Pasadena, California · International Model
Making Housing and Community Happen
What this story helps churches see
Churches can be equipped with practical tools when housing is treated as a faithful concern, not a side issue.
Making Housing and Community Happen is a Pasadena-based Christian housing advocacy organisation. Its logo is the vine and fig tree of Micah 4:4. It equips congregations, community leaders, and neighbours with practical tools to transform their communities — rooted in a clear theology of housing as a faithful concern, not a side issue.
Making Housing and Community Happen (MHCH) is based in Pasadena, in the United States. It is a Christian housing advocacy organisation, and the orienting fact about it is theological: its logo, and its starting point, is the vine and fig tree of Micah 4:4 — "Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid."
That image is not branding. It is a thesis. The organisation builds its work outwards from the conviction that "everyone is to have decent, safe and affordable housing."
The process
MHCH's stated mission is to "equip congregations, community leaders, and neighbours with practical tools needed to transform their communities, to end homelessness." The model is clear: theology first, organising second, tools third.
The work happens at the level of the local congregation. MHCH does not run housing projects directly; it equips other people to run them. Its training, its organising support, and its theological framing are all designed to be picked up and used by a church or coalition that has decided to act.
What was built
The outputs are not housing units. They are:
- A theological framework for housing as a discipleship concern, not a programmatic add-on.
- Practical toolkits and training that congregations can adapt to their own contexts.
- An identifiable model that other organisations — including the YIGBY coalition in San Diego — explicitly draw on.
What they learned
Research from Powell highlights MHCH because of the order of priority in its work. Theology, then organising, then tools. The opposite order — tools, then organising, then theology — is the more familiar pattern in development practice, and it tends to produce activity without conviction.
For South African churches looking for an international model, MHCH offers something specific: an example of a Christian housing organisation that did not soften its theological language to be acceptable to secular partners, and that has, as a result, kept its sense of purpose intact across decades.
Sources
- Powell, C. (2021), Fostering a Praxis of Spatial Justice in Suburban Churches, MTh thesis — international church-housing models section. Download PDF
- Making Housing and Community Happen — primary organisation website.
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