Nick Holovaty, J-T Kelly and Sean Connolly prepared this report about a reconnaissance trip they took to our southern branches looking for what God might be calling us to do there. On this trip they discovered Allendale and heard God calling the People of Praise to live there. They gave the report at the 2002 Leaders’ Conference for Men.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Recording begins after Paul DeCelles has already begun speaking.]
PAUL DECELLES: . . . Okay, so let’s come up, guys. I want to explain to you that we—let me—I’m going to read my notes here: so, we want the community to grow, and we want to bring the Kingdom of God to the weak, the lame, the blind, and the poor. We want to make the community a good place for kids. So we set up a planning team in Headquarters.
In fact, we hired these three guys. This is Nick Holovaty, recently from Moscow and Kiev. He’s a Notre Dame student, also. He took his senio- —he stopped going to school after his junior year so he could work for us for a year, and then he’s going back to complete his senior year in August.
And Sean Connolly. Yay, Sean. And—who’s also got red hair [laughter]. And J-T, who speaks for himself [more laughter]. And J-T is, of course, the man who has written so much of our music, which has been just a wonderful blessing to us.
These guys are—actually, I don’t know three more bright people than these guys. They’re really—they’re brilliant. But they’re also really committed to Christ.
And we also have just hired Mary Clare Ferber, who is from Servant Branch. She goes to St. Mary’s College here. She’s also going to stop going to school for her senior year. She’s completed her requirements for her major, and so she’s not going to hurt herself, either, by stepping aside for a year. She’ll work for us for a little more than a year, and then go back and complete her degree.
So, it’s going to be very nice to have her join Mary Frances Sparrow, and these three guys, and me, as the team—main team at Headquarters—working on this. We also hope to expand the others on this team as time goes on [applause and cheers].
This is something like an expansion of the planning team for the High Country Adventure that we had. But we didn’t have people hired full time; we just had full-time volunteers. In particular, Phil Monaco and Nano Farabaugh just did a spectacular job for over—planning for over a year, to pull off the High Country Adventure.
So, we sent these guys south, with the charge that they should scout out what, and where, we should do—what we should do to expand the community in our southern branches.
For—it’s interesting: I got a call from Jodi Engles, in the South Bend branch, this morning, about 7 o’clock. She said, very excitedly, “Did you see what the readings of the . . . ”—what do we call it? We used to call it the breviary, the Office, the Liturgy of the Hours— “ . . . what the reading is today?” In the Catholic tradition, and also of other people that use the same tradition.
And the reading was—I was going to read it, but we’ve run out of time. It’s Numbers, chapter 13, and a lot toward the end. And it had to do with Caleb and Joshua, along with some others going out across the River Jordan to scout out the enemy territory. And we were talking about these guys as “Caleb and Joshua going south.” Not that the south is enemy territory [laughter]. They could have gone north also, etc.
But by going into a place where we have—where the kingdom of God needs to grow; where changes need to happen; where people get a chance to be filled with the Spirit of God. . . . . We have a chance to baptize thousands and thousands of people in the Holy Spirit, in Ledbetter Heights.
They found that out. They found the place and they’re going to describe it to us.
So, they also were a little like—I wanted to explain, they went to all of our branches down there, in the south—not Tampa, ’cause it’s too far away for them to reach this time. But they will actually explain some of the reasons why we sent them there, in the presentation.
So, here I give you Joshua, Caleb, and Nehemiah. [Laughter.]
NICK: Yup, my name is Nick Holovaty. I—just a quick note—I lived in Russia for seven years with my folks, who are missionaries over there. So that’s why I’m relatively recently from Moscow and Kiev.
I’ve been working full-time at Headquarters since October. Sean’s been working here for about two months, and J-T’s been working for about a month. A lot of people want to know what we do at work, and we do all kinds of different things. So far, working at Headquarters has meant a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of talking to kids and adults. Learning a lot about—coming to an understanding of the People of Praise, how we work. A lot of brainstorming. And, recently, this 20-day trip.
Paul sent us on this trip because we had reached the point in our conversation where we couldn’t get much further without going somewhere and seeing what came up. We—and by “we” I mean Headquarters—were sure God was calling us to do something, but we weren’t sure what it was. And we realized we were going to have to get out there on the ground before we could move much further along in discerning his will.
So, a little more than a week after this realization, Sean, J-T, and I were on the road heading south. We were sent to gather information, and we called it a “reconnaissance mission.”
