Melanie Reimer serves in Whittier, California, a beautiful city just southeast of the bustling hub of Los Angeles. The area has a Quaker heritage and is nestled among the trails and hills that lead into the Los Angeles basin. Filled with a small-town feel, Whittier’s Hispanic culture, and its value of family and religious culture resounds in the city’s culture and ethos. But often religion and church tradition miss the meaning of a true relationship with Jesus—and that’s Melanie’s personal heartbeat for this city to experience.
Scripture challenges us to love your neighbor as yourself, and even the religious leaders questioned Christ asking, “Who is our neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-37) In scripture, we see Jesus being moved by the Spirit to travel to Samaria and find a “neighbor” in the woman at the well, meet a cripple begging on the street, or even rendezvous with a church leader at night who is wrestling to understand a real relationship with God versus religion and tradition. Each one of these individuals was Jesus’s neighbor. The location was not the defining factor necessarily, but the leading of the Spirit which connected them in a divine moment of truth, grace, and love.
Melanie’s “local” is guided by wherever the Spirit leads her to see her “neighbor” whether that be a homeless man sitting at the post office, or a woman in an abusive relationship struggling to have the courage to walk out of it, or the kids and family units that live nearby. “Local” is wherever the open door of the Spirit is directing.
Melanie’s heart theme comes from Isaiah 61 as she desires to step into Jesus's footsteps and co-labor with Him to draw the “spiritually lost, those in bondage, the broken-hearted, the mourning, and those with a spirit of heaviness” closer to the heart of Christ, and the anointing of His Spirit.
