From Charity to Empowerment
Pastor Mike Mather talks about a program for youth to discover and celebrate the gifts of their neighbors, and connect people who share a love/passion for the same thing. “Making the invisible neighborhood visible.”
Source: talkshoe.com
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
From Charity to Empowerment:
Conversation with Mike Mather
October 10, 2012
John McKnight: Welcome everybody. I’m very pleased to be joining Peter in introducing you to Mike Mather. I think I met Pastor Mather in Evansville, Indiana, in the early 1970’s and then he moved to another church in South Bend and then to the one where he is now, Broadway Methodist in Indianapolis. I’ve been his follower all that way.
The thing that has always struck me is that he sees the world with new eyes. I don’t know how that comes about. How do you see the world in ways that are unblinded by stereotypes and by the institutional assumptions? Mike is one of those rare people who has new eyes and he uses them in a neighborhood church.
Mike, I know this a big church, and it is in an inner city neighborhood, and that for a lot of people it might be viewed as a liability rather than an asset. Why don’t you tell us about your church? I remember you telling me how many bathrooms there were in this big church. That way people can understand where you are speaking from and the neighborhood where you are and then we can talk together about how the church becomes a real neighbor.
Mike Mather: Thank you, John, and thank you, Peter. Our church is about 26 blocks north of downtown, just off the main corridor that goes north to south through Indianapolis, Meridian Street. And we are located in what would be considered a low-income neighborhood. Our building does have 27 bathrooms, but it needs 27 bathrooms because it has nine kitchens. So, it’s a big old building. It’s a cathedral in lots of ways.
Back in the 1930’s it was the largest congregation in Indiana and then starting in the late 50’s and 60’s it experienced the white flight that happened in a lot of municipal congregations across the country as changes happened. The congregation made a decision to stay in this community and to try and figure out what it meant to be a good neighbor in this place. We are the Southeast quadrant of the neighborhood. The neighborhood has about 11,000–12,000 people living in it, and while it is mostly a low-income community, particularly in our quadrant, it really is a very diverse community as you go further north and to the west. And it’s got varieties of income levels, but the area closest to the church is mainly a low-income section.
John: And so you went there how many years ago?
Mike: Actually, this is my second time there. I came first in 1986 and from 1986 through 1991, I was the neighborhood pastor, the pastor in the street. Then I served a congregation, also named Broadway in South Bend for eleven and half years, and then nine years ago the bishop sent me back to Broadway in Indianapolis. So I’ve been here, this time, a little over nine years.
John: Why don’t you describe a bit of your adventuring in neighboring? How do you proceed?
Mike: I can talk about that connected to the time when I was there earlier as well as now.
Across the years as the neighborhood had changed and the congregation had changed, the congregation continued to think about what it meant to be in ministry in a low-income community. Like a lot of places, we started doing things like summer recreation programs, tutoring programs, food pantries, and different things like that. When I first came in 1986 the recreation program, the summer program, was basketball for the boys and cheerleading for the girls. And very painfully we changed it. We began every day with devotions and ended every day with devotions and each week organized was around a spiritual principle. We had art, drama, recreation, music, history, math –– everything you might consider. We had recreation for healthy bodies and education for the human spirit. It was delightful. We had 250 young people from this little corner of the neighborhood who came regularly. Most of the staff lived around here, but we were doing all this work.
The last nine months when I was here in 1991, I did nine funerals for young men under 25 years old in a four-block radius around our church building. We can do all the good work we want to, and I was breaking my arm patting myself on my back about how good that work we were doing was, and we felt good about it as a congregation. But nine young men under 25 years old died around here in just nine months. And the question it caused us to ask ourselves was, in doing all the good work we thought we were doing were we really changing things on the ground the way we thought and had intended it to do?