The decision to go south was the result of quite a bit of planning. We went south, first and foremost, because the head coordinators were sure God was calling us to some sort of action. “Us” meaning the People of Praise.
The fact that “we” are already in the south was key. We were going to visit the Gulf Coast branches: Shreveport, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. And, as Paul said, Tampa was just too far away for this trip.
A second reason we went south was that we knew God was calling us to an action with which the youth could help us. We knew that, whatever it was, it had to be something we could do with the help of 15-year-olds. And that kind of narrowed the field down for us. We had already learned, for instance, that that meant that the call to which we were responding was not to try and shut down the strip joints and porn shops here in South Bend. That may be something to which God is calling some of us. But, again, the particular call to which our road trip was response was not to do something that complicated and that dangerous. Fighting the sex industry just isn’t something we can ask 15-year-olds to help us do.
So to put it positively, we knew we were sent out to look for an action that would have a certain simplicity to it. Something sophomores, juniors, and seniors could help us do. Indeed, something for which their help would be indispensable. Which isn’t to say we were looking for something easy—just something relatively straightforward and safe.
The south, with the exception of Appalachia and some parts of the west, has the most widespread poverty in the country. So we were sent south because we suspected the south was the only place within a reasonable drive where we could find both “us” and actions we could do that would be straightforward and relatively safe.
So we went in search of what God was calling us to do, and we found it. We found it in Shreveport, in a section of town commonly referred to as “The Bottoms.” And this presentation is principally about Shreveport and The Bottoms. But let me give you a general overview of our trip first.
We left [on] February 15th. We spent two days driving to Shreveport. We spent the night in Indianola, Mississippi, which is where BB King was born. We spent five days in Shreveport; five days in Mobile; one day in Biloxi; two days in New Orleans; four more days in Shreveport; and then one day to drive home. Twenty days, 3,590 miles, three quarts of oil, and two tanks of coolant [laughter].
It could have been very grueling: a long time away from home, countless hours packed into a minivan, plus the daunting challenge to learn everything we could about cities to which we’d never been. But the truth is, the trip was a joy. Our brothers and sisters provided everything we needed: food, rest, fellowship, food, information, advice, direction, and food [laughter]. The Bible says that life with the Lord is like a feast, and in these four branches, life with the Lord is a feast. We all gained weight [laughter], quite literally.
In every branch we were housed by loving and generous brothers and sisters. In Shreveport, the Vaughans, the Parkers, and the Gideons each took one of us for the entire nine days. In Mobile, the Dreys hosted all of us. In Biloxi we all stayed overnight with the Ehemanns; and in New Orleans, the Coneys, the Mehaffeys, and the Slatterys each housed one of us.
It was wonderful to travel thousands of miles and be right at home.
Our first stop was in Shreveport; but, since I’m going to spend most of my time talking about Shreveport, I’m going to pass over it for now.
The branch in Mobile treated us like royalty. Every night a different family had us over for dinner. Julia Drey made a lot of phone calls for us and organized our stay. Neff Weber spent an afternoon telling us all about Mobile, and driving us around so that we could get the lay of the land.
And the Lord is clearly at work in that branch. The public meeting was wonderful. It was remarkably easy to meet people. Everyone was so friendly and outgoing.
One of the great things that happened in Mobile was an evening with a handful of young people in the branch. Twenty-something-year-olds. We spend some time playing music, exchanging songs, and singing together. And then we started praying together. And Jenny Burgess asked us, in a general way, to pray about her back; and J-T was, like, “Well, let’s pray now!” And so we did—and later found out that, after we’d left, she hadn’t had any pain; she was healed! So, praise God.
There’s a lot more stuff we could say about Mobile, but that’s just to give you a taste.
It was the Lord’s providence that we were able to attend a Tuesday night branch meeting in Biloxi. We only learned about the meeting Tuesday morning and, as it turned out, the branch members—some of them live pretty far away, so it was really great that we could meet all of them together.
The Biloxi branch, in case you don’t know, contains a lot of active and retired military personnel, who had an entirely new take on our “reconnaissance mission” [laughter]. They would ask us questions, and then they would say, “ . . . or is that classified?” [laughter]. It was funny.
Our short stay in Biloxi was a lot of fun. The branch was very welcoming. Phil and Carol Ehemann didn’t know we were coming until the day we arrived, but they fed us and put us up without hesitation. And at the end of the branch meeting, they prayed and prophesied over us, which was really great.
