PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Church finds new life, focusing on 'congregation' outside its walls
Redeemer Lutheran's annual block party is one of the many ways the church reaches out to the Harrison neighborhood in North Minneapolis. Photos courtesy of Redeemer Lutheran Church
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Church finds new life, focusing on 'congregation' outside its walls
Viewing the congregation as more than the Sunday faithful, Redeemer Lutheran Church in North Minneapolis has been ‘a beacon of hope’ for nearby residents, with its focus on service to the neighborhood.The first time the Rev. Kelly Chatman stepped into the pulpit at Redeemer Lutheran Church 17 years ago, he looked out at his new congregation -- 30, maybe 35 people at the most -- and got a sinking feeling in his stomach.
“I wondered if I had made a mistake,” he said recently.
After 25 years spent mostly in education and church administration, Chatman had decided to try his hand at being a local church pastor. He had walked away from a prestigious and comfortable position as the director of youth ministries in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Chicago headquarters to take over a struggling church in a distressed neighborhood in Minneapolis.
Many years earlier, he had served briefly as an associate pastor in Oregon, but this time he was heading his own church. And it was not an auspicious beginning. On his way into the building that morning, he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t seen the drug dealers doing business on the corner across the street.
“I said to myself, ‘What am I doing here at this stage of my career?’” he said. “I wasn’t even sure how long they would be able to keep paying my salary.”
Soon, Chatman changed his perspective.
“I decided that the congregation wasn’t the 35 people sitting in the pews,” he said. “The congregation was the 4,000 people who lived in the neighborhood. Once I reframed it like that, it helped me see that the church needed to be a physical presence on the street.”
Billy Johnson from Olivet Lutheran Church, a partner congregation, (left) joins with Kelly Chatman at the 2017 Redeemer block party.
Who is “the congregation” at your church? Can a congregation include those outside the church’s walls?
And what a presence it has become. Redeemer, through its nonprofit community development organization, Redeemer Center for Life,literally owns, if not the street, the entire block the church sits on -- and more. More importantly, it has had an extraordinary impact on the lives of people in the Harrison neighborhood of North Minneapolis, a racially diverse, mostly low-income area near the city’s downtown.‘A beacon of hope’
“We have been able to change the narrative about North Minneapolis within the church, the neighborhood and the larger community,” Chatman said. As the church’s website declares, Redeemer is “a beacon of hope in the Harrison neighborhood of North Minneapolis.
What is your church’s presence in the neighborhood? For whom is it a beacon of hope?
Over the years, Redeemer and the Redeemer Center for Life have launched a cafe, a bike repair and coffee shop, a 16-unit apartment building, another seven apartments over the cafe, a home that houses Lutheran Volunteer Corps members, and a storefront that has been converted into the Living Room, a gathering space for everything from health clinics to civic meetings. The church also has built two single-family homes that were sold as part of an effort to support affordable housing.“Between Redeemer Church and Redeemer Center for Life, we’re responsible for more than $1 million in economic activity in this neighborhood annually,” he said.
As for the church itself, worship is livelier and more crowded than it was on Chatman’s first Sunday, but the neighborhood continues to be Redeemer’s primary focus. About 90 people now attend Sunday services, and 250 are listed on the church’s membership rolls, but Chatman still insists that the congregation is more than just the Sunday faithful.
“There are people in this neighborhood who call this their church who have never been inside the building,” he said.
What does it mean to be church for those who don’t attend worship?
Some of those neighborhood residents have plots in the church’s community garden, where they grow produce, helping keep the area from becoming a “food desert,” lacking affordable nutritious food. Some come to the biweekly cookouts around the church’s outdoor pizza oven, where volunteers bake pizza and breads (all ingredients provided) for visitors. And some -- more than 800 this year -- come for the church’s annual block party.
Good music and good food are hallmarks of the annual Redeemer block party.
And as for the drug dealers, Chatman years ago invited them to the cookouts, too. But they declined and decided to relocate outside the church’s sphere of influence.Redeemer may not at first glance look like the model of a thriving congregation. It has an older, traditional sanctuary, with services that follow a standard Lutheran liturgy. And Chatman is far from a fiery, arm-waving, spell-binding orator. On the contrary, when he preaches, he stands between the two front pews, delivering his sermon in a casual fashion that is closer to a chat than a formal address.
What does a "successful" church look like?
“I was taught to preach in a pulpit reading from a manuscript,” he said. But he noticed when preaching at Redeemer that every time he looked up, he got little if any eye contact from the congregation. So he moved out of the pulpit and started memorizing his message -- or most of it, anyway. “Every week I forget something,” he said.
"We are brothers & sisters, not enemies," proclaims this colorful facade, painted in July by volunteers from the Kansas City Lutheran Youth Coalition.
More than Sunday morningMention the church’s growth to Chatman or the members, and they shrug it off. Redeemer Lutheran is not the kind of church that holds meetings to dream up ways to increase Sunday morning attendance. They use their meetings to discuss ways to better serve their neighbors.
“The service is nice,” David Merchant, a 10-year member, said as people filed out of the sanctuary on a September Sunday. “But the story here is not what happens on Sundays. The story is what happens in this building the other six days of the week.”
Kelly Chatman (in grey hat) and members of Redeemer's Black Lives Matter Coalition attend a march in December 2015.
Chatman is happy to lead tours of the church campus -- one entire square block plus properties on two adjoining blocks -- but he makes it clear that his pride is shared by many.“I’m just a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “This is much bigger than me.”
The Redeemer Center for Life acquired its first property not long before Chatman arrived in 2001. It was a new building to house Milda’s Cafe, a small but very important eatery across the street, a neighborhood fixture since 1965.
“The building housing Milda’s was sold in the mid-’90s, and Milda was going to close it,” said T. Williams, a member since 1991. “That was sad news. It was a community gathering spot; it was one of the few places in the neighborhood to eat. So we started a campaign to keep it open.”
The church didn’t have any money, but it did have a parking lot where they could put a new building to house the cafe. They found a suburban Lutheran church that was willing to partner with them. Redeemer provided the land, the suburban church provided the money, and a new Milda’s took root.
What non-monetary resources does your church have that can be leveraged for the benefit of the surrounding community?
“We are risk takers,” Williams said, “and I mean that in a healthy kind of way.”Things kicked into high gear with Chatman’s arrival. “He’s an entrepreneur,” Williams said. “He sees potential.”
He’s also very good at negotiating partnerships. Both the church and the Center for Life boast diverse lists of partners,from other churches to health service providers to housing coalitions.
“We may not be rich in money, but we’re rich in commitment and values,” Williams said.
A relevance that draws new people
The focus on service to people in the neighborhood has given Redeemer a relevance that many young people are seeking and has helped draw new people to the church. While the congregation does have its share of older members, it also has many young families. At a recent Sunday service, so many kids came forward for the children’s message that they were jockeying for places to sit.
Children at Redeemer Lutheran fill the aisle to hear a message from Kelly Chatman at the 2017 Easter service.
“It’s genuine, and it’s meaningful,” Merchant said. “In a nutshell, there are people here who are committed to living out the gospel and the radical and sometimes very difficult Christian message of love and reconciliation and serving the poor. In my view, it’s what we are called to do and be as Christians.”The congregation is diverse. Part of that is simply a reflection of the neighborhood, which is 39 percent African-American, 25 percent white and 16 percent Asian. But the diversity goes beyond skin color. Redeemer was one of the first churches in Minnesota to conduct gay marriage services. Worshippers range from retired executives to people who have no permanent address.
“It’s the whole rainbow of life,” Merchant said. “We have people from all walks of life, all economic levels and from all status of power. … And they all are comfortable with one another, and all are there for one another, and I think that’s really cool.”
The church places a high priority on the neighborhood’s African-American heritage. Although the attendance at Sunday morning worship services is about two-thirds white, “the people who come here during the week are 98 percent black,” Chatman said.