So, I left with that question and continued to struggle with that question up in South Bend and when I went back to Indianapolis, we were still doing the summer program and we continued to do it in similar ways for several years. I have a friend who talks about discernment by nausea –– that time when you are lying in bed at night and saying, Oh my, things have to change and it’s not going to be easy. We got together a staff and some of the leaders of the congregation and said, You know, we’ve been doing this work with the summer program and it makes us, the congregation, feel good, but it doesn’t really change things. And so, we said we just aren’t going to do it anymore.
Peter Block: What wasn’t changing?
Mike: For example, across the last 40 years of our involvement in doing neighborhood-based programming types of things, the graduation rate in our neighborhood had gotten worse. The number of people dying through violence and other things had gotten worse, young people ending up in jail and things like that had not gotten better. And yet if you ask the congregation or the community people why we are doing this, we would have said we are doing it so that these things would be better. I think most of the things most of us would think of –– graduation, doing well in school, fewer people dying, more stable economy, and those types of things –– were what we thought would get better.
Peter: Thank you. Let’s come back to the story. I just wanted to make those explicit.
John: Let me ask you this. What I think most people who are involved in social services or religious communities who have these programs never get to the place where they ask the question you did: If we are doing these programs so that the lives of people will be better, but the measurables about people’s lives are getting worse, what’s the connection or disconnection? Most people don’t ask that question. What made you want to ask that question?
Mike: What I think led us to ask that question were two things: One was, theologically, we asked that question because we really believe as we affirm in church all the time that everybody is gifted and so if everyone has a gift then the people that we had kept thinking of as people who needed our help were people who had gifts and so we needed to think about this in a different way. The second thing was just the stark reality of people’s lives. If you were going to as many funerals as we were going to it gets you to thinking about how you are seeing things. So, I think those are what led us to think about that.
Also, we had begun to think that our work wasn’t to beat the odds –– we might have helped a few young people here beat the odds –– but the odds weren’t changing for everyone, which is what we thought the work was about. Why we saw that, I don’t know. One of the pastors I work with, Rachel, had met with a group of young people who were blind and she asked them about how the seeing world treated them and they said, “No, no, no, it’s not the ‘seeing world,’ it’s the ‘sighted world.’” And she said, “I don’t understand what you mean,” and they said, “Just because you have sight doesn’t mean that you can see.”
John: So, how did you proceed?
Mike: We had a food pantry in Indianapolis and up in South Bend as well. When we were there, we started to thinking about this differently, but we also started doing it differently here in Indianapolis. When people came in, we started asking not how poor they were, but how gifted they were. We had been doing that and so we had had some practices beginning to be built around trying to pay attention to the giftedness of people who came in.
So, what we decided to do was instead of running a summer program here, because it hadn’t actually hadn’t changed the facts on the ground, we decided we would hire young people and adults from this community to meet their neighbors. They do three things and these three things have remained constant over the past four or five years as we built on this. That is, they named the gifts, talents, dreams, and passions of the neighbors they visit. They celebrate those gifts –– we say they bless those gifts. And the third thing is they connect them to other people who care about the same thing.
So, we build everything we do around this notion that we trust and believe that this giftedness is alive and present in the lives of people around here, and we build on that giftedness by connecting people who care about the same thing, who have the same gifts and talents and who have similar interests. That is what we have done for the last few years. During the summer these groups of young people –– we call them Roving Listeners –– go out and listen to the gifts and talents of their neighbors and connect with them with other people and build on that.
John: Can you give us an example of what they do?
Mike: For years our congregation had done things like community gardens around here, and we would bring people from the agriculture department at Purdue University, which is a few miles up the road, to teach people to be master gardeners. One of the things we discovered when the young people and DeAmon Harges, the original Roving Listener, were going out and doing their listening, was that there were all these gardeners that who we hadn’t even seen.
We hadn’t been thinking about people as gifted, we thought people here were needy and had to be taught how to garden. All of sudden we began to see gardens literally in front of our eyes that we had not been able to see. Within a few blocks here we found over 37 gardeners and they started bringing the gardeners together for conversation. Out of that, those gardeners ended up in a couple of different places –– it’s a longer story –– but they started farmer’s markets themselves, little groups of them in different places. Some down in Methodist Hospital, and some started their own thing with a group of gardeners who were African American who called themselves the Black Market.
