest speakers come in.

How did you train the elders and deacons in the area of worship?   What did they learn about worship?   What aspects of worship did you explore throughout these training sessions?

We particularly emphasized the multicultural nature of worship here at Bridge of Peace, so we talked a little bit about the biblical or theological foundation, if you will, about why that is important: how God calls us into worship and wants worship to really change us.   Worship isn't something we just do for an hour on Sunday morning.   Worship is like a spiritual gas tank.   Worship is there to fill us up, to give us the strength and the power to then go out and live in the world what we have just expressed in worship.   So there is a very strong connection in worship and Christian living, always.  

In our context, that means, because our worship is multicultural and our living needs to be multicultural, that we need to lift up in our neighborhoods, in our community service, in what we do in terms of human services and advocacy and all that other stuff, that we always lift that up.   So a lot of the training was around the biblical and theological foundation of that: why diversity is good, how God created us diverse, and how God marvels in our diversity and really likes diversity.  

And then from there, the training went into some much more practical things.   We spent a lot of time talking about how to do counseling, how to be in a helping relationship, how to do active listening, and non-judgmental conversation with somebody who is in need, because the deacons and the elders are often called upon to provide that kind of pastoral care.  

So there's Bible, pastoral care—the third emphasis was worship leadership, learning how to lead people in prayer, how to present the Word during worship, how to be a better a reader of holy Scripture in worship, how to preach—although we probably did a poorer job in that one.   We didn't have a whole lot of time at that point, but we did cover a little bit of what good preaching is about and we've had a couple of the deacons now giving their first sermons and really putting some emphasis and some effort into that kind of thing.

What other signs of renewal have you seen already, and aspects of worship renewal, both short-term, and maybe the seeds of long-term renewal?   What can you already see?

Short-term we have seen an uptick in attendance.   We've always been in these five years we've been a growing church.   If you can imagine, five years ago, we started with an empty building and me.   I remember our very first worship service we had nine people and now we worship with between seventy-five and eighty, and for special events like Easter we had 170.   I think that doing the Worship Renewal Project has a direct relationship to people being more excited about worship, being more tuned into it and then wanting to come, wanting to experience it.  

So that would be a short-term thing.   Long-term I think one of the biggest benefits really has been the participation of the leaders.   Every Sunday morning without fail, there is at least five or six others besides myself who participate in worship as leaders in significant ways.   They lead the prayers, they read the Scriptures, they do the welcome, they take up the offering, they preach occasionally, in every aspect of the service they are part of it.   It's not the pastor's show, so to speak.   There's always a team that does that.

Finally, Wolfgang, can you tell us things that we can pray for both in the completion in this grant and in general this unique context that you have been called to at Bridge of Peace in Camden?

Certainly.   I think a prayer of thanksgiving is in order for what has already happened in this current grant, the training that we have just completed.   Fifteen people graduated from the deacon training on November 4th.   And then for the upcoming training we have one more module to go.   We are hoping to train an additional maybe three to five people in this next round, that I think is going to start in mid-February and run through the end of Easter, the end of April.  

And then we also have, in the grant there is two congregational workshops.   We wanted to make sure that training isn't just for the leaders, but that the whole congregation gets some benefit out of that too.   So we have two congregational workshops scheduled.   The first one is going to happen on January 22, 2006, and it's going to be on hospitality.   We want to do a little bit of teaching in a workshop kind of setting around issues of how to be a hospitable church, how to welcome visitors and strangers, before, during, and after worship.

What's kind of cool is that the person who is coming to help us do this as an outside speaker is a deaconess from Baltimore whom I met at one of the [Worship Renewal] grant events [at Calvin College] because she was a grantee a year ago.   So we kind of made a connection and she had some gifts in that area, so we hooked up with one another and she is coming up here in January to do that with us.

Wonderful.   Anything else we can pray for about your ministry in general in your multicultural context?

Well, generally, we need prayers for the continued growth of the church and particularly for our community ministries.   We're very involved through the provision of human services as well as advocacy for peace and justice.   Camden is a very poor city.   We are officially the second poorest city in the country and we've just recently been named for the second time in a row the most dangerous city in the United States because we have the highest crime rate amongst all the municipalities, so it's not an easy place to do ministry.   It's very hard, and we appreciate all prayers we can get for the city in general and for the well being of the people here and for the flourishing of the mission work.

Well, we certainly do give gratitude for everything that God is doing through Bridge of Peace and pray for your continued flourishing and growth and safety.   We're just delighted to hear about everything that is going on through Bridge of Peace and glad as an Institute to play a small role in that.

Well, you have been really helpful partners in these past two years.

Thanks for your time.   It was good talking to you.

Same here.   I appreciate it.   God bless you.

Interview by Nathan Bierma