Inside Story
A New Kind of Family
Terence Fominaya finds a home in Neighborhood Ministries
By Rebecca K. Grosenbach
Thanksgiving. Christmas. The holidays turn people’s thoughts toward family. This is true for Navigator Terence Fominaya. But this year he has a new understanding of “family.” He’s involved in Neighborhood Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona, and the people of the neighborhood have become like family.
“It’s kind of a home for everybody,” Terence says. “It’s okay to mess up here; it’s a gracious environment. Everyone knows that if they ever leave they are always welcome back.”
Neighborhood Ministries is a community outreach. But in truth, it’s
simply “community.” The ministry team lives in an urban Phoenix
neighborhood where they strive to “be the church” to their neighbors.
The ministry is based in a church, but not limited to typical church
activities. Terence is the first Navigator on staff with Neighborhood
Ministries.“It is a community where we are unified in mission and where people genuinely care about each other,” Terence says. “I minister alongside people who are 15 and people in their forties. I feel like this is what the church is supposed to be.”
Terence learned about the ministry from The Navigators’ U.S. President Alan Andrews. Terence served in a Navigator campus ministry in Florida for three years, but an earlier experience working in an inner-city environment had given him a passion for urban ministry.
He spoke to Alan about his interest in switching to an inner-city work, and Alan suggested he check out Neighborhood Ministries. Terence visited Phoenix in the fall of 2006 and was impressed with what he saw. Three months later he was living in Phoenix. “I went from the sauna of Florida to the oven of Arizona,” he says with a smile.
The neighborhood
is a tough one. “The kids are surrounded by poverty, drugs, gangs, and
violence,” Terence says. “But they are having—and will have—a great
impact on the body of Christ.”As Terence considered how to be involved in the ministry, he decided to help coach the new soccer team as a way of getting to know neighborhood kids. He knew it would also be a platform for lessons on character and behavior.
“We started out with just a rag-tag bunch of kids,” he says. “We played games whenever we could. It has advanced to where we have two teams and a league.”
One of the original members of the team was a 14-year-old named Alfonso, or “Fonsie.” His involvement with Neighborhood Ministries gave him a desire to impact others, and the soccer team proved to be a natural place for that to happen.
Fonsie befriended a 10-year-old named Alex. “Fonsie really wanted to take Alex under his wing,” Terence says. Because Fonsie wanted to mentor Alex, Terence realized he needed to mentor Fonsie. “Working with Fonsie made me see that the Bible can be a tough book to just pick up and read. I’m helping Fonsie learn how to make sense of it. We meet every week and work through a chapter of the Bible. I also gave him one of my old study Bibles and taught him how to use the notes and teach himself.”
Terence oversees a program called “I Can Do It,” which is the ministry’s mentoring program. This fits beautifully with Terence’s Navigator value of building one-to-one ministry relationships. “The main point is to pair the kids with a Christian mentor,” Terence says. “The mentor’s primary task is to be a friend and minister holistically. Along with that we seek to help the kids be successful in school.”
Terence mentors eight-year-old Pete. “We have a lot of fun,” he says. “We get together once a week and talk about how God fits into his life.
“The goal is to get a child and a mentor paired for life—officially until the child is 18,” Terence adds. “This is especially important in the lives of kids whose fathers are absent.”
Terence has found a home in the hot, tough streets of Phoenix. Tutoring, coaching soccer, Bible teaching—it’s all part of the community. It’s church. It’s family.