That’s an example of what some of the young people found and the connections they began to build. One of the things we started was to ask the young people to make up certificates for their neighbors to thank them and celebrate them for growing gardens and beautifying and feeding their community. So, they would distribute these certificates that they themselves had signed as neighbors and they also would have me sign them as the pastor of the church. They would take them to the neighbor’s house to put them up. If we were going to be good neighbors, we would have to actually to see people for who they really are, not for who we thought they were.
John: When the young people went out and began to ask people what their gifts were, they had that experience, and they began the process of connecting. Can you tell me what effect that has on the young people themselves? We know that gardeners got put together. What happens to the young people when they do that?
Mike: Here is one of my favorite stories that a young woman from around here tells: We went to this one lady’s house and we knocked on her door and she said she didn’t want to talk to us. She was suspicious of us. The young woman went on to say that she had gotten to know this woman and what a great benefit this woman was in the community. I just love that her first reaction was not one that turned her away, but one that made her happy.
I think the effect of all of this thing is that these young people saw more fully what was right before their eyes, which was the giftedness of their neighbors and families and people in general. So, part of it is that one of the things we see in the lives of young people is actually more joy and more delight and more recognition of the giftedness around them. The young people in our neighborhood for the most part over the last 25-30 years have been bussed out to a suburban school district where they often get the message that where they come from is a troubled neighborhood. In fact, people in the school district will say to them that their parents don’t care. If people say that to you all the time, it can become an easy thing to believe. But when people around you are recognizing and seeing the giftedness of your parents and other neighbors, you begin to believe it and see it for yourselves as well. We feel like we have seen that in the lives of the young people who have been involved here.
Peter: Just to come full circle, have you seen the change in the traditional measures of the well-being of a neighborhood?
Mike: We are actually trying to keep track of that now. In the past all that was ever asked from us was how many people showed up –– how many showed up for this class, how many showed up for this tutoring program, how many showed up for whatever you were doing, and we were not asked about whether things changed. In fact, every year when we wrote the new grant request, we always had to say that things had gotten worse, but if they hadn’t given us money it would have been even worse.
Now one of the things we are paying attention to over the next five, six, seven years is trying to pay attention to questions like does the economy get more stable? For example, do dollars circulate more in people’s hands? Is there less violence? One of the ways we track that is we go to the local hospital and ask how many people are you seeing from fights from our zip codes? Do you see fewer of those? One of the ways we are trying to track whether things are happier is we talk about three things here: building community, building economy, and building mutual delight. For the mutual delight measure what we are trying to track is whether there are more parties being held, and if there are more parties then we feel like there is more community delight happening. In terms of building community itself, one of the things that we are tracking is how many people know one another better and know one another’s gifts better, and is that translating itself into all sorts of different measures?
I’ve talked to you about some of those measures, but one of them is that we had a really unique partnership with the State Department of Health and one of the things we are working on and trying to track here are birth rates and other data among young people and older women around here as they give birth. Is the birth weight better or more stable? We’ve just started doing this over the last four or five years, tracking those types of things. We think the main way we will know this is really on the front page of our paper.
We are also trying to do it deliberately in a partnership with IUPUI, Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis, and Tamara Leech, a professor there has been very helpful to us in doing that. They have been doing that so that it is independent from the church, so that the research can stand more on its own to prove that things will get better. And we think it is still too early to tell because we are still establishing a couple, three, four years of information. We like what we see, but we won’t really know for a few more years. We think of this as long-term work, but we want to see constant progress being made.
Peter: It reminds me of one of the measures you ask people in these neighborhoods: How many people do you know that you trust or have your best interests at heart? The number of people that they know is what changes over time as a result of this gift-based kind of work. A lot of people, when asked how many people you really know who have your interest at heart, will say none or one. And maybe later it’s four or five and that is as good as a predictor of well-being as most anything.
