by Chaplain Jeff Wolfe

“What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and its
grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the
impossible possible.” –Congressman John Lewis

A couple years ago, I was in Anaheim, CA for advanced chaplain training. The location for the training was at Magnolia Baptist Church in Anaheim. When I arrived the first day, I had arrived early (as I often do, to meet others in training and maybe have a few moments with the instructor), I met the pastor, who also was one of the facilitators for the training. His name was Nathan Zug. Nathan is a police chaplain for Anaheim Police Department and the Anaheim Fire Department.

As I began to become acquainted with Nathan over the next few days, I learned a lot about this quiet, unassuming man. He quietly setup the room each morning with a gentle disposition which was disarming and almost soothing. As I learned more about this pastor/police chaplain/fire chaplain/family man/community leader, I discovered that behind his quiet, unassuming personality was a man that had many plates spinning behind the scenes. Not that the five (5) roles I just listed weren’t enough, he was always trying to find ways to solve problems within his community.

One problem within Orange County (in which Anaheim is located) is homelessness. According to the “Orange County Homeless Count & Survey Report” from July 2015, the number of homeless living in Anaheim was 4, 452 people. In a federally mandated report in 2017, the homeless count went up to 4,792. That was an increase of almost 7% in just two years.

In 2017, Nathan and the Board for Magnolia Baptist Church realized that they needed to do something. As they began, they started a food program to feed the homeless in their community. They needed volunteers – volunteers that weren’t part of the church, but part of the community. Nathan knew he needed a way to engage the community in helping address its own problem of homelessness if it were to be effective. A simple concept – people helping people. Nathan needed a simple way to communicate a message of people helping people in their own community, regardless of race, creed, gender, socio-economic status. The idea “Love Anaheim” was born. Not a religious-based program, but a community-focused program, meeting the needs of all demographics of their diverse community. According to their website http://www.loveanaheim.org,

“Love Anaheim is multi – sector Service Project Movement with the goal of loving and serving Anaheim. It features 4 main Service Project Events (1 each quarter or so) that will match willing leaders, volunteers, and funding to accomplish a wide range of need based projects. The Love Anaheim Movement will add goodness, compassion and kindness across the City of Anaheim by the various Faith Based Groups, non-profits, school districts, businesses, service organizations, neighborhoods, city departments, residents, and guests all working together for the common good of Anaheim.”

---from “About Us” section of http://www.loveanaheim.org

Initially Nathan needed the website to help awareness and need for volunteers in the community to help the burgeoning homeless within Anaheim. But then one of Nathan’s church members was a graphic web designer and software developer asked Nathan if he could take his little website and “play with it for a while”. When his church member came back to Nathan with his “improvements”, Nathan realized his church member had taken his website and plugged the content into a platform model known as “love our cities”.

Nathan learned that Love Our Cities began out of the success of Love Modesto. Love Modesto started in 2007 at Big Valley Grace Community Church with two questions:

Why is our city on lists of the “worst cities in America”?
If our churches were to suddenly disappear from the Modesto area, would anyone even care or notice?”

Nathan discovered that Modesto was considering similar challenges 9 years earlier as Anaheim was now considering. Love Modesto, overtime developed a platform called “LoveOurCities.org” which became a flexible community focused website to which any city could utilize to address similar problems as Nathan and his church were trying to address.

For Nathan, http://www.loveanaheim.org has become a central hub which “… features 4 main Service Project Events… that will match willing leaders, volunteers, and funding to accomplish a wide range of need based projects.”.

Often it is Police Chaplains who are on the frontlines of Community Engagement. As a police chaplain, Nathan often had access to and was able to see first-hand, the needs of his community and the community that Anaheim Police Department served. It was through a police chaplain, a community church, and a church member speaking up about helping with a website that began what is now http://www.loveanaheim.org.

Police Chaplains often can be bridges between diverse communities.