One of the church’s primary missions is to further racial justice, which often involves pointing out the places it doesn’t exist. Among these efforts is a 12-week series of racial discussions being held Sunday mornings this fall to “create safe space conducive to deep personal reflection and community sharing.”
Through that and other programs, the church has earned a reputation in City Hall as a voice for change. “We are a force to be reckoned with,” Chatman said.
As part of the church’s racial and social justice efforts, Chatman often finds himself working to bring people together -- a gift that he calls “doing my pastor thing.” Sometimes that’s hard. In 2015, a 24-year-old black man, Jamar Clark, was shot and killed by two Minneapolis police officers. Witnesses said he was handcuffed at the time. Protests exploded across the city, including one organized by a Black Lives Matter group based at the church.
How can your church bring people together who are divided and apart?
Later, Chatman suggested that members of the police department be invited to the next pizza oven cookout.“The young Black Lives Matter people were totally against it,” he recalled. But he insisted, and three officers eventually showed up. “It was a little tense at first,” he said. “But then everyone relaxed.”
An outdoor pizza and bread oven located on the Redeemer Lutheran Church campus is a popular neighborhood gathering spot.
The church and the nonprofitThe church and Redeemer Center for Life enjoy a close relationship, with Chatman overseeing both. When the center was started in 1998, 20 percent of the board members were representatives of the church, but it had a separate executive director. When that person left in 2002, Chatman agreed to step in on an interim basis. After six years, he did manage to hand off the reins for a while, but it wasn’t long before he was back overseeing both the church and the nonprofit.
“I look at it like running a small business,” he said of the workload. “You show up in the morning as early as you need to and stay as long as it takes to get all the work done.”
In recent years, Redeemer has become concerned about the prospect of gentrification. The Harrison neighborhood abuts downtown Minneapolis, which changed dramatically after the Minnesota Twins opened a new stadium there in 2010. Since then, the area near the ballpark, once home to strip clubs and old warehouses, has evolved into one of upscale condos and tony microbreweries. The gentrification hasn’t yet reached the church (which is about a mile from the ballfield), but it’s clearly creeping in that direction.
Redeemer and the neighborhood, however, remember the area’s origins.
“There’s a map in City Hall from 1935 that describes this as a ‘Negro slum,’” Chatman said, shaking his head sadly. “Granted, that was 1935, but the fact that it exists shows what we came out of. We need to change that consciousness.”
Chatman is notably slow to anger, but it can happen. When a house across the street from the church was foreclosed on, “the lender put a piece of plywood up in front of the house and spray-painted on it, ‘For sale, call 1-800 …’
“That was an insult. They couldn’t even spare a regular ‘For Sale’ sign? And a spray-painted sign in a black neighborhood? They were just playing to the graffiti stereotype.” The Center for Life bought the residence, which it now uses to house Lutheran Volunteer Corps members.
Chatman is 67, and while his retirement is not imminent -- Minneapolis is hosting a national ELCA youth leadership conference in three years, and he wants to be involved -- he said that he probably won’t work much beyond that. Organizations that rely heavily on a visionary leader often flounder when that person steps aside, but Chatman said that won’t be a concern at Redeemer.
“Over the last 17 years, we’ve built enough of an infrastructure that that shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “There are enough people that the work will continue.”
Questions to consider:
- Who is “the congregation” at your church? Can a congregation include those outside the church’s walls?
- What is your church’s presence in the neighborhood? For whom is it a beacon of hope?
- What does it mean to be church for those who don’t attend worship? Is worship attendance required to be part of church?
- How does Redeemer Lutheran challenge your understanding of what a successful church looks like?
- What non-monetary resources does your church have that can be leveraged for the benefit of the surrounding community?
- How can your church bring people together who are divided and apart?
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: NEIGHBORHOOD MINISTRY
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
John McKnight: Low-income communities are not needy -- they have assets
Detail from a graphic record of a facilitated discussion in Vancouver, B.C., in which participants talked about what belonging and community mean. The artists included examples of local community development in the drawing. Illustration by Liz Etmanski and Aaron Johannes/Spectrum Consulting
People who want to help low-income communities should see them as “half-full glasses” -- places with strengths and capacities that can be built upon, says the co-developer of the asset-based community development strategy.Most people and institutions that want to serve poor communities are focused on what the residents lack. “What are the needs?” is often the first question asked.
John McKnight says that approach has it backward.
“I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them,” he said. “What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community.”
McKnight is co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and professor emeritus of communications studies and education and social policy at Northwestern University.
He and his longtime colleague John Kretzmann created the asset-based community development (ABCD) strategy for community building. Together they wrote a basic guide to the approach called “Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”McKnight also wrote “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits” and, with co-author Peter Block, “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”
McKnight spoke to Faith & Leadership about asset-based community development and the role the church can play in helping people identify and leverage their strengths to empower their communities. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is asset-based community development?
Our most common metaphor is a glass with water up to the middle. Is the glass half-full or half-empty? In our time, particularly in terms of cities and lower-income people, the institutions -- including almost all the churches -- look at those neighborhoods and they focus on the empty half of the glass.
They call the empty half “needs.” These people are needy, or they’re needy neighborhoods, right? That is the beginning point of almost all responses by institutions to lower-income and minority neighborhoods. This was something that I experienced in my life as a neighborhood organizer before I came to the university.
If you’re a neighborhood organizer, you have to start with the belief that the people here have capacities and abilities and that if they come together in a community organization, they can be powerful.
I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them.
What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community -- that that’s how change happens.
I’ve never seen a low-income neighborhood that really changed because they finally got enough health, human service, religious or government agencies fixing them. That doesn’t work. It may make life more tolerable for individuals, but it doesn’t change communities.
Asset-based community development is a phrase for the resources that exist in communities where people don’t seem to have a lot of money.
What we were doing was identifying the resources that are there, and we called those resources “assets,” so that we could say, “If you want to know what is in a neighborhood -- not what’s wrong, not what are the problems, not what are the needs, but what are the problem-solving resources in a neighborhood -- those are assets.”
You have to start with what you have before you know what you need. Institutions can be helpful, but always in the second stage of a community’s life. The first stage has to be, “What do we have, and what can we do with it?”
The second stage is, “What can outside institutions do in addition to what we can do?”Helping institutions that are focused on needs teach people in the neighborhood, “What you need to do is start with a needs survey. We don’t care at all how many of you can do carpentry; what we want to know is how many of you have bad eyes.”
But because institutions are so powerful and have so much money, they create a culture of neediness.
That’s the basic proposition of our work. We published a workbook called “Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.” It has become the alternative to the world of helping through a needs focus.
Institutions that are helpful provide support or incentives for local people to focus on what resources they have, and that particular neighborhood has, and how they can be connected, to begin to make the people feel they are producers rather than clients.
That’s the great shift that we’re trying to focus on -- that the real issue of having empowerment is whether you are a producer or a client.
Q: What role can churches and church institutions play?
I would say that there is more recognition of the full half in the church field than there is in the health, human service, government fields.
You can see churches that are attempting to manifest themselves as neighbors rather than saviors. There are church leaders who understand that the guiding Christian principle is friendship, not service. It’s those people who I think are the light of the world.
If I were saying something to church people, I would say, “Go spend time with people who have friendly churches, who are part of a neighborhood rather than serving the neighborhood, who are as enhanced by the relationship with the people and the place as they are part of enhancing that place and people.”
In our book, there’s a chapter on churches that has a series of examples of what churches do when they are friendly rather than serving. I’d be much harder pressed to find that kind of thing in the other helping fields, so we recognize the churches for positive examples in the book.
That’s another asset-based understanding -- that in anything to be done, the question is, “Who produces it?” Not, “Who do we consult; who do we have as advisors; who do we allow to be our shadow assistants?” but, “Who’s the producer?”
