Loving Lamasco Well
Twenty-five years ago, when Reverend Gerald Arnold came to serve on Evansville’s West Side, he wasn’t sure he belonged.
“There was an aura that, perhaps maybe I didn’t belong there,” he recalled.
Coming from a church background in New York, where collaboration between congregations was more familiar, Arnold found the relationships between churches on Evansville’s West Side different from what he had known.
“We were like … an island.”
Today, Arnold speaks of a different experience. Church leaders visit one another. Congregations worship together. Neighbors stop to greet him and ask how they can help. He remembers those who reached out, invited him into conversations, and eventually began showing up at Independence Baptist Church. They didn’t just talk about working together. They came, they participated, and they made him feel like he belonged. And it didn’t happen overnight.
From Conversation to Collaboration
The churches of Lamasco have long been finding ways to love and serve their neighbors.
At Glory Road General Baptist Church, Pastor H.T. Bradford remembers years of neighborhood outreach, including block parties and trunk-or-treat events. At Simpson United Methodist Church, Anthony Lebarron leads the Westside Food Pantry, which provides food assistance alongside a clothing closet and monthly community meal.
Independence Baptist, Renew Christian Church, St. Boniface Catholic Church, and other congregations have contributed to the neighborhood through their own ministries and relationships. The desire to serve was there. So were many of the relationships.
For years, gatherings like the Westside Pastors Lunch gave ministry leaders opportunities to connect, encourage one another, and learn about work happening across the West Side. But knowing one another and working together weren’t always the same thing.
Bradford remembers Kelli Ward, Renew’s Operations and Outreach Pastor, regularly asking what their congregations might do together. Every few months, she brought it up again. When she learned Glory Road was planning a trunk-or-treat, she didn’t propose starting another event. She asked how Renew could help. Reverend Arnold remembers that same willingness to show up.
Other leaders began visiting Independence Baptist, participating in its ministry, and recognizing what his congregation had to contribute. It was more than an invitation to join someone else’s initiative. It was an acknowledgment that they needed one another. Meanwhile, Renew was beginning to explore what a more coordinated commitment to Lamasco might look like.
In the summer of 2022, Renew began working with Community One to envision a neighborhood revitalization effort. Through Community One’s Love Your Neighborhood framework, and in partnership with the Lamasco Neighborhood Association beginning in early 2023, that vision began taking shape. The effort became known as Love Lamasco.
Over time, neighbors, businesses, organizations, and churches began finding new opportunities to work alongside one another—building on relationships and ministries already rooted in the neighborhood.
“It’s given us a reason to work together, not just talk about working together,” Ward explained.
Preferring One Another
When Kelly Fehrenbacher was considering a position coordinating Love Lamasco’s neighborhood efforts, someone encouraged her to take the job. It wasn’t a pastor from Renew. It was H.T. Bradford from Glory Road.
“He said, you really need to take this job because we need you,” Fehrenbacher recalled.
She still laughs about it. How often does a pastor encourage someone to take a position connected with another congregation because he believes the whole neighborhood needs them?
Today, Fehrenbacher helps connect churches, community partners, and neighbors. She describes her responsibility not simply as advancing Renew’s work, but as celebrating and supporting what’s happening across Lamasco. Sometimes that’s organizing a neighborhood event. Sometimes it’s connecting a family with resources at another church. Other times it’s simply recognizing something good happening elsewhere and asking how to support it.
“As we prefer one another, then I think Lamasco sees the church versus a church,” she reflected.
That same posture has found expression in worship. On Memorial Day and Labor Day, Glory Road and Independence Baptist gathered for joint services. Reverend Arnold preached at Glory Road, and Bradford brought a message to Independence Baptist. Congregants joined one another in worship, experiencing a different congregation’s traditions and sharing in its fellowship.
Bradford remembers those gatherings as humbling. He describes the Holy Spirit impressing on his heart Jesus’ prayer that his followers would be one. The churches came from different traditions, but their shared calling in Christ mattered more than the differences that might otherwise have kept them apart.
“Not just [to] worship together and remember that we’re one, but we’re also called to serve alongside one another,” Bradford explained.
For him, their unity wasn’t something to live out personally or talk about from the pulpit. It was something to practice together.
The Real Work
At Glory Road, one of the most meaningful changes Bradford helped introduce began around the breakfast table.
Instead of gathering for a traditional Bible study before Sunday worship, the congregation began sharing breakfast and inviting the neighborhood to join them. People came to eat. They stayed to talk. Relationships grew. Bradford describes breaking bread together as transformational, helping his congregation build relationships with neighborhood families. Some eventually became part of the church.
A few blocks away, Anthony Lebarron has seen the importance of those same everyday encounters at Simpson United Methodist Church. Through the Westside Food Pantry, Simpson provides food and clothing assistance, along with a monthly community meal. When volunteers are available, neighbors can select their own food rather than receive a prepared box. They can choose what their families will use, and volunteers have the opportunity to talk with them while they shop. It’s a way of meeting real needs while recognizing the dignity of the person in front of them.
Fehrenbacher remembers helping with one of Simpson’s community meals. After the food was prepared and served, Anthony had another task for the volunteers. It was time for the real work. He wanted them to sit down, eat, and talk with their neighbors.
“The real work is the conversation. The real work is the relationship,” Fehrenbacher reflected.
Across Lamasco, so many of these relationships have taken root around a table. Through breakfasts, community meals, pastoral lunches, and ordinary conversations, people who might otherwise have remained strangers are learning one another’s names, stories, and hopes. And the leaders have discovered that they have as much to learn from their neighbors as they have to offer.
From the early partnership with the Lamasco Neighborhood Association to the conversations and relationships that continue today, neighbors have helped shape the work, not simply participated in it. Through Community One’s coaching and the neighborhood revitalization work, Ward describes learning to listen before assuming she knows what someone needs or what should happen next. Ward puts what she’s learned into three commitments:
“Listen first, love always, and never give up.”
Please Don't Go
Not long ago, Ward sat down with a Lamasco resident who had been involved in neighborhood efforts.
Life had become difficult, and the resident no longer had the capacity to participate in meetings and activities as she once had. She wanted Ward to understand that although she couldn’t show up in the same ways, she still believed in what was happening. And she didn’t want the churches to stop.
“Please don’t go.”
Ward remembers that conversation as a reminder that relationships don’t always unfold according to a plan. People experience difficult seasons. Participation changes. The work can be slow, and progress isn’t always easy to see. But the invitation to remain is still there.
Across Lamasco, churches with distinct histories and ministries are finding new ways to share in the work of loving the people and place they call home. Not simply serving alongside one another. But learning to belong to one another.
