You'll meet a huge need in the inner city ... HUNGER ... and shine the love and mercy of Jesus.
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on the exponential power of Cru Inner City's discipleship training. In the first installment we see how the training impacted Blanca Nuñez's spiritual walk. In our next post we get a glimpse into how she's using what she learned to impact her community.
Blanca Nuñez cut her teeth in the church. Her father, called to be a pastor 28 years ago, served from the pulpit, while her mother contributed with her vocal chords. As youngsters, Blanca and her sisters were apprentices of sorts, spending hours playing hide-and-seek in sacred cubbyholes as their parents ministered well beyond Sunday worship.
"The bigger the church the bigger our playground was and the more rooms and offices it had, the more space we had to explore," Blanca said. "We did not grow up with cell phones or video games, so we were pretty much left to the limitations of our imagination."
Although Blanca honored her church commitment while away at college, it wasn't until after she earned her degree and married that she finally made her parent's faith her own.
"God has been merciful enough to keep me, even to this day, and the least I could do was really focus and give my life to serving this kingdom," she said. "And that's what I've been doing, helping my dad with the ministry, helping the youth, helping the community as much as I can."
As part of her work in the community, Blanca volunteered for Cru® Inner City Los Angeles, where her sister, Dina Martinez, serves as co-director. Through that connection, Blanca was invited to attend a Real Life Discipleship Class that ran the first five months of the year.
Although bilingual, Blanca said she didn't feel she had enough command of English to use it for evangelism. The Cru course, she thought, might offer an opportunity to polish her skills.
"I used to think that God only spoke in Spanish because I would only know the literature and biblical passages in Spanish," she said. "When it came down to sharing the gospel in English I was very shy and kind of timid, or just not very confident."
Despite the clear benefits of enrolling in the course, Blanca, now a mother of three, immediately concocted several excuses on why she couldn't invest the time — but unsolicited offers of help wiped away the trio of obstacles. The Lord, as is often His way, cleared the deck.
The excuses, she said, "were completely brought down, shut down by the Spirit."
Blanca stepped, by faith, into the unknown.
As the discipleship group she joined bonded over a united faith, they learned to share their testimonies, study Scriptures and apply Bible lessons to real life situations. Blanca's confidence in her English soared.
| "It was like sitting on the bottom of a dark pit, just sitting there covered in mud, not knowing where or how I'm going to get up from this." | Putting It to the TestShe clung to those lessons several months later when, unexpectedly, Blanca found herself in the lion's den, a personal experience that tested what she learned. |
"It was like sitting on the bottom of a dark pit, just sitting there covered in mud, not knowing where or how I'm going to get up from this," Blanca said. "Then, all of a sudden, there was the confirmation of 'I prepared you. From January to May, you were preparing for this battle.'"
Verses and concepts she learned during the 13-week discipleship course came flooding back.
"Jesus, the whole time, was preparing me for that," she said. "He's sitting in this dark pit with me and telling me, 'You're gonna be OK. I'm with you.' Getting up from that made me even more passionate, more stronger, more committed."
Looking back, Blanca describes her personal crisis as being similar to a gaping wound.
"What's the first thing you gotta do? You gotta stop the bleeding. So you put pressure on the wound."
After the initial emergency and shock, there was still work to be done, an extended process that involved facing the trauma, going deeper by sorting through issues and then exploring forgiveness.
"God really did the final restoration in my heart," Blanca said. "I can, with all certainty, say that the gospel is real, and not only can I share it, but I can tell you from experience that it's powerful."
Since completing the discipleship class, she's participated in other Cru training sessions, including the Holistic Ministry Model, Coach Approach to Discipleship, Domestic Violence Seminar, Leaders at Risk and How to Grow in Emotional Intelligence. She is now pouring herself into others by leading a session on "How to Walk in the Power of the Holy Spirit," the same discipleship class that eroded her shyness and timidity.
Blanca attributes God's power, working through Cru Inner City, for helping her to find her own voice.
"They are truly imitators of Christ," she said. "The fact that they're allowing me, the fact that they're welcoming me, the fact that they're encouraging me, the fact that they're giving me a space to sit with them at the table, has also given me that courage to say, 'Well, I can do this.'
"Even in the moments that I can't believe in myself — I am having doubts in myself — for the team to step up and say, 'Blanca, you got this,' it's just so humbling."
That moral and spiritual support motivates her to pass it on in her community.
"Inner City, to me, has been a blessing and for me to keep that to myself isn't fair," she said.
That's why Blanca takes every opportunity to volunteer for Cru and is working to expand church partnerships.
"It's a living testimony that God is working in everyone around me in South Central and there is hope."
That hope has been magnified in the midst of a global pandemic, which shuttered California churches for an extended period of time. Ministry approaches have shifted, but the gospel remains true.
"In Spanish we have a saying — el hombre propone y Dios dispone — which translates to "man proposes and God disposes," because, at the end of everything, we realize that it is He who arranges us in the position where He wants us to serve."
Blanca said that over time she's been able to witness how churches, including their lay leaders, are increasingly connecting with their neighborhoods, now with a new sense of urgency.
"I got to see leaders from inside these ministries step up and get their feet on the ground, where they made the initiative to make connections and use their time (and) homes to bring hope around them.
"I see it as a whole bunch of little lights flickering in South Central, rather than one big spotlight in the church building."
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Lori Arnold serves as senior writer for Cru's inner-city ministry.
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