So when we look at anything, the question we ask is, of the outcome, “Who’s the producer?” If the institution did it all, you have put another foundation stone in the dependency system.
There’s this idea, which really has grown hugely in my lifetime, that somehow if you surround people with enough services, that’s what makes a good life. What makes a good life is being surrounded by friends who are mutually productive with you so that you have greatly diminished the services you need or use.
Q: So you’re not just talking about poor people, then. You’re talking also about …
Anybody. I meant that; we started out doing the research in low-income neighborhoods, but it’s true every place. This understanding is manifested now in ABCD Europe. There’s Global South ABCD. There’s a Pacific Rim ABCD. So it’s something that crosses cultural boundaries.
Q: What made you think of this? How did you come to think differently from other people about this core issue?
Why did I think of it? I know why I thought of it. If you’re a neighborhood organizer -- I was an organizer in neighborhoods in the [Saul] Alinsky tradition -- to get something done, you’ve got to see that people have integrity, productivity, capacities and that if you put them together, if you connect them, that they will multiply in their power to be productive and to deal with outside institutions.
You can’t organize people by saying, “I’m here because you’re a poor, pitiful soul,” right? “God, you’ve had a bad life, and I feel sorry for you. I feel compassion for you.” That would never organize people.
If I’m a doctor, the proof of my effectiveness is I served 1,000 people this year. I did something about their empty half. That’s fine. I go to a doctor; it’s a noble profession. But as a neighborhood organizer, you’ve got to be a full-half person, not an empty-half person.
Then, when I was about 40, Northwestern University asked me to come there and help them start an urban research center. Everybody else was an academic, but they felt they had to have somebody who had been really active in the city, in Chicago, so they invited me to come and they made me a professor.
It’s 1969 and the cities are burning, and all the institutions say, “My God, we’d better do something, finally, about these people.”
So I entered that world and found that the research being done about neighborhoods was all about what was wrong -- needs surveys. The policies that were developed were developed on the premise that needs were met by institutions and if you strengthened and enhanced institutions, then everything would be OK.
I personally was insulted by what I found, because I could tell that these were not the people I knew, that I had organized, that were my friends.
I thought if I could bring anything to this place, it would be to see if you could get them to consider the possibility that these people were not broken and needy problems but they were people like them who had problems and assets.
So we got a grant and we collected about 3,000 stories of what people had done with the resources they have, from cities all across North America, in lower-income neighborhoods.
That’s what “Building Communities From the Inside Out” is. It has had influence on quite a few institutions of all kinds -- on some churches, on some governments, on some social service agencies, on people in the public health field, and some people in business, even.
Q: Were you motivated by your own faith as a Christian to pursue this work?
I would say it’s one part. I’m a loosely Episcopal person, but the current things you see on the website are the result of a lifetime of previous activities, and beliefs coming from my family.
On the McKnight side of my family, the people are all Reformed Presbyterians. They’d be called, among themselves, Covenanters. In general, they didn’t buy into most of the propositions of modern society.
Underlying most of what they tended to believe was a proposition that you couldn’t trust institutions, so I was raised in that context with a belief that in general, communities of faith were trustworthy but most institutions weren’t. The outside world was generally on the wrong track.
My Covenanter grandfather was a minister. I remember his telling me very frequently, “John, if the majority of people agree with you, you must be wrong.” That sort of sums it up.
Q: Why is it so difficult to change the thinking about communities?
It’s very clear that we have a service economy, right? The majority of our people don’t produce goods; they produce services. If I say to the service provider, “You know, if people were organized at the local level and able to identify and mobilize their own resources, they’d need you half as much,” what do you think people would think about that?
Because that’s what’s the problem. I wrote another book called “The Careless Society,” which is a series of articles which have as their basic point that we serve more and care less -- that service has replaced care, that clienthood has replaced citizenship, that productivity has been greatly diminished by dependency.
Q: A lot of what you talk about seems to be based on hope and respect. You haven’t used those words, but that’s what I hear coming through.
Yes. I like the way you’re putting it. Respect I would put way up at the top, because I’d say respect and trust are the bedrock of friendship. Now, hope -- I like that, too, but I don’t normally think in those terms. My highest value isn’t hope. It’s friendship.
Read more from John McKnight »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Building from strength
Metanoia's housing initiative has rebuilt eight abandoned homes, built four new homes and assisted in renovations of 24 owner-occupied homes. Photos courtesy of Metanoia
A Cooperative Baptist Fellowship ministry in South Carolina has created a sustainable model for community development by focusing on assets -- those of the neighborhood and those of the organization.The Rev. Bill Stanfield sat in his living room recently, reading a book and listening as a group of boys passed by outside. He vaguely hoped the deep shouts of teenage bravado and exaggerated confidence wouldn’t wake up his wife and children.
Then a car door slammed. He looked up from his book. The front door handle jiggled, as if someone was trying to get in.
Stanfield’s house is on Success Street -- a name with an ironic ring to it, since it is located in the impoverished Chicora-Cherokee community of North Charleston, S.C. Heart quickening, Stanfield set down his book and slowly walked toward the front door. He swung it open.
“Reverend Bill, you left your car lights on -- and your keys in the door,” said the young man standing in front of him.
It was Kerionne -- a neighbor and one of the many young people who have been involved in Metanoia, the ministry that Stanfield and his, wife, the Rev. Evelyn Oliveira, founded in 2003.
At that time, the neighborhood had the highest crime rate in the city of North Charleston, itself a regular on Congressional Quarterly’s list of the 10 most dangerous U.S. cities. The Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood also had the highest per-capita rate of child poverty in the state.
Back then, the stories coming out of this community were not about success. Far from it.
Ten years later, however, there are many such stories -- from the rehabilitated owner-occupied homes to the new Youth Entrepreneurship and Volunteer Center to the promising high school graduates, such as Kerionne, who have learned business and leadership skills and are pursuing postsecondary education.
One of the most inspiring stories is that of the Metanoia Community Development Corporation itself -- the faith-based, community-led, asset-driven community development organization that Stanfield and Oliveira founded, which has been a catalyst for much of the change in Chicora-Cherokee.
Metanoia has successfully expanded its programming, its scope, its staff and its funding over the years, managing to uphold its mission and its core values. By focusing on strengths -- both in the community and in the organization itself -- it has created a sustainable model for facilitating change over the long term.
“I really do believe in this organization; I believe in where it’s going,” said Tony Joyner, who has lived in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood for 27 years. He served as Metanoia’s first board chair and has worked as the organization’s housing director since 2006. “It’s been a rewarding experience to see the progression of the organization and the changes it’s made in the community,” he said.
Community-based: Solidarity, not charity
The key to Metanoia’s sustainability was established from the beginning.
When Stanfield and Oliveira first moved into the predominantly African-American neighborhood, the fresh-faced Princeton Theological Seminary graduates -- he, a white native of Greensboro, N.C.; she, a Brazilian-American whose family had moved to Landrum, S.C., when she was 10 -- were charged with fostering a relationship with community members.
As urban ministers for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina’s Charleston Poverty Initiative, Stanfield and Oliveira had a commitment of support from CBFSC of $120,000 a year for three years to establish an asset-driven approach to community development.
“Poor communities are poor communities because of one thing and one thing only: they lack money,” Stanfield said. “That’s the only thing this community doesn’t have. Everything else is here. They just need to recognize that and capitalize on what they have. They have to focus on their gifts.”
The couple embraced the responsibilities with enthusiasm. In their first year, they sought out interested community members and set up an advisory board to identify concerns and assets. They joined and became involved in St. Matthew Baptist Church and bought a home in the neighborhood.
