A 125-Year-Old Love Letter

Last week, a place I will love forever turned 125 years old.

In 1901, when La Verne, California, was still called Lordsburg, a small group of people began something that would outlive every one of them. They couldn’t have imagined the world we live in today. They couldn’t have anticipated the changes that would come to their community, their country, or the world.

But they began.

And 125 years later, what they started is still here.

Grace Brethren Church of La Verne—later Grace Church of La Verne and now Hope City Church—has been woven into the life of Southern California for more than a century.

Through world wars, cultural upheavals, and technological revolutions, this congregation has continued to worship, serve, and persevere. In old-fashioned church buildings, school gymnasiums, and other unusual places, people have wrestled with tough questions, raised families, buried loved ones, served neighbors, and done their best to represent Jesus well.

They built buildings, taught children, prepared meals, visited hospitals, prayed for strangers, gave sacrificially, and showed up when people needed them. They carried one another through wars, hardship, personal tragedy, cultural upheaval, and all the ordinary difficulties of being human.

This church has been doing those things for half the time the United States has existed!

That’s pretty awesome.

Jessica and I joined this community when I became the pastor in 2007. Over the past nineteen years, we and the church have healed and grown up together.

In 2022, we joined with Baseline Community Church, a congregation with nearly fifty years of life and ministry of its own, to become Hope City Church. A new name, new relationships, and a renewed commitment to serving the people along Southern California’s 210 Corridor.

We didn’t start this church. And it will outlast us.

But for nineteen years, we’ve had the privilege of sharing its life.

We’ve watched children grow into adults. We’ve celebrated marriages and welcomed babies. We’ve stood beside hospital beds and gravesides. We’ve witnessed amazing acts of courage, generosity, forgiveness, and love. We’ve watched people discover faith, recover hope, rebuild their lives, and find a community they could call home.

We’ve known heartbreak. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve navigated changes we didn’t anticipate, and we haven’t always clearly seen the way forward.

But after nineteen years with these people, I believe more deeply than ever in the profound good that a healthy local church can offer the world.

When Jesus is central, and when faith, love, and hope shape the way people live together, incredible good can result. A church can become a place where lonely people find belonging, where struggling people find support, where differences don’t have to become divisions, and where ordinary people discover that their lives can make an extraordinary difference.

Lived humbly and well, the church can offer the world a glimpse of Jesus Christ. And that’s something worth giving our lives to.

We are here because people who never knew us lived for something greater than themselves. And that is what we intend to do as well.

To everyone who has ever been part of Grace Brethren Church, Grace Church of La Verne, Horizons Community Church, Baseline Community Church, or Hope City Church: you helped make this church what it is today, and your contribution matters. And if your experience with us was difficult or painful, I want you to know that I’m genuinely sorry. We haven’t always gotten everything right, but I’m grateful for the part you played in our history.

Thank you to those who came before us. Thank you to those who have walked alongside us. And thank you to those who will carry this story forward long after we’re gone.

I hope that 125 years from now, someone will sit down to write another love letter to this church on its 250th anniversary.

And I hope they’ll have even more to celebrate.

God bless you today.

Know you are loved!

Chris Jackson