Andres Flores
June 2017
By: Samantha Angeles
“It seems reasonable to believe that at least 40 to 50% of Seventh-day Adventist teenagers in North America are essentially leaving the church by their middle 20’s,” says Roger Dudley, emeritus professor of Church Ministry at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary on the campus of Andrews University. “This figure may well be higher. This is a hemorrhage of epic proportions.”1
Not only are the majority of Adventist churches failing to retain their young adult population, but they also are unable to effectively evangelize secular young adults, resulting in the neglect of an entire generation of secular and postmodern people.
For Andres Flores, lead pastor of Chicago’s EPIC Church (EPIC = Every Person In Christ), this “hemmorrhage of epic proportions” is unacceptable.
Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Andres’s family was a mixture of Catholics, Pentecostals, and the unchurched. Due to the influence of his grandmother, the only Adventist in the family, Andres and his mother were baptized together into the Adventist church when he was 16 years old. After high school, he chose to pursue pastoral ministry, and spent several years pastoring in various church contexts throughout the United States before enrolling in the Seventh-Day Adventist Theological Seminary on the campus of Andrews University to earn his Master of Divinity. His experience at the Seminary was transformational in two ways.
“It was like having a conversion experience,” he says. “It was an academic experience, but it reaffirmed my identity as a son of God. It equipped me with tools I now use in my field. But spiritually, it was a transformational experience.”
Not only did his time at the Seminary shape his personal spiritual identity, but it would also define his calling.
“As a student, my wife and I noticed the absence of young adults in our churches and the lack of contextualization of the Adventist message in urban settings. And God gave us a passion for the city.”
Unbeknownst to Andres, God was planting the same passion for urban young adults in the hearts of the leaders of the Illinois conference and the Lake Union. Immediately after graduation, just one day after Andres’s first child was born, he received the call to plant a young adult church in Chicago.
“The Illinois conference president said that I would not have a mother church—that I would need to plant this church by the compelling power of the vision. It was so inspiring, but so not practical. I was captivated, but frustrated. I didn’t understand it at the time, but he was absolutely right.”
In faith, Andres, his wife, their new baby, a theology student from Andrews University, and one other Adventist church member joined to pray about and develop a strategy for planting a church that would make the gospel relevant to young adults in Chicago’s urban setting. And, as his conference president predicted, it was the power of the Holy Spirit, combined with the compelling power of the vision, that made their small team grow.
“Beginning in May of 2012, we started to have “open houses” all over Chicago, in quirky, unique places like storefronts, rooftops and abandoned churches. These open houses were essentially preview nights of worship, casting a vision of what the church would be like when it opened. We always featured a core value of what would be Epic Church, the main vision, a testimony, music, and allowed time for socialization. We also included creative elements, something to speak to people’s hearts so that they’d be inspired to check it out. Our first open house was in a storefront in an abandoned Mac store. The second one was on a rooftop above a penthouse. Our third open house was in a black box theater, which is the location where we opened our church. We just kept inviting people, casting the vision, and every open house, people would join the core group. As we shared our core values of Sabbath, creativity, acceptance, community, service, diversity and wholeness, people got interested. By October, we launched with 30 core group members.
One way that Andres’s team promoted these open houses was through personal invitations. “As we gathered groups of young adults, we told them, ‘You may not have a lot of money or resources, but you do have a lot of social networks. Will you give up your social networks for Jesus?’ We asked them to invite their own friends personally, not just through social media.”
However, these same young adults would also grow to surrender their finances, meager or otherwise, to Jesus. Though the Lake Union and Illinois conference provided six months of financial support to Epic Church, the church soon had to support itself. “We learned to disciple toward stewardship, and our people are givers,” Andres says. “We took over the funding for the church. We became self-sufficient, and our young adults are also maturing, gaining jobs in areas like technology, and are generous.”
Now in its fifth year, Epic Church is not only self-supporting, but due to its incredible growth as a result of creative evangelism and an intentionally relationship-oriented environment, Andres and his team are now preparing to start a second church plant in the suburbs of Chicago. This new campus was brought to life organically by Epic Church members and will open in October 2017, one week after the church celebrates its five-year anniversary. Visit epicwiredsda.com to find out more!