“I don’t think the importance of living in the neighborhood can be overstated. That shows a huge commitment when you are clearly an outsider,” said Steven Porter, an instructor at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. “It’s a reflection of the incarnation of Jesus Christ -- God taking up residence in us.”
Indeed, that initial year was fundamental in shaping the focus of what would in 2003 become the Metanoia Community Development Corporation.
“The initial expectation of improving the fortunes and prospects of some poor children has become a ministry that is bringing transformation to an entire community,” said Jay Kieve, the coordinator of CBFSC.
Metanoia is rooted in a theology of the kingdom of God as expressed in the ministry of Jesus Christ, who called everyone to a “metanoia” -- a push toward something better, a positive change.
That idea of pushing toward something better with understanding is fundamental to the organization’s community-based approach, and it explains why Stanfield -- now the organization’s CEO and an associate minister at St. Matthew Baptist -- insists on doing the work from within the community.
The problem with social work that approaches a population from the outside, Stanfield said, is that the well-intentioned outsiders make assumptions about the people they are trying to help, the problems they are trying to fix and the solutions they are trying to impose.
“When you’re coming from the inside, you’re listening before you’re making any assumptions,” Stanfield said. “I think that’s another secret to our longevity: the idea of listening first. It creates the position of leaders as learners first.”
This is why, when putting together an advisory council in those early days, Stanfield and Oliveira selected community members with a long history in the neighborhood. And Metanoia still relies on its Council of Advocates to build support. In fact, most members of both its Board of Directors and its staff live in the neighborhood.
The organization’s autonomy is critical in community-based models of community development, which follow the iron rule of trusting people to come up with their own solutions. It’s a crucial difference from charity-based models that don’t necessarily empower communities.
“This model allows the people to own their success, and I think that has a lot to do with the staying power of the organization,” Porter said. “By deciding on the right model on the front end, they really laid the foundation for success from the beginning -- and a good start is really important when it comes to sustainability.”
Start with strength. That was Stanfield and Oliveira’s approach from the beginning.
As they got to know the Chicora-Cherokee community, the couple drew inspiration from sociologists John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, founders of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, who argue that the most efficient and effective way to heal a community is to focus on its strengths.
“Instead of looking for the problems, the asset-driven approach to community development looks for the bright spots to solve the problems themselves,” Stanfield said. “And that lends itself to our sustainability, too.”
That approach was the genesis of Metanoia’s first programming initiative, an after-school program for students who show leadership potential or academic motivation. Young Leaders was launched in the fall of 2003 based on the community-defined strengths and goals.
“Focusing on the best and brightest students has been very important for gaining and enhancing their reputation in the neighborhood, because it’s this self-perpetuating cycle of success,” Porter said.
As the Young Leaders grow up, student volunteers from the College of Charleston continue to work with them, focusing on character education, entrepreneurship and financial literacy.
“It’s all about finding the bright spots,” Stanfield said.
From its initial focus on youth, the organization quickly began to expand into other enterprises. Having identified vacant homes as a community asset, Metanoia began purchasing, rebuilding and selling them to first-time homebuyers. In 2008, they organized the renovation of two vacant duplexes owned by St. Matthew Baptist Church, to be used as housing for local students and interns working in the community.
“By creating home ownership opportunities and buying rentals, we’re creating job opportunities,” Stanfield said. “It’s about recycling capital in the neighborhood. That’s what makes a healthy neighborhood.”
Of course, fixing up homes doesn’t do a thing without people to live in them. So in 2008 Metanoia began its financial literacy programs, including a creative collaboration with Atlantic Bank and Trust designed to help folks during the depths of the subprime mortgage crisis.
It did the trick for Lisa McLean when her pre-qualified application was rejected.
“I knew as soon as I called them that I was in good hands. I felt like I was really blessed. They made the home-buying process so much easier and smoother than when I was with the realtor,” said McLean -- who, based on her home-buying experience, decided to get involved with Metanoia. She is now the board chair.
Metanoia’s economic impact also is being felt across the community. A 2010 study estimates that $1.5 million will go to local employees and businesses and 3.6 jobs will be created annually over a 10-year period.
Public murals and a community garden have also engaged and uplifted community members.
“The garden has gotten everyone involved. You can really feel that there’s a sense of pride in the neighborhood now,” McLean said. “I just see Metanoia going forward and getting more and more people involved in the community.”
One way the organization is doing that is by creating as many opportunities for community input as possible. For example, at a town hall meeting last spring, stations were set up for residents to identify what is working and not working in the neighborhood by placing different colored flags on maps.
And, it turns out, there are little bright spots shining everywhere you look in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood.
Rooted in faith: Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t
Metanoia’s approach to its own sustainability focuses on assets as well. And its greatest strength, Stanfield said, is its commitment to its fundamental values: remaining community-based, asset-driven and rooted in faith.
No matter how much the organization grows, those core values are always the guiding force.
“Sometimes we all have to ask ourselves the million-dollar question: What are you willing to give up for a million dollars? What aren’t you willing to give up? You must always have some unchanging thing that you can’t let go of -- not even for a million dollars.”
Fortunately, Metanoia has not been tempted to compromise its core values, thanks in large part to the CBFSC, which continues to support the organization with $100,000 per year.
“Their support can’t be underscored too much,” Stanfield said. “That’s what allows me not to have to worry about paying me so that I can concentrate on other funding.”
“Within those first three years, a couple of things were very clear,” said Kieve, of the CBFSC. “Bill and Evelyn are wonderful ministers who deeply understand how to do community development as ministry; and this model for ministry is showing promise within this community.”
“The ministry is sustainable because Bill transforms our investment of about $100,000 a year into $1 million through grants and other fundraising. He helps others see what he loves about the community and how to help it in a transformational and lasting way.”
Aside from support from the CBFSC, another key to Metanoia’s financial sustainability is its diverse funding sources. From local governmental and nongovernmental grants to individual and corporate donors to annual fundraisers such as a jubilee banquet and golf tournament, Metanoia is not overly dependent on any one source.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some rough periods. “It requires much more spiritual discipline to get through the lean times,” Stanfield said. “You’ve just got to concentrate on what you do have.”
And what they do have is faith, along with a definition of success that is based on faithfulness, not outward measures.
“Some days might feel hopeless, but if you’ve been faithful that day, you can go to bed saying, ‘I did OK because I was faithful,’” Stanfield said. “And that’s success.”
From transformed streetscapes and decreased crime rates to improved police-community relations and increased community involvement, Metanoia is slowly creating success stories throughout the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood.
Stories like Kerionne’s. He is proud of the progress he made during his six years in the organization’s “leadership pipeline.”
“I did not take the initiative when I was younger. I wasn’t focused on my future. Now I’m a leader. My advice to the younger ones is to stay focused, keep a positive attitude and always think about your future. Getting your education, that’s the key to all the doors in your future,” he said.
And while Stanfield is happy to open the door for the Kerionnes of the neighborhood anytime, it’s his long-term goal that he’ll eventually no longer be needed.
“In 15 to 25 years, I’d like us to have grown enough opportunities for people -- enough businesses, enough housing opportunities -- that the community can sustain itself without us,” he said. “We have the goal of working ourselves out of our jobs, of handing over the keys and letting the community drive itself.”
That is when he’ll know that he really belongs on Success Street.
Read more about Metanoia »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
When Jonathan Brooks was growing up in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, the message was clear: if you end up here as an adult, you have failed.
Getting out of the neglected South Side community was the ticket to success, he knew. And he did get out, for a time. He went to Tuskegee University in Alabama to study architecture with the hopes of being upwardly mobile enough to never have to return.
But when he had to move back to Englewood to take care of his ailing mother, Brooks started on a journey that transformed his attitude toward his community -- and the church.
“I began to see the community with new eyes, not only the brokenness and tough stuff that I had always seen growing up, but I began to see the beauty in the relationships there and the resilience of the residents,” said Brooks, who also is a teacher, a trainer and an artist known as Pastah J.
