Photo: Volunteers (from left to right) Dick Davis, former conference minister for Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference, Marla Davis, Pastor Juan Mendoza and Alex Corona, help to load and transport donated goods for Full Circle Thrift. Photo provided. 

David Gray is no stranger to creative ministry models. His first post-seminary assignment was as a Mennonite Brethren church planter in Montreal, a role shared with his wife, Heidi. Montreal experienced what Gray refers to as a “quiet revolution.” Over 10 years, the population shifted from 95 percent of people attending Mass or worship weekly to less than 5 percent.

In this post-Christendom environment, David and Heidi found a way to connect with new people by starting a Ten Thousand Villages store. These fair-trade stores raise funds to support international development work through Mennonite Central Committee. The store also provided a place to meet new people and talk with them about Christianity in a place where they felt more at home.

“If we said we were pastors, people thought we were part of some cult,” said Gray, in a March 24 interview. “As Christians and as Mennonites, finding ways where we can rub shoulders in our neighborhood and can maybe do something good for the community is important.… And in those places, we need to find new models that don’t rely on affluent, large communities that can pay for ministry staffing and buildings.”

An Anabaptist center in Southern California

Gray now lives in Oakland, California, and serves as the mission minister for Pacific Southwest Mennonite Conference, where he’s working to launch an Anabaptist center and the Full Circle Thrift store this summer.

Gray and the thrift store launch team, a group of four volunteers, hope the business generated by the thrift store will help fund costs associated with the resource center. The center will provide office space for conference leaders and include a meeting room and large gathering space open for use by nonprofits and conference ministries. In southern California, where physical space is costly and at a premium, having access to the resource center will allow many congregations to expand their ministry.

For example, Wholicare, a Congolese Mennonite congregation that meets in rented space in Pasadena, California, on Sundays, has longed to do weekday prayer nights but hasn’t found a space they can rent during the week. When the resource center opens, they’ll have access to a variety of gathering spaces to host evening services.

They also hope the resource center will become a gathering space for community members. Ideas brainstormed by the leadership team so far include hosting a fix-your-electronics night, where people pool their brainpower to repair damaged appliances or electronic goods rather than buying new, or hosting a museum exhibit open to the public about what thrift stores teach us about race and racism in the United States. The exhibit originally ran at the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas, in 2015.

New models for ministry

The launch team hopes the thrift store will not only be a hub for community events but will provide the funding necessary to keep the resource center running and open to organizations at low cost.

“I like the social business model,” says Maya Sharp, a member of Pasadena Mennonite Church and part of the thrift

store launch team. “Fundraising is hard and always not so fun. This way, you have a business that provides a service for the community and you can have a resource center in addition to that.”

When Gray was hired in 2013, launching an Anabaptist resource center was a key part of the job description, but he was skeptical about the sustainability of a physical, brick-and-mortar space. In Montreal, Gray observed the “crippling cost and logistics that sometimes fall on smaller conferences when they try to do things larger conferences can do.” Gray wanted the ministry to be sustainable on its own and not reliant on ongoing funding from outside church agencies or congregations.

In October 2014, he presented a business plan for the thrift store and resource center combo to the PSMC conference board, and Full Circle Thrift was born. The conference put in place a number of benchmarks the project needed to meet in order to continue, including forming a volunteer launch team and raising $120,000 to cover startup costs. The conference contributed $65,000 right away, which was followed by personal donations, a $20,000 grant from the Schowalter Foundation in Newton, Kansas, and a $16,000 grant from Everence, Mennonite Church USA’s Stewardship agency.

They also solicited donations from congregations all across PSMC and have four large steel containers full of donated items waiting to be sorted and shelved when the thrift store opens in May.

Finding the right location took some time, but in January, Gray signed a lease on a 6,200 square foot building in a small shopping plaza in Altadena. They are working with the property owner to convert the space into both a store and a resource center, and spending time learning from other area thrift stores, like the Mennonite Central Committee thrift store in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

The launch team is also actively recruiting for a full-time store manager, a paid position Gray believes will be key to Full Circle Thrift’s success.

“When you live in major urban areas, it’s difficult to find time to volunteer if you’re spending 45 minutes a day in traffic. I didn’t want a business plan that was relying on a volunteer base that might not materialize,” he said. “We need the right manager and somebody who believes in the project. The purpose of the thrift store is to make money, and the purpose of the resource center is to spend that money in ministry.”

So far, Gray has been amazed at the ways “God is bringing people together” to make the store and resource center a reality. Through Facebook, the volunteer team connected with David Thompson, a new student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, who worked as an administrator for the Salvation Army for nine years and has been consulting with the group on setup and best practices. Ken Gingerich, creative director for Mennonite Church USA, provided helped design the store logo. Volunteers from congregations all across PSMC have also pitched in to help sort and gather donated goods.

Gray and Sharp both hope Full Circle Thrift will find ways to connect with the local Altadena community and be a vehicle for communicating who Mennonites are and what they’re about.

“As Mennonites, we do a lot of really good things I don’t know if the general population knows we do,” said Gray. “Things like immigration support or reconciliation in the Korean peninsula. We just need to figure out how to talk about that and have it be understood and not just always be in our sanctuaries talking to each other.”

In addition to Gray and Sharp, the launch team includes Dick Davis, Joe Roos, Sharon Andre and Peg Reese.