Mike: One of the interesting things for us is that when the young people talk to their neighbors first, what their neighbors often say bad things about their neighbors, things like nobody around here pays any attention or takes good care. Then when they spend time and listen to the conversations, almost always somebody says, Well, Miss Jackson down the street, I really love her and she watched my kids when they would walk to school. People start naming these things, but the first initial reaction in conversation is almost always negative, then as they listen longer they start hearing these other things, which they then celebrate and hold up to people.
John: Mike, I think that is part of the result of being inundated by people in the health and social service worlds who say that your problems here are that you’re needy and the newspapers making negative reports. If you go to an upper-middle class neighborhood where there are a lot of problems, nobody will ever say there’s a problem. They will always say the reverse –– Oh, this is a wonderful neighborhood. They believe that because they are paying money for it and if they are paying that much money for it, it better be a good neighborhood. So, you are really seeing an inversion, but the difference is that I think that most low-income neighborhoods are propagandized into believing that they have troubles and their neighbors are troubled.
Mike: Absolutely, and we in the church have often done a good job of perpetuating that out of kindness. We want to help the poor saps.
Peter: Now, let me ask you one more theme, Mike. There are a lot of faith-based initiatives in neighborhoods and some of them are in the context of missionary work. There is an evangelical not only movement, but mandate for most churches to bring people into Christ or into the fold. What is your thinking about that kind of dilemma?
Mike: We really feel strongly this is Christ’s motivated work and one of the ways we think about this is from a passage in the New Testament, in Matthew 11, where John the Baptist is imprisoned, and he ask his disciples to go ask Jesus if he is really the one. Jesus says go back and tell John that the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor hear good news, and blessed is the one who takes no offense at me. It reminded me of Flannery O’Conner, who wrote a novel called Wise Blood, in which she has a character named the Reverend Hazel Motes, who’s a pastor in the Church without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the deaf don’t hear, and then the dead stay that way.
And so, our intention and our mission, our sense of things, is to see and recognize that where the world see brokenness, we don’t deny the brokenness, but we say God has brought healing in the very presence of that, and there is not only healing, but there is just amazing giftedness all around us. And it’s this abundance that is promised in John 10:10, where Jesus said, I came that you may have life abundant. We always say that that’s not life abundant when your pockets are full. That’s not life abundant when everything is all right. It’s life abundant right here and right now. And we think of stories like Jesus feeding the 5,000 where the disciples say there’s not enough, they can’t do this, so send the crowd away. And Jesus says, No, no, let’s get everybody to sit down and let’s improvise. What have we got and they say we only have two loaves and five fish. Well, let’s see what we can do. And before they know it everybody has been fed and there are more leftovers than what they started with.
We think that type of abundance is present and powerful around us all the time, but if we won’t look for it we don’t see it. It’s just like when we were running community gardens with outsiders and not noticing that people were gardening on their front porches or backyards, in their side yards and sometimes even inside their homes. We weren’t seeing that because weren’t looking for it.
Peter: You don’t measure your work by membership or how many show up for this or that?
Mike: No, but our denomination does.
Peter: Because everybody listening lives in a larger system or a larger world and the question is you create pockets of things that are working and then that also impinges on how you relate to the larger congregation or denomination.
Mike: One of the things that this congregation has taught me across the years is that they have survived when a lot of other places didn’t. And one part of our job as pastoral leaders here was to say to them, Look at the remarkable things that you’ve done. You stayed while everybody else fled. What is it about you that caused you to do that and then can you then turn that around and look at your community around you in the same way? What is the thing that caused you to stay here in this place and what is it that causes you to see the resources here when everybody else thought there weren’t any anymore?
John: That is such a wonderful question because almost all of the work that we observe that is really significant and powerful is making what is in our time invisible visible. And it seems to me that your story is a story of making the invisible neighborhood visible with all it has in abundance. It’s a perfect example of how communities get built. They see who they are and what they have.