“I began to see how beautiful it was.”
One of the most inspiring stories is that of the Metanoia Community Development Corporation itself -- the faith-based, community-led, asset-driven community development organization that Stanfield and Oliveira founded, which has been a catalyst for much of the change in Chicora-Cherokee.
Metanoia has successfully expanded its programming, its scope, its staff and its funding over the years, managing to uphold its mission and its core values. By focusing on strengths -- both in the community and in the organization itself -- it has created a sustainable model for facilitating change over the long term.
“I really do believe in this organization; I believe in where it’s going,” said Tony Joyner, who has lived in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood for 27 years. He served as Metanoia’s first board chair and has worked as the organization’s housing director since 2006. “It’s been a rewarding experience to see the progression of the organization and the changes it’s made in the community,” he said.
Community-based: Solidarity, not charity
The key to Metanoia’s sustainability was established from the beginning.
When Stanfield and Oliveira first moved into the predominantly African-American neighborhood, the fresh-faced Princeton Theological Seminary graduates -- he, a white native of Greensboro, N.C.; she, a Brazilian-American whose family had moved to Landrum, S.C., when she was 10 -- were charged with fostering a relationship with community members.
As urban ministers for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina’s Charleston Poverty Initiative, Stanfield and Oliveira had a commitment of support from CBFSC of $120,000 a year for three years to establish an asset-driven approach to community development.
“Poor communities are poor communities because of one thing and one thing only: they lack money,” Stanfield said. “That’s the only thing this community doesn’t have. Everything else is here. They just need to recognize that and capitalize on what they have. They have to focus on their gifts.”
The couple embraced the responsibilities with enthusiasm. In their first year, they sought out interested community members and set up an advisory board to identify concerns and assets. They joined and became involved in St. Matthew Baptist Church and bought a home in the neighborhood.
“I don’t think the importance of living in the neighborhood can be overstated. That shows a huge commitment when you are clearly an outsider,” said Steven Porter, an instructor at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. “It’s a reflection of the incarnation of Jesus Christ -- God taking up residence in us.”
Questions to consider:
- What difference would it make in your life and ministry if faithfulness was your measure of success?
- How do the core values of your organization contribute to its sustainability?
- What are the unchanging things that you will not let go of, even for $1 million?
- What are the most critical challenges facing your community? What are its greatest strengths in addressing those problems?
- What would happen if you asked those same questions about your organization?
Indeed, that initial year was fundamental in shaping the focus of what would in 2003 become the Metanoia Community Development Corporation.
“The initial expectation of improving the fortunes and prospects of some poor children has become a ministry that is bringing transformation to an entire community,” said Jay Kieve, the coordinator of CBFSC.
Metanoia is rooted in a theology of the kingdom of God as expressed in the ministry of Jesus Christ, who called everyone to a “metanoia” -- a push toward something better, a positive change.
That idea of pushing toward something better with understanding is fundamental to the organization’s community-based approach, and it explains why Stanfield -- now the organization’s CEO and an associate minister at St. Matthew Baptist -- insists on doing the work from within the community.
The problem with social work that approaches a population from the outside, Stanfield said, is that the well-intentioned outsiders make assumptions about the people they are trying to help, the problems they are trying to fix and the solutions they are trying to impose.
“When you’re coming from the inside, you’re listening before you’re making any assumptions,” Stanfield said. “I think that’s another secret to our longevity: the idea of listening first. It creates the position of leaders as learners first.”
This is why, when putting together an advisory council in those early days, Stanfield and Oliveira selected community members with a long history in the neighborhood. And Metanoia still relies on its Council of Advocates to build support. In fact, most members of both its Board of Directors and its staff live in the neighborhood.
The organization’s autonomy is critical in community-based models of community development, which follow the iron rule of trusting people to come up with their own solutions. It’s a crucial difference from charity-based models that don’t necessarily empower communities.
“This model allows the people to own their success, and I think that has a lot to do with the staying power of the organization,” Porter said. “By deciding on the right model on the front end, they really laid the foundation for success from the beginning -- and a good start is really important when it comes to sustainability.”
Metanoia's programs develop young leaders in the Chicora-Cherokee
community of North Charleston, S.C. Photo courtesy of Metanoia
Asset-driven: Get to know the community, not its problemsStart with strength. That was Stanfield and Oliveira’s approach from the beginning.
As they got to know the Chicora-Cherokee community, the couple drew inspiration from sociologists John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, founders of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, who argue that the most efficient and effective way to heal a community is to focus on its strengths.
“Instead of looking for the problems, the asset-driven approach to community development looks for the bright spots to solve the problems themselves,” Stanfield said. “And that lends itself to our sustainability, too.”
That approach was the genesis of Metanoia’s first programming initiative, an after-school program for students who show leadership potential or academic motivation. Young Leaders was launched in the fall of 2003 based on the community-defined strengths and goals.
“Focusing on the best and brightest students has been very important for gaining and enhancing their reputation in the neighborhood, because it’s this self-perpetuating cycle of success,” Porter said.
As the Young Leaders grow up, student volunteers from the College of Charleston continue to work with them, focusing on character education, entrepreneurship and financial literacy.
“It’s all about finding the bright spots,” Stanfield said.
From its initial focus on youth, the organization quickly began to expand into other enterprises. Having identified vacant homes as a community asset, Metanoia began purchasing, rebuilding and selling them to first-time homebuyers. In 2008, they organized the renovation of two vacant duplexes owned by St. Matthew Baptist Church, to be used as housing for local students and interns working in the community.
“By creating home ownership opportunities and buying rentals, we’re creating job opportunities,” Stanfield said. “It’s about recycling capital in the neighborhood. That’s what makes a healthy neighborhood.”
Of course, fixing up homes doesn’t do a thing without people to live in them. So in 2008 Metanoia began its financial literacy programs, including a creative collaboration with Atlantic Bank and Trust designed to help folks during the depths of the subprime mortgage crisis.
It did the trick for Lisa McLean when her pre-qualified application was rejected.
“I knew as soon as I called them that I was in good hands. I felt like I was really blessed. They made the home-buying process so much easier and smoother than when I was with the realtor,” said McLean -- who, based on her home-buying experience, decided to get involved with Metanoia. She is now the board chair.
Metanoia’s economic impact also is being felt across the community. A 2010 study estimates that $1.5 million will go to local employees and businesses and 3.6 jobs will be created annually over a 10-year period.
Public murals and a community garden have also engaged and uplifted community members.
“The garden has gotten everyone involved. You can really feel that there’s a sense of pride in the neighborhood now,” McLean said. “I just see Metanoia going forward and getting more and more people involved in the community.”
One way the organization is doing that is by creating as many opportunities for community input as possible. For example, at a town hall meeting last spring, stations were set up for residents to identify what is working and not working in the neighborhood by placing different colored flags on maps.
And, it turns out, there are little bright spots shining everywhere you look in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood.
Rooted in faith: Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t
Metanoia’s approach to its own sustainability focuses on assets as well. And its greatest strength, Stanfield said, is its commitment to its fundamental values: remaining community-based, asset-driven and rooted in faith.
No matter how much the organization grows, those core values are always the guiding force.
“Sometimes we all have to ask ourselves the million-dollar question: What are you willing to give up for a million dollars? What aren’t you willing to give up? You must always have some unchanging thing that you can’t let go of -- not even for a million dollars.”
Fortunately, Metanoia has not been tempted to compromise its core values, thanks in large part to the CBFSC, which continues to support the organization with $100,000 per year.
“Their support can’t be underscored too much,” Stanfield said. “That’s what allows me not to have to worry about paying me so that I can concentrate on other funding.”
