UTM & the Philosophy of CCDA (Part 1)
Twenty-Seven years ago, I was at my wit’s end. Having recently moved into an urban community on the NE side of Grand Rapids to do ministry, I was overwhelmed by the violence, brokenness, and despair, and I didn’t know what to do. A month earlier, a shootout between a crack dealer and one of his customers whom he cheated (by selling him dial soap made to look like crack rocks) took place right above the apartment where my college roommates and I lived. A shotgun blast from the crack addict left part of the drug dealer’s hand embedded in the wall while leaving a weird burning smell in the upstairs hallway.
As a first-year seminary student that desired to share the love of Christ with the urban poor, we reserved a large room in our apartment to help homeless people in need of housing. At the same time, I had just begun working at the elementary school across the street from me as a supervisor of an after-school recreation program, which allowed me the opportunity to build relationships with many fatherless children trapped in poverty within my neighborhood. Right before the shootout, we recently brought in Jon, a homeless man who previously lived in a broken down El Camino under the Grand Rapids S-Curve. The shooting scared Jon so much that he observed: “it was much safer living in my old car than around here.” But after the gun battle, I became much more acutely aware of my surroundings. Until the shootout, I hadn’t noticed the bullet holes that littered our house’s front siding from a previous drive-by shooting (before we moved in). And I hadn’t paid attention to students within the rec program that I supervised were selling in front of my house or kiddy corner across the street at the neighborhood park. From that point on, I began working with the Grand Rapids Vice to rid the apartment above me, along with several other houses on our block that were trap houses for crack dealers.
Amid all the turmoil, I heard about an urban ministry conference sponsored by CCDA (Christian Community Development Association) held in Detroit. Several hundred pastors, community developers, and urban ministers converge to fellowship and help each other how to rebuild and restore communities of need that were broken by poverty, violence, and despair. The visionary leader of CCDA was Dr. John M. Perkins, a seasoned evangelical civil rights leader who had developed several successful ministries among the poor (both rural and urban) in Mississippi and California. Having read “With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development,” https://www.amazon.com/Justice-All-Strategy-Community-Development/dp/0830759549 I was familiar with Perkin’s philosophy of ministry but had not seen it in action…until the conference. So I drove to Detroit and was blown away! On both Friday and Saturday mornings, I went on tours to visit urban ministries in Detroit that were effectively reaching Detroit neighborhoods that resembled war zones in the Middle East.
Amid all the brokenness and violence, Detroit churches and ministries rebuilt communities, as the gospel of Jesus transformed lives. I witnessed churches and non-profits investing in the lives of fatherless children by partnering with public schools. I saw flourishing drug-rehab centers. I toured housing programs that helped the poor own their own homes, along with job-training programs that effectively placed participants with living-wage employment. I observed an army of volunteers and staff sharing Jesus as they serviced these neighborhoods. On Friday evening, I listened to the testimony of a nurse that managed the Voice of Calvary health center in Jackson, Mississippi. She shared her life experiences growing up without a father, experiencing poverty, attending poor-performing public schools, and living in a shotgun shack of a house. She spoke of attending VOC ministry programs, coming to faith in Christ, yet having three children out of wedlock, and how the staff and volunteers of VOC mentored her through adulthood, walking alongside her through college. She ended her testimony with the charge: “Don’t give up on that fatherless teenager, that young single-mother or jobless young father! That was me 15 years ago. Don’t give up!
At that moment, it all made sense to me. There was no quick-fix to the multiple issues that were devastating the neighborhood where I was living! My response was to live a life faithful to Jesus for the long-haul as I loved those around me. Yet certain guiding principles that aligned with Scripture were needed to act as a scaffolding to support doing ministry in my inner-city community, which I discovered at the CCDA conference and the writings of Dr. Perkins. Thus UTM, since its inception, has sought to live out these eight guiding principles of Christian Community Development. Over the next several weeks, I will be identifying and explaining each principle of Christian Community Development and how UTM lives them out on a day-to-day basis.