Mike: One of the remarkable things we have is this amazing building that, while it’s huge and has a lot of water pipes that can go bad with nine kitchens, it also has a lot of great space and a lot of space on our walls. One of the things we do with our walls is put up pictures of people from our whole parish. Pictures of people inside the walls of the building and outside the walls of the building that show people and their giftedness. So, if you walk into our building you literally cannot escape noticing the amazing people that are all around us in this parish.
John: I want to go back to this question of how you act as a neighbor and how the idea of Christian service relates to that? It seems to me in practice that people are in neighborhoods because they feel they have a mandate to express Christian service. Always embedded in that is a service of the superior/inferior idea that I got it and they don’t and what I’ve got to do is fix them and give to them. And in that sense, Christian service doesn’t seem to me to be very strong as a way of building neighbors. It’s much more like a professional relationship to a community. How do you deal with the Christian service idea?
Mike: One thing that has been very helpful to us, John, is a piece you wrote called “Why Servanthood Is Bad” which appeared in a Christian magazine called The Other Side. A lot of people in this congregation, and on the staff and in the leadership, know what we call the five rules to keep from being called the agent of the devil in the middle of the church. And those rules have guided us into being good neighbors.
The first rule is never do something for someone that they can do for themselves. The second rule is to discover in others their gifts, talents, capacities, passions, and dreams and find a place for them in the life of the community. The third is to not give poor people services, but to give poor people income because poor means you don’t have money. The fourth is that if people are hell-bent on providing services rather than income, see that it comes in the form of a voucher so that people have a choice. And the fifth one is to practice hospitality.
So when we think about Christian service, we think about that movement that you’ve written and talked about, where Jesus says in John 15, No longer do I call you servants, but friends. Love one another. And we think that is the heart and core of Christian discipleship and life is this notion of this movement from service to friendship.
John: That’s powerful.
Peter: What you just talked about was so clear. What do you look ahead into and where is your thinking going now?
Mike: These days I think we are willing to think about how to build on this growing number of Roving Listeners that have been going for several years. The question now for us is to keep building on the giftedness around us. In fact, one of the things that I love the best that has happened to us in the process is that we used to spend our time talking about what we couldn’t do because we were overwhelmed by the needs around us. Now we spend our time talking about how we can keep up with all the giftedness around us.
So, we keep thinking about how to deepen that practice in what we are doing. When we are going out and finding and talking with people, talking with neighbors and talking with others, how do we really see and know what people care enough about to actually act on versus somebody telling you at first that nobody cares? Then as you talk you begin to find out the giftedness of people around you. We’ve been trying to build on that.
We have also been trying to push in the whole parish, both inside and outside our walls, the capacity of people to do something about this in the community. A woman in our congregation ran the 21st Century Scholars Program for the state of Indiana and she did it out of this sort of way of looking at the world and it has really changed things and made some things better. We have people thinking about and talking about it in their own communities and neighborhoods.
One of the practices we’ve been developing a lot lately is gathering people together for meals around giftedness, around things people care about and where they have similar interests, but we bring them across all sorts of boundaries. Women often talk about the glass ceiling, and in our neighborhood, in low-income neighborhoods, we often talk about the concrete walls. There are rich social networks within the neighborhood, but they very often don’t go outside of that because mostly the relationship with the larger society seems to be not a friend one, but a client one. So, we are trying to bring people together, just around meals, who care about the same thing. One odd thing that has happened with this is we often use some seminary interns and they often ask about the agenda for people getting together for a meal. Well, if they all care about the same thing you are not going to have to worry about that.
Peter: That’s the system world training people with questions that don’t make sense. There are a lot of systems and institutions surrounding you and I’m sure that you have relationships with other churches and social service agencies. What can agencies and social/human services do that’s useful to support you and a neighborhood like this? A lot of times, John and I talk about the distinction between the system world and the neighborhood, and the system versus community and deficiencies versus gifts, but what are systems to you?