We only spent two days in New Orleans, and that was a disappointment. We would have loved to have stayed much longer, and gotten to know the branch and the city better. Like I said, we stayed at the Coneys’; I stayed at the Coneys’. Let’s see: J-T was at Mehaffeys’, and Sean was at Slatterys’.
I was great while it lasted. Sean and I organized a neighborhood guys’ tennis outing. Patrick Slattery and I still have a set to finish; the score is 4–4. [Light laughter.]
Linda Coney was especially helpful to us. She spent quite a while explaining how the city worked, tracking people down, making phone calls for us. We also talked for a while with Tom Evans, and that was great. Linda Coney also makes very good marinated pork [Nick and all laugh].
Like I said, we would have loved to have stayed longer, but we felt like God was calling us back to Shreveport, and after a late-night conversation with Paul, that’s what we decided to do. So we went back to Shreveport.
And now I’m going to talk about Shreveport.
Before I begin, I want to explain how Sean, J-T, and I have chosen to present this. We all wrote this together, so the responsibility [Nick chuckles] falls equally on our shoulders, what I say here.
We were sent to gather information, and we spent a lot of time doing just that. But more was going on. Before we left South Bend, the team told us that we were going out to look for what was on God’s heart, and that we’d be able to tell what that was by what really moved our hearts.
So what Sean and J-T and I are hoping to convey here is more than simply information. God spoke to us on this trip. A lot of stuff happened that was clearly prophetic. And to capture that, we’ve arranged the rest of this presentation in a series of stories. Sometimes the arrangement is chronological, sometimes it’s topical. Almost never is it logical [Nick and all laugh].
We were really happy to get to Shreveport. On our way down from South Bend we went through Arkansas, and just past the border, dead bugs started to collect on the windshield, and we knew we were getting to a place warmer than South Bend [laughter].
Driving into the city, we knew our task was going to be twofold: to get to know the branch, and to get to know the city. It wasn’t much to work with, but it was enough.
There was a public meeting the evening of the day we arrived, the 16th. And I know I’ve said this before, but something that really impressed us was how different, and yet how the same, the branch was, and the meeting was. We really felt at home right when we got there. We also got to meet a lot of the people straight off, which was a really good way to start the visit.
On Monday we started our reconnaissance of the city. We asked Steven Parker, who’s a senior in high school, to give us a tour of the town. We asked him to take us to the poorest part of town, and he took us to The Bottoms. And, what we saw there made a huge impression on us. It was really surprising. So, I thought we’d, sort of, do the slide show now, so that you guys can have images in your mind as I finish this.
This is Louisiana. Shreveport is right there [northwest corner].
This is clearly a map of Shreveport. Shreveport is right here, and then Bossier is over here, on the other side of the river. So, our target area is in Shreveport, but some of our statistics refer to both Shreveport and Bossier. So, just so you know.
And this is the same map, organized by neighborhood. This—let’s see. Sorry, pressed the wrong button. Wrong direction.
Okay. This, right here, is the target area. This blue here says “Ledbetter Heights,” and this says “Allendale.” So when I refer to Ledbetter Heights, to Allendale, to The Bottoms, I’m talking about this area right here. Broadmoor is where many of the branch members live.
And this is a detail of the target area. The green line is a line that we drew. We drove around the area; And we, basically, circled in an area that we thought was extreme in its decay, I guess. It was a visual rationale. From here to here is 1.4 miles, to give you a feel for that.
And this is what the neighborhood looks like. This is in Ledbetter Heights. Notice the house falling apart. Downtown is over here.
So, Shreveport proper has 200,145 people in it. Shreveport/Bossier is 392,302. Allendale and Ledbetter Heights, our target area, is 7,687.
The racial makeup of Shreveport—this is not Shreveport/Bossier; this is Shreveport— is 47% white and 51% black. And it’s rising; the percentages are rising. They have risen since 2000.
And this is the racial makeup of our target area: 97% black.
This is what the neighborhood looks like. There are 3,690 houses, total; that’s this column. And there are 3,043 occupied, which means that 647 houses in the area are vacant. 1,203 houses are owner occupied, 1,840 are rented. Which means that there’s 39.5% owner occupancy in our target area.
And in Ledbetter Heights, it’s quite a bit worse. There’s—20% of the houses are vacant and only 9.5[%] are owner occupied.
Many of the houses are condemned, like this one, but some people live in them anyway.