“Within those first three years, a couple of things were very clear,” said Kieve, of the CBFSC. “Bill and Evelyn are wonderful ministers who deeply understand how to do community development as ministry; and this model for ministry is showing promise within this community.”
“The ministry is sustainable because Bill transforms our investment of about $100,000 a year into $1 million through grants and other fundraising. He helps others see what he loves about the community and how to help it in a transformational and lasting way.”
Aside from support from the CBFSC, another key to Metanoia’s financial sustainability is its diverse funding sources. From local governmental and nongovernmental grants to individual and corporate donors to annual fundraisers such as a jubilee banquet and golf tournament, Metanoia is not overly dependent on any one source.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some rough periods. “It requires much more spiritual discipline to get through the lean times,” Stanfield said. “You’ve just got to concentrate on what you do have.”
And what they do have is faith, along with a definition of success that is based on faithfulness, not outward measures.
“Some days might feel hopeless, but if you’ve been faithful that day, you can go to bed saying, ‘I did OK because I was faithful,’” Stanfield said. “And that’s success.”
From transformed streetscapes and decreased crime rates to improved police-community relations and increased community involvement, Metanoia is slowly creating success stories throughout the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood.
Stories like Kerionne’s. He is proud of the progress he made during his six years in the organization’s “leadership pipeline.”
“I did not take the initiative when I was younger. I wasn’t focused on my future. Now I’m a leader. My advice to the younger ones is to stay focused, keep a positive attitude and always think about your future. Getting your education, that’s the key to all the doors in your future,” he said.
And while Stanfield is happy to open the door for the Kerionnes of the neighborhood anytime, it’s his long-term goal that he’ll eventually no longer be needed.
“In 15 to 25 years, I’d like us to have grown enough opportunities for people -- enough businesses, enough housing opportunities -- that the community can sustain itself without us,” he said. “We have the goal of working ourselves out of our jobs, of handing over the keys and letting the community drive itself.”
That is when he’ll know that he really belongs on Success Street.
Read more about Metanoia »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Jonathan Brooks: Sometimes the church needs to follow and partner with others
The Kusanya Cafe in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago was established five years ago by a partnership that included Canaan Community Church. Photo courtesy of Kusanya Cafe
The pastor of an inner-city Chicago church shares how he and his congregation have changed the way they work in their neighborhood -- and how that has changed the community itself.When Jonathan Brooks was growing up in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, the message was clear: if you end up here as an adult, you have failed.
Getting out of the neglected South Side community was the ticket to success, he knew. And he did get out, for a time. He went to Tuskegee University in Alabama to study architecture with the hopes of being upwardly mobile enough to never have to return.
But when he had to move back to Englewood to take care of his ailing mother, Brooks started on a journey that transformed his attitude toward his community -- and the church.
“I began to see the community with new eyes, not only the brokenness and tough stuff that I had always seen growing up, but I began to see the beauty in the relationships there and the resilience of the residents,” said Brooks, who also is a teacher, a trainer and an artist known as Pastah J.
“I began to see how beautiful it was.”
Twelve years ago, he became the pastor of his childhood congregation -- now the nondenominational Canaan Community Church -- and he has developed an approach to ministry and community development that he outlines in his forthcoming book, “Church Forsaken: Practicing Presence in Neglected Neighborhoods.”
Brooks spoke to Faith & Leadership about the ways in which becoming the pastor at Canaan shifted his thinking from loving his neighbors to loving his neighborhood. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is your takeaway message for folks who are interested in the kind of work you do?
The church has been a very integral part of the community’s flourishing. It was the center of the community. It’s where people went to find out about what’s going on in the neighborhood, what’s going on in the world.
So my prayer is that the church would return to that understanding and not forsake its local place.
At the center of the message is this notion of not living above place. That we don’t have this idea that my faith is completely separate from where I live. Or I can live wherever I want because God is everywhere, omnipresent, and therefore it doesn’t really matter.
That’s not the way that God shows himself when he showed himself in human form. Jesus came down, was among the people, in the place.
We know clearly that there are no Godforsaken places, no Godforsaken people. There are only church-forsaken places, because it’s the church that’s called to be God’s hands and feet in the world. So if the place is still neglected and disinvested in, it’s not God that’s not there. It’s God’s people that are absent.
Therefore, we are not just called to sit inside the four walls and love one another. We are called clearly to love God and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, which means that we’re called to love our neighborhood.
Q: Where did you get the idea for community development-focused ministry?
I was pastor of the church, I was living in the neighborhood, and I was teaching in a school in Englewood at the same time. God was orchestrating that my life would be all within this one community.
When I went to the park with my daughters, I saw kids that I taught. When I went to the grocery store, I saw people that were in my church. And when I hung outside, I saw people that I grew up with. It ended up this hyperlocal life -- living, working, ministering and being in one community.
I began to see the community with new eyes, not only the brokenness and tough stuff that I had always seen growing up, but I began to see the beauty in the relationships there and the resilience of the residents. I began to see how beautiful it was.
That changed the way I pastored. It changed the way I thought. It changed the way I lived.
It changed the way our church understood what our responsibility was in the neighborhood. God clearly spoke that our church was meant to be not only loving our neighbors but loving our neighborhood.
Thus began this journey of figuring out what it meant to be a church that was in love with its neighborhood -- all of its residents, all of its beauty, all of its brokenness, all of the things that make Englewood, Englewood.
So not only did that change my perspective, but it changed our process. We moved from our church focusing on what I call creating “safe space.” We don’t want just our children to be safe in our church building or to be safe in our homes or to feel safe in our families.
When you create a safe space, you only create a space that’s safe for your people or your children or your family. But Jeremiah 29:7 is clear. It says, “Seek the peace and welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
It’s those last couple of words that really hit me hardest: it’s “in their welfare, in its welfare, that you will find your welfare,” which meant that when Englewood did good as a whole, that’s when my family is doing good, because we’re a part of Englewood.
If I work with community residents, organizations, politicians, law enforcement -- whoever is a part of trying to make our community better -- when we all work together, we can not only create a safe space, but we create a safe place, meaning that all of the people of the community can have greater safety, greater joy, greater flourishing, including my family.
Q: What are some specifics that folks could picture for how your church functions differently?
I think the main thrust is incarnational living. The first thing that our church does differently is we believe that it is important that we are a part of the community. My church went from being about 90 percent commuter to being about 65 percent local Englewood residents that walk to church.
It changes the way we think, because we no longer have an “us and them” mentality. Practically, what that would mean is we don’t do “outreach.” We do community engagement and events.
On Mondays, for example, we have what’s called the 5 Loaves Food Cooperative. So rather than having a food pantry that has the mentality, “There are people out there who need food; let us prepare bags of food for them, tell them when they should come and pick it up, tell them what things we’ve put in the bag,” we’ve completely flipped the paradigm and made it about “us.”
That’s a practical way of thinking “we” language. We are a part of this community; “we” do this together, and “we” meet our own needs. “They” don’t need the church to meet their needs; “we” need to meet our communal needs, and the church is just a part of that.
Each person gives $5 a week, and we put all of that money together and use it to go purchase groceries. We bring them back to the church, and then we come and we shop together. You get your milk, your eggs, your bread, your healthy vegetables, tomatoes, salad, things of that nature.
Before we had our own grocery store -- which we have now in our neighborhood -- those of us who had vehicles would go to stores and bring those things back so that the seniors wouldn’t have to take three buses to get to a grocery store.
We’re all able to get much more when we pool our resources together versus one person going to the grocery store trying to buy all the things that they need.
Q: Are there other examples?
When ministries are created, lots of churches just say, “Hey, these are the ministries we have. We have ushers. We have greeters. We have musicians. We have benevolence.” Then they say, “Who are the people who want to work for that?”
What our church does, though, is we try to match people’s gifts with needs that the community has expressed. We say to the community, “What are we going to do about this need?”
