Chris Accardy has found his ministry itch: working-class millennials.
Two years ago, byFaith took a look at Accardy’s ministry in Grenada, Mississippi, and the once-troubled Grace Presbyterian Church that has turned a corner toward a more compassionate and diverse future.
Since then the ragtag community and what Accardy calls its “storefront-style ministry” has jumped in attendance from a few dozen to at least 60, with more than 150 who are connected to the church in some way. Most are young, with no college education, and working blue-collar jobs. They’re single moms, factory workers, and recovering addicts.
His congregants might not know much Reformed terminology, Accardy says, but if you ask them if God has loved and pursued them from before the foundation of the world, they have a ready answer.
Accardy is blunt about the fact that his congregation doesn’t mirror much of the denomination: “We are not an upper middle-class professional church.”
He explains, “We tend to think about the artsy, educated millennial who is working to pay off the bills, but what about those who are working in our factories, our restaurants, our car repair centers; who fix our plumbing, and put a roof on our house? There are many young people who are doing that.”
It wasn’t just hard-working types who started coming to Grace, but also those who are working through addictions. It began when a young man in the congregation with a history of substance abuse asked if he could start a Celebrate Recovery chapter. That ministry now welcomes between 15 and 35 adults and eight to 15 children into the church every week, folks who come with a lot of brokenness.
That brokenness brings a weight Accardy feels every week — in the familiar faces who stop showing up for weeks at a time because they’ve relapsed; in the children who stopped visiting shortly before their mother was murdered.
A Church for the Broken
To be the kind of church that broken, uneducated 20-and-30s can find accessible, Grace has eliminated many “sacred cows.” They’ve turned the sanctuary into a multipurpose room, replaced the organ with a guitar and keyboard, and Accardy has learned to fill his preaching with more stories, abandoning the traditional didactic sermon.
His congregants might not know much Reformed terminology, Accardy says, but if you ask them if God has loved and pursued them from before the foundation of the world, they have a ready answer.
“These are the people who are out there transforming the community in the name of Jesus Christ,” he says. “In the history of the church, it wasn’t the elite classes that swept in when the Spirit of God started working. It was the working-class folks that were often there as foot soldiers for Jesus.”