The rent people pay for a “shotgun shack,” which is like these—it’s called a shotgun shack because you’re supposed to be able to open the front door and the back door and shoot a shotgun through it. The rent people pay for a shotgun shack is about $100 a month.
But the houses are in such bad shape that utilities in the winter routinely run twice that.
Air conditioners are the exception, not the rule. People board their broken windows over to keep their houses from being burglarized. And every summer, we were told, a number of people die from the heat. This picture is noteworthy because that little speck of white is sky.
And this house is lived in.
You can’t drive a block without passing at least three vacant lots and abandoned houses.
The land is choked with fallen trees, toppling buildings, and trash. We recorded the block numbers and addresses of 25 vacant lots and 15 abandoned houses in less than two hours. And we were only driving down the busier streets.
Notice the boards on the windows here.
I asked BG, the director of Christian Services, what people in the area did for a living, and he just laughed. I said, “So we’re talking 95% percent of these people are on welfare?” And he nodded; he said “Something like that.”
The neighborhood is just rotting away. Notice the house is falling apart here. [One local realtor] said his company—which is one of the biggest in Shreveport—owns no property in the area, because it’s just not economically viable.
You spend $1,000 fixing up a place and you’re lucky to get 800 [dollars] back. One of the houses in the area collapsed while we were there. The mother and six children who lived here escaped at one o’clock in the morning, unharmed. But many of these places look like they could fall over if you pushed them hard enough.
We were surprised, because it just didn’t look like South Bend or Chicago. It didn’t look like anything we’d ever seen before.
This is the middle school with barbed wire around it. There are several schools in the area.
What we saw there was the worst poverty any of us had seen in the States. I saw children on the street who were dirty and hardly clothed.
This is a picture of the projects. These kids reminded me more of rural Russian poverty than of American urban poverty.
In fact, it reminded all of us of the rural poverty we’d seen in Mississippi and Arkansas on the way to Shreveport: the rotting houses, the trash, the rusted-out cars. The only difference was that out in the country, the houses were pretty far apart. In The Bottoms, they’re very close together.
You can see here the power plant, actually, that Russ Gideon works for.
It didn’t feel like the inner city. Sean grew up on the west side of South Bend, which is the poorer part of South Bend. J-T lived in inner-city Seattle for five months, and I spent a summer in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. We all agreed that something different was going on here.
There was very little graffiti. There were very few souped-up cars, with chrome rims and weird paint jobs, cruising the streets. There was a great deal of distrust, but it wasn’t tension. It was different from the north. Walking down the street, people thought—we were definitely out of place, but it wasn’t like people were hostile.
There wasn’t much evidence of money misspent; there’s evidence elsewhere of money misspent in inner city neighborhoods like these, but not here. In fact, it didn’t look like much money was being spent at all.
There were no grocery stores, only a few bars and a few liquor stores.
This is Tucker’s. It’s a bar that has a sign [that] says, “You can’t get in unless you’re 25 or older,” which was interesting. The—we suspected that they didn’t want younger—idle younger men wandering around.
And this is a—it calls itself a grocery store. It’s liquor store that also deals drugs. We talked to the priest at Blessed Sacrament, which is the Catholic church in The Bottoms, and he said they’d been trying for years to get these people out of the area, and they can’t. He suspects that they’re paying someone off in the city.
There were no gas stations. No evidence that there had been stores—there was evidence that there had been stores in the past, but they were all shut down. No banks, not even currency exchanges or check cashing places. It just looked like—it looked like all the money was draining out of the area
And this is all right downtown. I mean, right up against downtown.
This is me and Roosevelt standing outside of a shotgun shack that they had for rent. These houses have two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. There’s no heat, there’s no air conditioning, plumbing, power, and phone. Runs for $200 a month.
This is in this neighborhood. It doesn’t look like it, but this is Mount Canaan Baptist Church. It’s a black Baptist church with about—well they said 20 [hundred] to 2500 members. Yup.
And this is Blessed Sacrament, with barbed wire around the entire place.
This is Galilee Baptist, and this is razor wire around their parking lot.
And this is a large building that’s right by Booker T. Washington School. We like it a lot. We want to do cool stuff there, like big meetings, stuff like that.
This is the front of it.
Just to get you back on the map, the big white building is here; Mount Canaan Baptist is up here; Blessed Sacrament is here; Galilee Baptist is here. The police station is here.
