Tuesday, November 02, 1999
Offering hands, not handouts
Suburban evangelical Christians renew commitment to urban poor
BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
After 25 years of working with Cincinnati's poor, Phyllis Shippy is starting to find help in new places.
Since she and her late husband Ostell moved here in 1975, their work has included finding housing for teens whose parents were jailed, starting a church that offered meals and job training, and launching a teen abstinence program geared toward inner-city youth.
For much of that time, the only time Mrs. Shippy has seen suburban evangelical Christians in Over-the-Rhine was when they came to distribute pamphlets or drop off a check. But in the past year or two, many have started showing up with the kind of assistance she needs: Hammers and nails to build housing, computers to teach technology, and a desire to know the poor rather than simply to give them money.
Mrs. Shippy is pleased with the renewed interest she sees among white evangelicals in the causes to which she has devoted her life. The question now is how long the interest will last, and whether it can make a difference in people's lives.
“Suburban churches are used to saying, "I see a problem, I've got a solution, let's get to it.' Slowing them down to a more relationship-based community is what we're trying to do,” says Mrs. Shippy, 51, who has just launched a new ministry to suburban congregations who want to do urban work.
For much of her ministry, Mrs. Shippy says suburban churches often brought an “imperialist, colonizing mentality” with them when they came to help. She would get calls, for example, from people who wanted to bring their puppet ministries to poor neighborhoods.
“I'd tell them, my children aren't passing their fourth-, sixth- and ninth-grade proficiency tests. I don't need puppets,” she says. “I need people to teach them, and I don't need a vague tutoring program either.”
Church members and leaders agree there's been a change of heart in the last few years. They hope to encourage the momentum this week with an area-wide conference on urban ministry.
“Evangelicals were used to handing out tracts or trying to change someone, rather than going to the inner city and actually lending a hand,” says John Kirby of Kenwood Baptist Church, whose title at the church recently changed from business administrator to director of missions and administration, to reflect the changing priorities of the church.
“Evangelicals who looked askance at social ministry are starting to see it's the price we have to pay for the right to be heard, and there will be a result in people's lives if we are willing to take action.”
Phyllis Shippy Ministries and about 20 area churches are bringing Dr. John M. Perkins to Cincinnati this week to help foster urban ministry among Tristate churches. Dr. Perkins is well-known in evangelical circles for encouraging suburbanites to move to the inner-city communities they want to help.
“Jesus didn't commute,” he likes to remind audiences.
There's no stampede yet of Blue Ash and Mason residents relocating to Over-the-Rhine in the name of Jesus. But suburban evangelical churches are investing more time and resources in the inner city in other ways:
• Kenwood Baptist Church has begun partnering with other churches, such as St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, to build Habitat for Humanity houses, hold summer day camps, and tutor children at Hope Temple in Evanston. Kenwood is concentrating its efforts in Evanston, the neighborhood the church left behind when it moved to its present location.
• Hope Evangelical Free Church in Mason is supporting an African-American pastor who is attending divinity school in Chicago and will start a church next year in Over-the-Rhine. Hope Church sees the Over-the-Rhine church as a complement to the work they have done in Mexico, Egypt, India, Nepal and Russia. The church's youth have been involved in extensive volunteer work in Over-the-Rhine for several years.
First Christian Assembly of God, has launched an intensive program to involve area children in the life of its church. The congregation has pledged to remain active in the lives of 15 to 30 children for a decade.
• Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy (CHCA), a private school whose campus sits on the Symmes-Sycamore township line, plans to open a downtown elementary school next year. The school will target inner-city students, although it will have an open enrollment policy.
Other examples of new projects by predominantly white evangelical churches abound, especially in Over-the-Rhine, the area's poorest neighborhood. They join the African-American churches and other Christian agencies who have toiled in poor neighborhoods for years. First Christian executive pastor Christopher Beard credits Christ Emmanuel Christian Fellowship and New Prospect Baptist Church in particular for their work.
“Those guys are leading the way,” he says. “We're way behind. We're trying to catch up.”
The new interest is in stark contrast to the civil-rights era, when mainline Protestant churches did much of the outreach in urban areas. Many evangelicals tended at the time to be more concerned about personal faith than social action.
But several events in the past few years — welfare reform, the Promise Keepers movement, arsons at churches nationwide — sent urban problems to the top of many evangelical churches' agendas.
Mr. Kirby credits Kenwood Baptist's relationship with a church in Tigrett, Tenn., for convincing members of the need to reach out to the poor. Kenwood members rebuilt Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church and at the same time received a living lesson in racism and poverty.
Around the same time, many evangelical men became involved in the Promise Keepers movement, which emphasized the need for racial reconciliation among Christians. And Mrs. Shippy believes that the 1996 welfare reform bill gave many churchgoers a philosophical reason to help the inner city.
“Many churches don't like the idea of a government presence in the community,” she says. “They see (the help) as part of something they can bring” to help welfare reform succeed.
That doesn't mean there aren't occasional misgivings from churches who have made a commitment to inner-city work.
“Some in our church family have really struggled: "Pastor, do you know what you're doing here? Has this succeeded anywhere else?' ” Pastor Beard says. “But to their credit, they've really hung in there.”
Lifelong commitment
Mrs. Shippy was born in Cincinnati but was living in New York when the Christian ministry Teen Challenge sent her and her husband back to her native city. Together the two started Manoach Ministries, which provided a home to teens whose parents were in jail or addicted to drugs.
In 1985 the couple started a church in Over-the-Rhine, Living Word Outreach Center, that provided meals and job training to its members. Mrs. Shippy also founded Teens Against Premarital Sex (T.A.P.S.), an early abstinence program that targeted poor teens. After her husband died in 1997, she decided to start Phyllis Shippy Ministries to build a bridge between churches who want to help and people who need help.
Along the way, Mrs. Shippy began reading about Dr. Perkins' work, which led him to give up his home in California to live in rural Mississippi. He advocates Christian community development, which stresses racial reconciliation, the redistribution of skills and resources, and the relocation of comfortable Christians into poor neighborhoods.
It takes time, Mrs. Shippy and Dr. Perkins both stress. But it beats the alternative — people remaining in poverty, or worse.
“If you don't deal with people now, you will have to deal with them later. You can deal with them as a violent, rebellious mob, or you can begin to address the needs and the systems that have caused this,” Mrs. Shippy says.
“I don't think the church is going to fail. They're afraid, but they are going to rise to it because they see that chaos spreads. I think the churches see that unless they address these issues, chaos in the city will spread to the suburbs.”
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