One of the needs in our community that was expressed was we were having trouble with watching a lot of our young people end up in the prison system. I worked with young people, walked with them and then ended up having to visit them in prison or in Cook County Jail.
So we said, “How can we get ahead of this?” We put our heads together as a community and came up with some ideas.
We try to push education, so we provide a college scholarship that is funded just by community events. We have different events throughout the year.
But here’s the catch about our college scholarship: it’s not merit-based. What allows you to get this is if you make the commitment to return back to the neighborhood once you complete school.
That was a community idea. We have a leadership vacuum in our neighborhood, because people keep thinking that to be successful you have to escape from the place. So how do we address that vacuum issue?
We say, “We want you to go to school. We want you to get experiences. We don’t even mind you leaving. But how amazing would it be if you brought that back?”
This is what happens when it’s about us and not just about that individual student or our individual church.
Our church doesn’t have to get the accolade for it. No. What we’re hoping is that we see the community change through the activity that the church participates in.
I tell people often that we don’t lead a lot of stuff. If you come to Canaan, it’s not that impressive. You don’t walk into our church and go, “Wow, this is amazing. Look at their facilities. Look at all the things they’re doing.”
We participate with the resident association. We participate with other organizations in the community, work with politicians, work with anybody that wants to see the community flourish.
We’re not a huge church with a bunch of different things going on. We’re a church that understands that to lead sometimes is to follow and partner.
Q: Tell us about your five-year effort to establish a cafe. What did you learn from that?
That was one of those partnerships that happened organically. There was a group of residents that had come up with this notion -- we were trying to have meetings and organize and participate in the neighborhood, but we never had a space. We didn’t have a space where you could sit down and talk, because the only things in our neighborhood were fast-food restaurants.
We wanted to open up our first sit-down restaurant. Once we talked about it, we realized we wanted it to be a not-for-profit, because the goal was to use it not just as a place to eat but as a place to gather.
There was one guy who kind of took the lead. His name is Phil Sipka. Phil became a member of Canaan; he came to Canaan because he saw that we were worried about the community flourishing, and that’s the kind of church that he wanted to participate in.
[He said,] “I don’t have a 501(c)(3). Is there any way that the church can participate?” The church became the fiscal agent for gathering donations and became a voice for the Kusanya Cafe. Kusanya is Swahili; it means “to gather together.”
Where most coffee shops can come up in one year even, it took us five years to get the coffee shop off the ground -- to find a space that we could have it in, to find a place where it could be built out where a landlord wasn’t trying to swindle us, to get all of the proper permits and all of the different things necessary.
We ended up having to purchase a building, because there were no landlords willing to build out the space. Another resident took the plunge of purchasing a building on behalf of the cafe and then the cafe moved in, and it was the first entity in this multiuse building.
It will be five years in November, and it’s been quite a journey to watch it, but this cafe has become a staple in our neighborhood.
It is where everybody goes. It’s where everybody meets. It’s where everybody sees one another, and it has become exactly what we hoped it would be. You walk in and everybody just says “hello” and knows your name, and it’s been excellent.
But the No. 1 thing that has been so excellent about it is it proved to me that Jeremiah 29:7 was correct.
Because it’s not just that our neighborhood has a gathering place. But I can take my children there and we get to enjoy it together, and I get to bring my friends when they come into town. And all of the negative stereotypes and ideas about my neighborhood get washed away in one visit to the Kusanya, because this is what we did for ourselves.
Canaan was a big part of it, but Canaan’s name is not on the top of the Kusanya Cafe. It doesn’t say “A ministry of Canaan Community Church.”
It is a stand-alone cafe that is for our community, and when you walk to the front door, there are three R’s on the front. It says, “Resident-owned, resident-operated, resident-sustained.”
What we want more than anything is for the community to understand that this is our coffee shop. We take care of it. We keep it open. We keep it nice, and as long as we are responsible for it, there will continue to be investment in it.
That’s one of the main things that I preach in our congregation -- that whoever has the ownership will have the responsibility. Whoever has ownership will sustain it.
If you want something to sustain longer than your church or longer than your tenure as a pastor or longer than your tenure as a ministry leader, then allow the neighborhood to own it. It becomes much bigger than anything your local church could create.
Q: You have a book coming out about your work. Is the book intended to help people replicate what you’ve done?
Well, it’s not really about replication. I don’t believe you can replicate. Context is too important.
What I do is give principles in the book about what I learned from my context and my experiences. I think the principles are transferable.
Although I live in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago, I’m still talking to the affluent soccer mom that lives in Wheaton, Illinois, because the principles are transferable.
There are specific things that God has called the church to do that -- because we’re seeking comfort rather than the call of God in our lives -- we have kind of forsaken and done things our own way. Then we’re wondering why we’re not seeing the impact that God desires.
That’s why the book is called “Church Forsaken” -- because it’s really talking about the various ways that we’ve forsaken what God has called us to do as the local church.
Read more from Jonathan Brooks »
Every year, an estimated 1.6 million Americans participate in short-term mission trips, spending over one billion dollars-figures that have increased exponentially in the last two decades. About one third of U.S. congregations sponsor such trips each year. While they are referred to as "mission" trips, many trips focus not on conversion or evangelism, but on service projects-building a playground, providing medical care, or serving free meals to the poor. Short-term mission participants have a genuine desire to transform conditions of poverty, yet they don't always know how to go about it; many people involved in short-term mission work virtually reinvent the wheel when they design and plan their service projects.
Making a Difference in a Globalized World: Short-term Missions that Work is a guide to leaders of such trips. The book presents clear insight and research from anthropologists and development professionals, and encourages individuals to lead mission trips that make a greater impact on the communities that they are serving.
The text provides:
Brooks spoke to Faith & Leadership about the ways in which becoming the pastor at Canaan shifted his thinking from loving his neighbors to loving his neighborhood. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is your takeaway message for folks who are interested in the kind of work you do?
The church has been a very integral part of the community’s flourishing. It was the center of the community. It’s where people went to find out about what’s going on in the neighborhood, what’s going on in the world.
So my prayer is that the church would return to that understanding and not forsake its local place.
At the center of the message is this notion of not living above place. That we don’t have this idea that my faith is completely separate from where I live. Or I can live wherever I want because God is everywhere, omnipresent, and therefore it doesn’t really matter.
That’s not the way that God shows himself when he showed himself in human form. Jesus came down, was among the people, in the place.
We know clearly that there are no Godforsaken places, no Godforsaken people. There are only church-forsaken places, because it’s the church that’s called to be God’s hands and feet in the world. So if the place is still neglected and disinvested in, it’s not God that’s not there. It’s God’s people that are absent.
Therefore, we are not just called to sit inside the four walls and love one another. We are called clearly to love God and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, which means that we’re called to love our neighborhood.
Q: Where did you get the idea for community development-focused ministry?
I was pastor of the church, I was living in the neighborhood, and I was teaching in a school in Englewood at the same time. God was orchestrating that my life would be all within this one community.
When I went to the park with my daughters, I saw kids that I taught. When I went to the grocery store, I saw people that were in my church. And when I hung outside, I saw people that I grew up with. It ended up this hyperlocal life -- living, working, ministering and being in one community.
I began to see the community with new eyes, not only the brokenness and tough stuff that I had always seen growing up, but I began to see the beauty in the relationships there and the resilience of the residents. I began to see how beautiful it was.
That changed the way I pastored. It changed the way I thought. It changed the way I lived.
It changed the way our church understood what our responsibility was in the neighborhood. God clearly spoke that our church was meant to be not only loving our neighbors but loving our neighborhood.
Thus began this journey of figuring out what it meant to be a church that was in love with its neighborhood -- all of its residents, all of its beauty, all of its brokenness, all of the things that make Englewood, Englewood.
How could we be God’s representatives and good neighbors -- love the community the way God loves it?