And this is—these are the crime stats we have. It was hard to get crime stats; this is what we could do within a week. Let’s see. What it’s saying here is that there are 15.7 murders per 100,000 people, per year, in South Bend. And this is saying that there are 15.4 murders per 100,000 in Shreveport/Bossier, which is the most specific area we could find stats for. So, we’re looking at pretty much comparable crime rates.
This is household income distribution. The Y axis reads “number of people—number of households”—and the X axis is the financial brackets. So under $5000, there are 14,136; between $5–$10,000, there are 11,981; $10–15,000 for households, 11,410; $15–20,000, 10,804; $20–25 [thousand], 13,016. Total under—total households under $25,000 in the Shreve- —in greater Shreveport is 61,347.
This is household net worth. So again, [the] principle’s the same: number of households. And there are 18,531 households whose net worth are under zero. Zero to 5 is 21,154; 5–10 is 10,059; 10–25 is 17,009. Totalling—total under $25,000 is 66,763.
So, that’s the slide show. If we could have the lights back on. . . .
We were immediately very interested in The Bottoms. I mean, it made a huge impression on us. It was—so much so that we spent most of our time in Shreveport walking around, driving around the area, taking pictures, learning about it. And even when we were in Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans, we couldn’t stop thinking about The Bottoms.
As we drove around Allendale and Ledbetter Heights, we were quite a spectacle: three young white guys driving, and walking around, taking pictures. People would stop and just sort of [laughter, presumably in response to a gesture of Nick’s].
Unfortunately, our novelty didn’t make it any easier to meet people. In fact, the widespread reaction to us was one of distrust. We realized that part of the distrust came from the fact that we, obviously, didn’t live around there, and no one could figure out why we were on the premises. We were offered drugs. . . . And it was just kind of clear that it wasn’t normal for us to be there. But again it wasn’t a hostile thing; it was a “What’s going on?”
It was frustrating, and somewhat disheartening, but we eventually realized that if we’d been living there, the situation would have been quite a bit different.
We did have good conversations with a few people. J-T and I talked to one man who had lived in the same house there for 36 years. His name was Washington. We knocked on his door, and when he opened it, we told him we thought God was sending us to the area, and could he tell us something about the neighborhood and, in particular, about the for-rent houses across the street.
He was happy enough to talk to us. He kept repeating, “The last thing this neighborhood needs is more drug addicts. If you’re a drug addict, we don’t need you.” I finally asked him, “So what’s the first thing that this neighborhood needs?” And he said, “Well, that’s easy. It needs more Christian life.”
While we were there in Shreveport, we talked with several directors of local service organizations. We met with Henry Martin, the director of Shreveport Rescue Mission, which is a homeless shelter and resource center that seems to operate very much like Hope Rescue Mission, here in town.
We spoke with BG, who, like I said, is the director of Christian Services. They live—I mean, they’re centered right in Ledbetter Heights. They have two houses —one for men, one for women—where they put people up while they go through a program. And they also have a soup kitchen where they feed around 200 people a day, every day. BG is Franciscan.
Our first stop was at the Lighthouse, a Volunteers of America center sponsored by the Methodist church up the street. They run an after-school program, and programs for kids, helping them catch up, preparing them for college. And they run a mentoring program, as well.
We walked in, and we were greeted by Ron Anderson, who’s the director of the place. We said, “We’re visiting from South Bend. We’re members of the People of Praise, and we think God might be calling us to do something here in The Bottoms. We’re not sure what it is, but we wanted to talk with you about what you’re doing here, and about the area.” And Ron paused for a moment, kind of surprised; but then he said, warmly, “If God sent you to Shreveport, he sure sent you to the right place! There’s a lot that needs to be done here, and we could really use you here.”
And our reception at the other places we went to was very similar. God really opened the doors for us. At Mount Canaan Baptist Church, Deacon George surprised us with his directness and honesty. Everyone was eager to give us the information that we needed, and they were all very encouraging when they heard that God might be calling us to The Bottoms. We found that, really, the best way to introduce ourselves was to come in and say, “We’re here because God is calling us to do something.” It cut straight to the heart of the situation, and it saved us from also doing a bunch of unnecessary explaining.
The three of us went to church in The Bottoms one Sunday, both to Mt. Canaan and to Blessed Sacrament. We had met with Deacon George at Mount Canaan previously, and he had said that only about 10% of the people who go there lived within walking distance of the church. He said that most of them commute in from other, more wealthy, areas of the town. The church is 100% Af- —well, no: there’re two white people, I think, who go to the church.
