CHICAGO (BP) – Overdose deaths, homicides, gang violence, prostitution and political corruption are rampant in Chicago’s Garfield Park, but God called Jamie Thompson to plant a church “right in the middle of the devil’s playground.”
“It’s just been a miracle story of God’s grace,” Thompson, pastor of Reborn Community Church, told Baptist Press.
Thompson grew up in a poor, rough neighborhood of Chicago and was accustomed to the depravity, but God saved him in high school and set him on a track that included Moody Bible Institute.
Though he thought he’d spend his life ministering to gang members through a sports ministry he founded, God called him to plant Reborn in 2012. Through the story of the Good Samaritan, God challenged Thompson to leave people in a better place than he finds them.
“Ultimately, no one is in a better place if they don’t know Christ, so we’ve got to share the Gospel of Christ with them,” Thompson said.
Because meeting needs through love is a platform for the Gospel, the congregation established Reborn Ministries, a nonprofit that serves as an evangelistic arm while the church focuses on discipleship.
Reborn noticed that many students at a local school were not graduating, so they started a tutoring program and began to see higher numbers graduate. They noticed kids were not showing up to school, so Reborn began gathering them up and taking them to school.
“If you ask any of our kids if they’ve had somebody killed through gun violence, everyone’s going to raise their hands, including all of my own kids who have known people that have died from being murdered or killed through gun violence,” Thompson, a father of four, said.
“So there’s a lot of trauma, and you’re expecting these kids to succeed in school without dealing with trauma, so we started nurture groups to just work through the trauma.”
Reborn hosts an afterschool program, too, with students hanging out at the church building, hearing the Gospel and being discipled.
“We do a lot of trips and stuff, get them out of the city, open their minds to a different world and help them see the potential that they can pursue as adults,” Thompson said. “We’re seeing some of these kids now going off to college and doing things with their lives.”
The church, through the nonprofit, started a mentoring program for youth that meets during the week.
“We started realizing that a lot of the problems that create cycles of poverty were rooted in areas like anger from a lot of trauma, so we became certified anger management counselors,” Thompson said.
He found it didn’t matter if he got someone a job if the person would lose control of emotions and “cuss the boss out,” ending the job opportunity. It also didn’t matter if he found employment and the person didn’t have a way to get to work, so the pastor initiated a finance class to prepare people for jobs.
More recently, Reborn started a handyman training school. The idea came as the pastor, in a side business over the years, had been renovating 25 foreclosed buildings to house more than 100 needy families.
“I tried to hire people from the street, but they never had skills,” Thompson said. “I used them for demo, and I would be talking to gang members and they’d say, ‘If I had a chance, another career, I would make a change.’”
He knew he needed to help such men learn to work in the trades because “you don’t need much certification, but you can make really good money.” Reborn now trains in six competencies: plumbing, electric, carpentry, tiling, drywall and painting.
“It takes about a year, 36 weeks, and we only can take 10 people at a time,” Thompson said of the training school. “We’re in our third year, so we’ve helped about 30 people. We have some guys working with contractors. We have people making $50 an hour as handymen, able to work fulltime.
“We have people that through this have realized they really love electric, so they’ve gone on for further education in electrical school,” the pastor said. “We’re seeing a lot of people turning their lives around.”
More importantly, many of the people being reached by Reborn Ministries now are following Jesus and involved in the church. It helps that the building where they have become accustomed to receiving help is the same building where they are invited to worship God and study the Bible. “We’re seeing so much fruit just from these intentional efforts to love people.”
Attendance at Reborn ranges from 80 to 100 people on Sundays, and Thompson noted that 100 people in a church in Chicago is comparable to 1,000 in a church in the South because “it’s really hard soil in Chicago.”
He fears that if churches keep closing in Chicago at the current rate, which is higher than those that are opening, “there won’t be an evangelical presence in Chicago in the next 20 years.”
In 2026, Reborn is launching an urban training center to help urban churches engage people with the Gospel and make disciples. Also, with 160 people on a waiting list for the handyman training school, they aim to increase the number of students they can accommodate.
Already, Reborn hosts groups from churches on mission trips to Chicago, and they are in need of more partners to help them financially as they identify needs, meet those needs in love and share the Gospel intentionally in a city where sin has a remarkable foothold.
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