Mike: A couple of things. One is that systems and structures can do more to celebrate the giftedness around them. Let me give you a concrete example. I told you that across the years the graduation rate in this neighborhood had not been very good and in fact it had gotten worse and worse. I remember the headline in the newspaper five or six years ago saying the graduation rate here was 19%.
One of the things I realized around this time was that what folks said all the time that they always talk about how bad it is around here. What about the folks who do graduate? What’s going on with them? What’s going on with the families? One of the things we recognize is that a lot of the institutions in our neighborhood, a lot of the systems in our neighborhood, actually offer scholarships to college and give them out every year, but we weren’t talking with each other about that nor were we celebrating that in public ways.
So, a few years ago the Children’s Museum, which is about six blocks from our neighborhood, was holding a Juneteenth celebration and we asked them if we could partner with them on one of those days and celebrate the young people and the families of those young people who were graduating from school, and we could also celebrate the institutions who were giving scholarships to these young people. When everybody got together, we were, as John talked about a few minutes ago, making the invisible visible. These things were all going on, these young people were graduating from school and these scholarships were being offered. Until the Children’s Museum with its public capacity to make a big deal about what the people around here were doing in terms of graduating and what the institutions were doing in offering scholarships ––until we publicly celebrated that –– it wasn’t really known.
One of the things that has come true is that you ask people about that, more and more they will say if you graduate from school in this community there’s a lot of support for you. Well, there always was, but people didn’t know that. It was invisible, but it was right there all along. And nobody was talking about the people who were graduating; all the attention was focused on how terrible it is over there. It would be like if I got my children up every morning, and said, So tell me what’s wrong with you this morning. What a way to start the day!
John: We always hear the saying it takes a village to raise a child and I wonder if the result of the Roving Listeners, which is connecting younger people with more senior people, adults, you begin to see at the very local block level more of a relationship that is village-like because everybody begins to see what’s there.
Do you see that kind of thing? One of the things that I’ve noticed with groups of people of a wide range of age is that when you ask people who are over 50 to tell you about their neighborhood when they were a child, you get stories that almost are predictable: if I did anything wrong my mother would know about it in a day and Mr. So and So helped me do carpentry. These stories are about the kinds of relationships that were meaningful between young people and seniors and people over 50. Then if you ask people under 30 to tell you about the block where they live, what you generally get is nothing. They don’t have that story.
So, you know that in one lifetime we’ve lost the story of the block being a village. I’m wondering if as a result of what you’ve been working on you begin to see that restoration in some way.
Mike: We begin to see that people are recognizing the little ways that this happens and as they recognize the little ways they begin to multiply. And again, as a church in this community we have a role that we can play as good neighbors.
For example, if somebody comes and asks us for assistance with the utility bill, for the most part we probably won’t pay a utility bill, but we would say, We know that your neighbor three doors away, has been going through a really tough time with cancer and did you know that? And sometimes they will say no and sometimes they will say yes. We say, You are a really good baker and you make good cakes. How about you bake that person a cake and we will buy the cake for you to take your neighbor? Sometimes people say, Will they want a cake? I say, Will you ever turn one down? And most people don’t.
I saw the young people do this in the summer as well. A young person in the family of one of the people they had visited had committed suicide, and they were really broken up about it. They had been at a neighbor’s house just the week before who has a little cookie business on the side and they took some of the cookies to the family of this young man who had died and it became a way that they could then talk with the people they went to. I hope that is a story that as they grow older, they will tell more and more.
The other thing is that we’ve been asking a series of questions and one of the things that we ask is, Who are the healers in this neighborhood, the healers around here? And then people start naming people, and them to us how they know this person as a healer. To tell us who the teachers are around this community. And we say to them, Tell us how you know this person as a teacher. As you do that people begin to tell stories about the little things that they have not recognized because even if it’s less than what it used to be, there are still seeds of it around and the responsibility is to nurture those seeds.
And just one little thing connected to that in terms of being a church and being a mission is we think of this in terms of what Jesus talked about as being yeast. Everything is all right there in the community; it’s just how to help it rise so everybody sees it.