When we were there, we didn’t see anyone who looked like they lived in the area. In fact, the assumption seemed to be that no one did. The preacher said things like, “We gotta thank God we aren’t living in shacks anymore.”
And the same seemed—I mean, the same scarceness of residents in the area seemed to be at Blessed Sacrament, as well. We talked to BG, and he actually said that very few of the people in the area go to church, even though there are plenty of churches in the area. We got the sense that the region was pretty much unchurched.
In our meeting with BG, he said that crime has really gone down in the area in the last 10 years. This was confirmed by everyone with whom we spoke. BG’s assistant said she never feels threatened when she walks down the street where their buildings are located. Which is actually saying a lot, because she said, that their street is one of the roughest the area; and she’s white.
We heard from several people that crime had been a real problem in the—from—in the early 80s to the early 90s. But that’s really been cleared up. For—there seemed to be two reasons. One: in the mid-90s, they got a bunch of casinos in, along the river. And the Casino owners basically said, “Look. We gotta stop crime. People aren’t gonna show up if they’re afraid of getting mugged.”
And another thing was, they had a really great chief of police, Stephen Prator; he’s now the sheriff. But he really put a lot of the key people behind bars, who were making it dangerous.
We asked BG: if he had the resources to do something more than what he’s doing, what would it be? He said that he’d open a house for kids, in addition to the two houses he has for adults.
He said something really interesting. He said there’s a significant number of kids who get kicked out of the house at age 17, and they have nowhere to go. They’re kicked out because they can’t bring another—in another welfare check once they get to be 17. “If they’re drug addicts,” BG said, “there’s somewhere for them to go. If they’re shoplifters, there’s somewhere for them to go. But if they’re just decent kids, they’re homeless.” He even mentioned that he’d seriously considered shutting down his houses for the adults, and opening them up for kids age 11 through, like, 25..
It was really telling: if these kids were living in the house only because they mean money, one can imagine what it must be like for a lot of them.
The simple visual impact of The Bottoms—the decay, the dilapidation—it immediately sent us thinking along the lines of material solutions. We would drive around and we would say things like, “Well, we could fix these houses!” Most of them were of pretty simple construction. It would be cheap, relatively easy, and the youth could certainly be a big help.
And we were very encouraged when we heard from Cliff—Cliff Vaughan—that fixing houses was something the branch had already been doing. Pat O’Connor, Cliff told us, had, several times, taken people from the branch out to decaying houses and spent the afternoon fixing them. [Former branch leader Pat O’Connor had died in a small plane crash in December 2001.]
Cliff described one situation where the entire neighborhood came out to watch what was happening. And then we were really struck by the potential that that meant. We could go into The Bottoms, we could fix something, and it would impact more than just the people living in the house.
This was in contrast to the rural situation, which we also checked out, where you get houses spread out in a—3 miles distant from each other.
The more we talked with Cliff, and the rest of the folks in the branch, the more we began to see the evidence of God’s action and God’s desire. The construction connection was huge. There’re a lot of people in the branch, comparatively speaking, who are in construction.
And, Pat O’Connor was huge. It sometimes seems like—seemed like we couldn’t think of things to do in The Bottoms that he hadn’t already done, or been trying to do.
We drove through the neighborhood once, and J-T said, “Well, what I want to do in this neighborhood is throw public meetings.” And we got back and it turned out Pat had been trying to do that for the last two years.
People in the branch kept telling us, “You know, Pat would really be all about this.” We began to realize that in a very real sense, we were in Shreveport to further something God had already been there doing for years. It was amazing. And quite moving. I never met Pat, but the more I was in Shreveport, the more I missed him.
As we were driving north, back to South Bend, a little before sunrise, J-T said something prophetic. He said, “You know, one thing that really amazes me about this branch is that they’re still so strong! The more you talk to people, the more you realize how crippling the loss of Pat could have been. He was so huge, so great. But the branch isn’t crippled. They’re hurt, and you can tell, but they’re pressing on.” I think we caught a glimpse of what Kevin [Ranaghan] meant when he said of Pat, “He’s gone, but he’s not far.”
