Like all good missionaries, Chris and Carrie Anne Sandoval knew that they would need time to learn the unique dynamics of their new community before launching a church plant. In 2012, they began researching Greater Logan Heights, an urban San Diego community comprising six neighborhoods and roughly 40,000 people, and heard some troubling statistics.
Nearly one-third of the community was teens and children in dire circumstances. Most of those children lived below the poverty line, and more than half would drop out of high school. Many of those children did not have stable housing. The community is more than 75% Latino, and research on mental health reveals that Latino youth have high rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and adverse childhood experiences.
Seeking to serve the needs of these vulnerable children and their families, the Sandovals approached the principals of the community’s schools and asked, “How can we serve you?”
The principals requested parenting seminars. And in a parched and rocky soil, a fruitful partnership began to grow.
After two years in the community, the Sandovals launched both Servant Church of San Diego and Alma Community Care. The original plan was to launch Alma two or three years after the church plant, but when one donor read of the community’s needs in the church planting prospectus, the donor provided the resources to launch Servant Church in 2016 and Alma in 2017.
Alma (the Spanish word for “soul”) provides gospel-centered, professional mental health help for Greater Logan Heights families. Chris notes that, historically, many missionaries entering new communities have established churches, schools, and hospitals that allow Christians to serve their neighbors as people created with — and needing redemption of — soul, mind, and body. The partnership between Servant Church of San Diego, Alma Community Care, and existing neighborhood schools is having a similar multi-dimensional transformational effect in Greater Logan Heights.
Nearly a decade after its launch, Servant Church still meets for weekly worship in a neighborhood school. The parenting seminars are now offered in four schools, with a waiting list of additional schools eager to offer the training as soon as Alma can staff them. Through the parenting seminars, Alma provides parents with scholarships for individual and group therapy sessions with licensed professional counselors.
Though the seminars are hosted in local schools, Chris opens every seminar with a devotional and takes confidential prayer requests, allowing him to minister to community members who otherwise might never attend a Servant Church worship service.
Servant Church of San Diego
In 2024, byFaith researched the most common names for PCA churches and found that names for Jesus — like “Christ” and “Redeemer” — were near the top of the list. But at the time, only Sandoval’s San Diego congregation adopted the name “Servant.”
The name is primarily derived from passages such as Isaiah 53, Philippians 2, and especially Mark 10:45, in which Jesus says, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
In a historically “overlooked and underserved community,” as Chris calls it, the name is especially fitting to emphasize that the “practical ministry” of the church is “deeply theological, deeply biblical.” To be created in the image of God and recreated in Christ is to be made to serve God and others, “creating communities of service.”
Carrie Anne has observed that the longer they have been in the community, the more they see how fittingly the name reflects it.
Residents “don’t just show up to be served,” she said. “They desire to serve as well.”
For example, Servant Church and Alma collaborate with neighborhood schools to host a Thanksgiving feast for some of the most vulnerable families in the community, those facing significant economic and relational challenges. Many of the servers that helped host the 2025 feast had been attendees in previous years.
Alma Community Care
Before church planting in San Diego, Chris had previous experience planting in an urban neighborhood of Chicago, which he called “a bootcamp in contextualized ministry.” One of the lessons of that “boot camp” was about the cumulative trauma that many residents in urban neighborhoods face.
Recognizing the distinct differences in the calling and equipping of pastors and licensed professional counselors, Alma leverages the unique gifting of a group of Spanish-speaking therapists who lead parenting seminars as well as individual and group therapy sessions. Having professional counselors in these roles also enables Chris to be a community pastor, seen and known by people throughout the community, given his consistent presence in the schools.
Generally, the principals and school staff recommend the seminars to parents. There are 12 seminars offered every semester across the four partner schools, and about 25 parents attend each session. After initial exposure to Alma in the seminars, some parents are offered scholarships for therapy sessions with the same counselors. In the process, parents who were isolated see others who are struggling in the same ways and develop community. Additionally, in these seminars, many of the material needs in the community surface, and Servant Church responds in service to its neighbors.
In the course of their work, Alma’s counselors not only correct bad information about mental health that people wrongly attribute to the Bible, but also invite participants into a church community at Servant Church that seeks to serve them as whole people with physical, mental, and spiritual needs.
“What our families need more than anything else is the life-transforming power of the gospel,” Carrie Anne says. “And they need the community that the church provides.”
Training future “domestic foreign missionaries”
Given their location just 15 miles from the Mexican border, and the demographics of their community, the Sandovals see themselves as “domestic foreign missionaries.” Domestic in terms of geographic boundaries and foreign in terms of cultural context. Their backgrounds make them ideal candidates to train future ministry leaders called to urban cross-cultural ministry.
Chris grew up as the son of Latino immigrant parents and said, “I can see myself in the faces of the kids in my community.” His upbringing gives him a unique ability to “bridge the experience of first- and second-generation immigrants” in the community. At the same time, Chris has realized that some of God’s provisions for him — namely a stable family and educational opportunities — are unique and compel him to invest his life “in service of others,” he said.
Carrie Anne felt called to global missions as a college student and spent time in Thailand and Tanzania before working in the missions department of a large church for five years. Given the opportunity to travel broadly and see many partnerships, she learned the necessity of the “pull approach” to ministry (as opposed to the “push approach”). She described the pull approach as, “whatever we are going to do, the local community has to really want.”
It’s easy to see how that philosophy eventually birthed the partnerships with principals and parents in Greater Logan Heights.
Both Chris and Carrie Anne also studied engineering before entering vocational ministry, providing them with unexpected ministry skills, like diagnosing problems, crafting solutions, and excelling at project management in complex settings.
The United States has many urban immigrant communities like Greater Logan Heights, but historically the PCA has not excelled in planting churches in these contexts. In order to raise up more people equipped to minister in these communities, both in the United States and in urban settings throughout Latin America, the PCA needs good training pipelines.
Eventually the Sandovals hope to see Servant Church and Alma begin to function as a “domestic foreign ministry training center,” Chris said. For now, they hope to continue developing partnerships with churches that want to participate in faithfully serving the Greater Logan Heights community and neighborhoods like it around the country.