John: The yeast, yes. When people say this person is a healer, can you give us an idea of what that means in practice What is a healer as you listen and hear people respond to that?
Mike: There’s a woman who lives about a block away, named Mrs. Jackson, and she is known as a healer in the community. Her next door neighbor had been struggling with alcoholism and another neighbor had come up against a problem associated with the neighbor struggling with alcoholism. The healer, Mrs. Jackson, said, Honey I will take care of this; my job is to heal the broken. And she did that; she was part of a real healing for this woman as she was struggling with alcoholism. We also had a guy in our congregation who was struggling with some addiction issues , and it had gotten him in some legal trouble. We asked Mrs. Jackson if she would go over and spend some time with this man because her gift was healing. Could she be of help to him? That man had lost his house and everything else, but as a result of Mrs. Jackson going in and spending time with him, he moved a block away from her house so he could be close to the healer.
John: If you are a professional pastor and you take on the job of being the counselor or healer, wouldn’t you rather do it than see Mrs. Jackson do it?
Mike: Yes, but I would be much lousier at it than Mrs. Jackson.
John: Can you say a few words about this? It seems to me that we are training people in our seminaries to be more professional, to have more skills in terms of psychological counseling and all kinds of other technical and professional abilities. Do you discover that there are people around you who might do that better than you?
Mike: Oh, there are a lot of people that do that better than me. And one of the things we struggle with in our parish, because it’s true everywhere, is that things like that happen in larger communities. You discover people who have struggled with child abuse and things have happened to them. But instead of me dealing with that or a professional counselor, we find the other people who’ve gone through these things and are known as healers and who are really good at it, and we invite them to come together to talk with each other and listen to each other. It’s a lot better.
You can come to the church and see me, but at a certain point at night the door gets locked, and if your next-door neighbor or the person a block over is home you can go there late at night or early in the morning or when you are in the midst of a crisis. It’s just a lot more dependable a structure and a lot more long-term healing. This has not diminished those who I know to be gifted counselors, but to say that those gifted counselors can’t begin to touch all the things that go on in our communities. As people are able to bless each other with that on the community level, it just builds that capacity within the community for people to recognize the healing already present here.
Peter: There’s a question that somebody typed in the chat. Can you talk about how you organize and keep track of all the gifts that people have? Is it all oral or is there a graphic or written way of doing this? Could you discuss this a little bit?
Mike: We do a couple of things with that. Oral is a big part of it, but it’s not nearly the only part of it. For example, the young people in the summer all have notebooks where they keep track of conversations they have, but we also have a room at the church we call the Loaf and Fishes Room. We keep having to move the room because we need a bigger space because we use fairly large Post-it notes so that the young people and adults who do this write down the gifts, the names and the addresses of the people who they are talking with and put it up on the wall. And why this is helpful with the Post-it notes is because then you can walk around and play with it. You can say, Oh, these six people all love to go fishing, and that way we can bring all that together.
We did a lot of debate years ago about whether we should put the neighborhood information in a database and we ended up not doing that mainly because our experience was when something was in a database we didn’t use it anymore. Just on a practical level it seemed like it wasn’t helpful for us to keep it on a computer, but if we could have it displayed both visually and right in front of our eyes we could keep telling each other the stories.
So, one of the things we have developed in terms of practices is when we have committee meetings in the church one of the ways we start is for people to tell each other stories. That way we try to build the capacity for people to listen to one another. When the young people come back from their listening in the community they sit around and tell each other the stories they heard. So we begin to just build practices that already existed, but maybe had diminished, for people to tell each other the stories so that those things become more real and storytelling becomes more practiced in a good way.
Peter: You are not tracking things for the sake of measurement. Has this affected other aspects of the church service or other practices within the church, like the more traditional?
Mike: Yes, there are two other things that we have done. Well, maybe three. In worship, we have something every Sunday we call the lessons from the contemporary church because God didn’t stop speaking when the book went to press. And so, we let people tell stories of giftedness and that could be about someone from outside the congregation or someone from inside the congregation.