We were waiting in Cliff’s office while he finished some stuff; he was gonna take us out to lunch. And we—it was sort of a break for us; we weren’t really thinking seriously about much. And out of the blue Sean said to us, “You know, this branch really loves kids!” And he was right. It seems like if the people in the branch aren’t in construction, they’re in pediatrics [laughter]. There were 21 kids distributed in the three houses where we stayed; 21 kids, and 17 girls [laughter].
We were driving across Cross Lake when it occurred to me that our thought, concerning The Bottoms—we might have been guided too much by what we saw. So, the houses were obviously in need of fixing, and so we thought a lot about fixing houses. And I wondered if, in doing so, we weren’t missing something, weren’t missing needs that we couldn’t see. So I asked the guys—I said, “What other needs are there in The Bottoms that we can’t see? Let’s try to think out of the box.”
And what J-T said, almost immediately, was, “What about Home Management Resources? That’s something we did in response to real needs that weren’t material.
We’ve heard quite a bit about the dependency of the people here, the messed-up families. Poverty impacts more than simply what shape your house is in.”
And that was a real breakthrough for us. Not so much because we started making plans to start Home Management Resources in The Bottoms, but because we remembered, for instance, what Sean had said about the branch really loving kids. We remembered about how big “family” is in the branch, how strong the families are. We remembered one thing about the POP, which is that we’re really good at families, and households, and life.
We realized there’s a whole lot that we could do in The Bottoms. And from that point, we started thinking much more broadly. In a way, we started saying, “We could do anything in here. We could build community in The Bottoms.”
There’s an active married couples group at St Joe’s, the church which most of the branch members attend. The folks in the branch generally revolve in the same circles as this group of married couples; there’s a lot of contact, a lot of common ground.
Cliff pointed out something about this group of people that was very intriguing. He said, “Many of these married couples are very eager to help the branch.”
Many of them had gone with the branch on Pat’s construction projects; and at Pat’s funeral, people approached Cliff saying, if there was anything that they could do to help, just to let them know. And he did; they’ve helped a lot, actually, at several branch outreaches.
And Cliff’s comment on this is interesting: he said he can see this sort of thing working evangelistically. The branch needs help, and these people are looking for ways to help. So they come; they interact with the branch, getting to know them, and slowly getting drawn into our life.
And as we talked with Cliff about the possibility of doing something in The Bottoms, he said, “This would be really great, because it would provide a vision and a direction for people who have resources, skills, but they don’t know what to do with it.”
Shreveport is in the Bible Belt. There are Baptist churches everywhere. We saw Baptist churches that were getting built. It was great. Nonetheless, the branch is almost completely Catholic. It kind of surprised us, actually. And, my point here isn’t denominational; it’s demographical.
There are lots of reasons why the branch is mostly Catholics—Catholic—but demographics is not one of them. Shreveport, as a whole, is something like 5% Catholic, but the branch is less than 5% Protestant. So we were thinking about this, just trying to figure out if there was something we could learn from that. And we realized that this disproportion was surely due, at least in part, to how the People of Praise works. We save people by drawing them into ourselves. That’s how evangelism works for us: “Come on in!”
And the people we draw in are people who are like us: they live near us, they work where we live—work. What we realized, as we drove through The Bottoms, was what we’d learned back at Headquarters: namely, that if God is really calling us to do something different, that call is most likely going to be to a place, a geographical location, somewhere different. As different as his call.
It means we’re going to have to move there, and start working there. It means we are going to have to start living differently. We’re going to have to become like the other people who live in this geographical location.
Like I said earlier, before we left Headquarters, we were told that we should look for God—what was on God’s heart. And that we’d be able to tell what that was by what really moved us. We realized, as we drove around The Bottoms, “We’ve got to just pick up and move here. God is calling us to this place. We’ve got to move in and start working here. We’re going to live the People of Praise life, that’s for sure, but we’re going to do it The Bottoms’ way, whatever that turns out to mean. Because that’s how we work.”
And we’re serious about this. Like, the three of us. We want to move to The Bottoms. I want to move there. I want to—I’m thinking about moving there after I graduate and teaching at Booker T. Washington, the high school.
Our plans are concrete. We can see families moving there. Getting to know the people there. Putting things in common with them. Starting businesses, maybe another Trinity. Because, in the end, we’ve realized, the most important thing we have to offer these people is not home improvements, not better jobs, not even better families.
The most important thing we have to offer these people is the life of Christ, the freedom of the Spirit, friendship, and purpose. What we have to offer these people is us.
So let’s go there!
[Applause.]
Copyright © 2022 People of Praise, Inc.