Feature Article: Winter 2009-2010

Ministry in the neighborhood

A church partners with others in their community

by Samuel Voth Schrag

He walked in during the sermon—an odd enough occurrence—and his ragged beard, battered red jacket, and furtive manner were more than enough to distract me from the preaching task at hand. He puttered around the back of the sanctuary for a while, while the people in the back pews looked on nervously, before striding up the center aisle where he claimed a center pew. During sharing time, he took the microphone, introduced himself as Jim, explained that life was hard, but that God was greater, and that we all should vote for him for mayor of St. Louis in the upcoming election. Then, he gave the microphone back to the usher, got up, and left the building.

In the fall of 2008, the St. Louis Mennonite Fellowship (SLMF) purchased its first building in a low income neighborhood in southern St. Louis. By our second Sunday in the building, we experienced the different culture of our new neighborhood in the form of our neighbor Jim, and soon afterwards lost the first car windows and cell phones to theft during an evening meeting. We had rented from other congregations for the first 30 years of our history, mostly in suburbs around St. Louis, so a low-income neighborhood was outside our comfort zone. Beyond the obvious challenges of owning our own building—the water in the basement, the lawn needing to be mowed every week, and the bathrooms requiring cleaning—the community around the church became a much greater part of our experience as a congregation. After that encounter on our second Sunday, a constant stream of visitors have been inserting themselves in our lives and asking for our assistance, and we have not lacked for opportunities to live out God’s mission.

In the fall of 2008, the St. Louis Mennonite Fellowship purchased its first building in a low income neighborhood in southern St. Louis.

Faced with a poor neighborhood, an economic crisis, and a new building, our task as a congregation was to discern how to best serve God in our new community: How might we offer service to the poor, justice to the oppressed, and the vision of Christ to all people?

There were some obvious first steps. Since we did not know our neighbors, we tried to listen well. We mined the demographic data collected by the city and the census bureau; we walked the neighborhood, going door-to-door to introduce ourselves to our neighbors in the community; we visited local neighborhood organizations; and we met with the local churches and social service agencies to see what they were doing.

And we began to ask questions about how we might add to the community in our new location. We asked social workers in the congregation and service agencies in the community, and we listened to what people in the neighborhood were requesting. These questions led to much more extensive training for our greeters, a collection of nonperishable food in the foyer, and relationships with a local ecumenical agency with a long history in the neighborhood, Isaiah 58 Ministries.

Isaiah 58 Ministries (www.i58ministries.org) began as a food pantry in 1970. It was formed as a cooperative among five churches along south Grand Street in St. Louis, based on the passage from Isaiah 58:9b-12: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday . . . Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in” (NRSV).

Since then, it has spun off a senior center and a childcare center. In addition to the food pantry it now offers a clothing exchange, rental assistance, and job training. Right now, Isaiah 58 is expanding into healthy living services, planning healthy cooking classes, free physicals and shots, and efforts to encourage healthy lifestyles. Finding such a vibrant and energetic organization so close to our new building was a blessing—it was clear that the Holy Spirit had been at work in the neighborhood long before we arrived, and we were eager to join in the mission. But engaging with the Isaiah 58 ministries has been an interesting challenge for the congregation. We had to decide how much energy to put into this new ministry and discovered some of the blessings and challenges of ecumenical ministry.

Brenda Booth, the executive director of Isaiah 58, has been a blessing, serving as a one-woman welcoming committee to the neighborhood. Brenda, a social worker and pastor has taught Sunday school at SLMF. There she has shared the challenges of urban ministry and the needs of the food pantry, suggesting techniques for helping people who come into the church building as well as how to handle crime in the neighborhood. She also helped us think theologically about serving others, how providing assistance like job training, computer access, and the like, rather than simply food aid, may help people break the cycle of poverty. One of the blessings of the kind of ecumenical perspective Isaiah 58 represents is the ability to collect people with greater expertise, to focus resources, and to care in ways that we hope respect the complicated nature of poverty in the modern nation state.

. . . One of the things we wrestle with is the balance between participating in the wider mission of God in the city and our own particular calling to share the Anabaptist/ Mennonite perspective on faith.

We also have been a blessing to Isaiah 58. The needs of the food pantry have been increasing, and their donations have been decreasing. In 2007, Isaiah 58 served 600 families a month, and this year it has been running over 800. At the same time, suburban churches that serve as the wealthiest partners for Isaiah 58 have been facing budget crises. Grocery stores that give excess bread and other pastries to the ministry have reduced production, and the reduced surplus means fewer donations. Brenda explains that sometimes people feel that a crisis like this should not “affect those at the bottom because they don’t have houses and investments, but it all trickles down.” New churches to help support the agency are a real need.

But the win-win of ecumenical ministry is not unconditional. As we reflect on our missional calling as a congregation, one of the things we wrestle with is the balance between participating in the wider mission of God in the city and our own particular calling to share the Anabaptist/ Mennonite perspective on faith. Mennonites are more or less unknown in the city. We all have to practice answering the questions, What is a Mennonite? and Where is your buggy? But participating in ecumenical work leaves us as a behind-the-scenes player, and urban ignorance about the Anabaptist/Mennonite context continues to flourish. If part of our Anabaptist identity is a commitment to service, it is much easier to communicate that commitment to newcomers when our efforts have our name on it, and outsourcing our direct service work to another organization means that we rub shoulders with the poor less often than we would otherwise.

So we have looked for ways to combine our efforts at service and our efforts at evangelism. Along with food pantry donations, we have joined the PeaceMeal project, which is a free meal offered every Saturday, served by volunteers and open to anyone who wants to eat, so we can be personally involved in the ministry. Last fall we sponsored a chili cook-off as a fundraiser for Isaiah 58. We invited the neighborhood and the churches involved in Isaiah 58 to join us for an evening of food and fellowship, with the hope of having a positive impact on the community, both in the fundraising and in building community. While this event helped us learn some of the challenges of advertising and inviting the community (even with a building and a sign out front, it is still difficult to break into people’s routines) it was an opportunity to serve in times of economic trouble, to offer our Anabaptist vision to our new neighborhood, and to grow in relationship with those God has called us to love in the world.

As a church seeking to act as followers of Christ, there is always plenty of work to be done in the world, particularly in times of economic crisis. We’re still learning what it means to engage with poverty, to confront structural issues in our society, and to work within ecumenical frameworks while preserving our Anabaptist identity. But through the leading of the Holy Spirit, we hope to continue to flourish together.

Samuel Voth Schrag is pastor of St. Louis Mennonite Fellowship in Missouri.