Peter: This is during the service?
Mike: At the 8:30 and 10:45 service every Sunday. Then the other thing we have done in worship is to celebrate ministries that are beginning ministries, that are continuing, and that have died. When we talk about ministry, we often don’t mean something programmatic in the church; we mean things in people’s lives. Like we had Mrs. Jackson, the healer, come, and we celebrated her ministry of healing the community. It was not a programmatic thing.
Another example of talking about making the invisible visible is a woman named Maya who DeAmon in his Roving Listening had originally come across. We had run a tutoring program here in the church for years and we never asked for tutors from the local community. DeAmon came in and said there is a woman named Maya who lives three blocks from the church and runs a tutoring program at her house during the summer. So, I called Maya and said, Tell me, what do you do? What do you cover?” And she said, “I cover everything from phonics to Sophocles.” So, we brought her to church one Sunday morning and at the end of worship we had her stand and share about what her ministry was. Then we asked people in the congregation if would they support her by their prayers, their presence, their gifts, and their service, and people affirmed that they would. Then stealing a little from the wedding liturgy, we said, “Would all of you do everything in your power to uphold and care for this person in her ministry?” And the congregation thundered, “We will!”
And in that moment two things that had been invisible became visible. That congregation saw that in this community there were gifted people who are doing this work already and she saw that there was a group of people who would support and celebrate what she was doing. And both those things had been invisible before.
Peter: So, the service becomes a celebration. Another one of those moments of celebration like what can systems do where they can help celebrate and make visible. We’ve got about five minutes left.
Dan Haves: We have some more questions coming in from the chat. We have one person, Paul Komarek from Cincinnati, who wants to know if you are seeing more people taking positive risks because of your work. He said he knows many kids who won’t go out of town to go to college.
Mike: I haven’t tracked anything about the number of kids going out of town to go to college or not, so I don’t know the answer to that specific inquiry. I think that what I notice is the change of language that people are more and more beginning to recognize and ask for, based more around giftedness than around need. To me, that’s the biggest change that has happened.
Dan: And we have one final question about whether there are any particular demographics that affect the intention of your work, for example, renter versus owner, social economic level,
Mike: Do those factors affect the work? I’m sure they do, but one of the things that we discovered when we began this work is that things that we always thought were true weren’t true. For example, the people talk about this neighborhood in the outer world as being very transitional and it looks like that because people will often move because there are a lot of renters. But what we didn’t realize until we really started paying attention was that a lot of these people were moving within the community. There were families that had lived here for longer than 30 years and had lived on nearly every block in this community.
And one of the things we discovered when people were talking about this as an unstable community was that on almost every block there is more than one household that is related biologically to another family on the block. And we had thought about it as an unstable place! It is also a low-income community and that affected us because of the ways in which we once often looked at this community as if that lack of income defined everything about its people. And then we began to see in our practices that is really not true and that people are a lot more interesting than that. It’s been taking the blinders off for us that are changing more than the demographics.
Dan: Thanks, Mike. Peter and John, as we draw to a close do you have any concluding remarks on the conversation we had today?
Peter: It’s thrilling to listen to how your thinking keeps evolving and how clearly. You have a wonderful bridge between a set of ideas and how to make them incredibly concrete and specific. And people want to know that there is a prophetic role for the church and for leadership. It seems such an embodiment for that because you are not distracted by the dominant culture. What it measures, how it funds, how it gives money, even calling people poor –– that conversation. You don’t get caught up in it and you just created an enormous space, intellectual space, in the place you are and you say that if you want to create an alternative economy, an alternative kind of spiritual world, it’s all possible once you get clear about it. Your voice is so clear and I’m so grateful for that.
Mike: Thank you. Let me just say it’s a lot more fun to do things this way.
Peter: Delight. You rate high on the delight measure. I’ve got to work on that.
John: You can take the superhighway or you can make the path by walking it. Mike, you are a path-maker. In that way you’ve got a lot of followers including the two of us. So, thanks so much.