My prayer from that is that local churches would understand that that command that God gives us to love God and love our neighbor has implications in a local church.So not only did that change my perspective, but it changed our process. We moved from our church focusing on what I call creating “safe space.” We don’t want just our children to be safe in our church building or to be safe in our homes or to feel safe in our families.
When you create a safe space, you only create a space that’s safe for your people or your children or your family. But Jeremiah 29:7 is clear. It says, “Seek the peace and welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
It’s those last couple of words that really hit me hardest: it’s “in their welfare, in its welfare, that you will find your welfare,” which meant that when Englewood did good as a whole, that’s when my family is doing good, because we’re a part of Englewood.
If I work with community residents, organizations, politicians, law enforcement -- whoever is a part of trying to make our community better -- when we all work together, we can not only create a safe space, but we create a safe place, meaning that all of the people of the community can have greater safety, greater joy, greater flourishing, including my family.
Q: What are some specifics that folks could picture for how your church functions differently?
I think the main thrust is incarnational living. The first thing that our church does differently is we believe that it is important that we are a part of the community. My church went from being about 90 percent commuter to being about 65 percent local Englewood residents that walk to church.
It changes the way we think, because we no longer have an “us and them” mentality. Practically, what that would mean is we don’t do “outreach.” We do community engagement and events.
On Mondays, for example, we have what’s called the 5 Loaves Food Cooperative. So rather than having a food pantry that has the mentality, “There are people out there who need food; let us prepare bags of food for them, tell them when they should come and pick it up, tell them what things we’ve put in the bag,” we’ve completely flipped the paradigm and made it about “us.”
That’s a practical way of thinking “we” language. We are a part of this community; “we” do this together, and “we” meet our own needs. “They” don’t need the church to meet their needs; “we” need to meet our communal needs, and the church is just a part of that.
Each person gives $5 a week, and we put all of that money together and use it to go purchase groceries. We bring them back to the church, and then we come and we shop together. You get your milk, your eggs, your bread, your healthy vegetables, tomatoes, salad, things of that nature.
Before we had our own grocery store -- which we have now in our neighborhood -- those of us who had vehicles would go to stores and bring those things back so that the seniors wouldn’t have to take three buses to get to a grocery store.
We’re all able to get much more when we pool our resources together versus one person going to the grocery store trying to buy all the things that they need.
Q: Are there other examples?
When ministries are created, lots of churches just say, “Hey, these are the ministries we have. We have ushers. We have greeters. We have musicians. We have benevolence.” Then they say, “Who are the people who want to work for that?”
What our church does, though, is we try to match people’s gifts with needs that the community has expressed. We say to the community, “What are we going to do about this need?”
One of the needs in our community that was expressed was we were having trouble with watching a lot of our young people end up in the prison system. I worked with young people, walked with them and then ended up having to visit them in prison or in Cook County Jail.
So we said, “How can we get ahead of this?” We put our heads together as a community and came up with some ideas.
We try to push education, so we provide a college scholarship that is funded just by community events. We have different events throughout the year.
But here’s the catch about our college scholarship: it’s not merit-based. What allows you to get this is if you make the commitment to return back to the neighborhood once you complete school.
That was a community idea. We have a leadership vacuum in our neighborhood, because people keep thinking that to be successful you have to escape from the place. So how do we address that vacuum issue?
We say, “We want you to go to school. We want you to get experiences. We don’t even mind you leaving. But how amazing would it be if you brought that back?”
This is what happens when it’s about us and not just about that individual student or our individual church.
Our church doesn’t have to get the accolade for it. No. What we’re hoping is that we see the community change through the activity that the church participates in.
I tell people often that we don’t lead a lot of stuff. If you come to Canaan, it’s not that impressive. You don’t walk into our church and go, “Wow, this is amazing. Look at their facilities. Look at all the things they’re doing.”
We participate with the resident association. We participate with other organizations in the community, work with politicians, work with anybody that wants to see the community flourish.
We’re not a huge church with a bunch of different things going on. We’re a church that understands that to lead sometimes is to follow and partner.
Q: Tell us about your five-year effort to establish a cafe. What did you learn from that?
That was one of those partnerships that happened organically. There was a group of residents that had come up with this notion -- we were trying to have meetings and organize and participate in the neighborhood, but we never had a space. We didn’t have a space where you could sit down and talk, because the only things in our neighborhood were fast-food restaurants.
We wanted to open up our first sit-down restaurant. Once we talked about it, we realized we wanted it to be a not-for-profit, because the goal was to use it not just as a place to eat but as a place to gather.
There was one guy who kind of took the lead. His name is Phil Sipka. Phil became a member of Canaan; he came to Canaan because he saw that we were worried about the community flourishing, and that’s the kind of church that he wanted to participate in.
[He said,] “I don’t have a 501(c)(3). Is there any way that the church can participate?” The church became the fiscal agent for gathering donations and became a voice for the Kusanya Cafe. Kusanya is Swahili; it means “to gather together.”
Where most coffee shops can come up in one year even, it took us five years to get the coffee shop off the ground -- to find a space that we could have it in, to find a place where it could be built out where a landlord wasn’t trying to swindle us, to get all of the proper permits and all of the different things necessary.
We ended up having to purchase a building, because there were no landlords willing to build out the space. Another resident took the plunge of purchasing a building on behalf of the cafe and then the cafe moved in, and it was the first entity in this multiuse building.
It will be five years in November, and it’s been quite a journey to watch it, but this cafe has become a staple in our neighborhood.
It is where everybody goes. It’s where everybody meets. It’s where everybody sees one another, and it has become exactly what we hoped it would be. You walk in and everybody just says “hello” and knows your name, and it’s been excellent.
But the No. 1 thing that has been so excellent about it is it proved to me that Jeremiah 29:7 was correct.
Because it’s not just that our neighborhood has a gathering place. But I can take my children there and we get to enjoy it together, and I get to bring my friends when they come into town. And all of the negative stereotypes and ideas about my neighborhood get washed away in one visit to the Kusanya, because this is what we did for ourselves.
Canaan was a big part of it, but Canaan’s name is not on the top of the Kusanya Cafe. It doesn’t say “A ministry of Canaan Community Church.”
It is a stand-alone cafe that is for our community, and when you walk to the front door, there are three R’s on the front. It says, “Resident-owned, resident-operated, resident-sustained.”
What we want more than anything is for the community to understand that this is our coffee shop. We take care of it. We keep it open. We keep it nice, and as long as we are responsible for it, there will continue to be investment in it.
That’s one of the main things that I preach in our congregation -- that whoever has the ownership will have the responsibility. Whoever has ownership will sustain it.
If you want something to sustain longer than your church or longer than your tenure as a pastor or longer than your tenure as a ministry leader, then allow the neighborhood to own it. It becomes much bigger than anything your local church could create.
Q: You have a book coming out about your work. Is the book intended to help people replicate what you’ve done?
Well, it’s not really about replication. I don’t believe you can replicate. Context is too important.
What I do is give principles in the book about what I learned from my context and my experiences. I think the principles are transferable.
Although I live in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago, I’m still talking to the affluent soccer mom that lives in Wheaton, Illinois, because the principles are transferable.
There are specific things that God has called the church to do that -- because we’re seeking comfort rather than the call of God in our lives -- we have kind of forsaken and done things our own way. Then we’re wondering why we’re not seeing the impact that God desires.
That’s why the book is called “Church Forsaken” -- because it’s really talking about the various ways that we’ve forsaken what God has called us to do as the local church.
Read more from Jonathan Brooks »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Making a Difference in a Globalized World: Short-term Missions that Work is a guide to leaders of such trips. The book presents clear insight and research from anthropologists and development professionals, and encourages individuals to lead mission trips that make a greater impact on the communities that they are serving.
The text provides:
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