http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/portland/neighborhoodrenewal.html?paging=off
The Rosewood neighborhood isn't really a neighborhood at all," says Mike Vander Veen, "but some of us are working to change that."
Mike, a community development advocate in Portland, is
absolutely right. You won't find Rosewood on the city's map. It is a
metropolitan marginalia bereft of the conventional signs of place: no
edge, no center, nothing much to walk to. The area is seared as the
jagged welding line between Portland's eastern edge and its suburb
Gresham's western flank. A glance at the area's planning map reveals a
disjointed jigsaw of zones, jurisdictions, and municipalities.
Boring as those words may be to most Christians, their
consequences spring into 3D in Rosewood. Planners and developers are
unable to build desirable destinations, neighbor kids go to different
high schools, and a cop's jurisdiction depends on which part of which
side of the street she is driving on. "We're in a borderland," reflects
Mike.
This borderland has recently moved to the center of
attention for an unusual coalition of police officers, AmeriCorp, and
several small nearby churches. Each had been taking their own steps
toward enlivening Rosewood. Now they're working together with residents
to take responsibility for Rosewood's legacy and future.
A Confluence of Ministry Streams
Mike
met Chief Deputy Jason Gates, unknown to one another but both active
members at Parklane Reformed Church, a long-established church in
Rosewood, as the coalition was gearing up.
Mike, a deacon at Parklane, had been facilitating many
of the 140-person church's experiments in collaborative neighborhood
engagement. "Our denomination was encouraging us to become a
'church-with,' " Mike recalls. "Which is to say, be a church that
participates in our neighborhood, not only do kind things to it."
Meanwhile, Deputy Gates's drug response team and
Rosewood's two precincts were at their wit's end over how to turn the
tide against Rosewood's reputation as a hotspot of drugs, sex
trafficking, and gun violence. They were ready to try something new.
Parklane staff invited Gates to teach the church and
interested neighbors about meth's challenges, tragedies, and telltale
signs. "I've done dozens of these presentations, but that's the only
time it has ever been to a church," says Gates. It gave members a
clearer sense of how to take a healing responsibility for Rosewood's
future.
Parklane Pastor Vance Hays has lived in the parsonage
for 23 years, and was initially unsure of what Mike and the deputy were
up to. "I always knew that gospel proclamation and gospel works go
together. But, you know, I'm conservative enough that I didn't want to
be labeled with the social gospel moniker," Hays said over a cup of decaf. Hays felt clearer about where the church was heading after reading The Externally-Focused Church,
Rich Rusaw and Eric Swanson's evangelical summons to collaborative
neighborhood service. "That book … gave me permission," says Hays. "It
made it theologically safe."
Momentum slowly gathered after Deputy Gates's Meth Day, a
defining moment for Parklane. The deputy's stories illumined Rosewood's
darker ambiguities vividly. He exposed them to challenges that Mike had
been equipping them to see uniquely through the lens of a holistic
gospel and an asset-based ministry.
"We're trying to be an island of sanity and care and
community," says Hays, "in a neighborhood that doesn't have any sense of
community." As it turns out, the island of Parklane was part of a wider
ecclesial archipelago waking up to their responsibility among
Rosewood's stakeholders.
A Serendipitous Convergence
Discovering
the brutalized body of 37-year-old Amatha Mendive behind neighboring
Freedom Foursquare Church in November 2008 was a wakeup call to local
pastors. They began meeting regularly to support each other and to
strategize about responding to the neighborhood's tumult. They knew
something needed to be done—but what? And how? How could they begin to
address the neighborhood's needs when so few of their members were
actual parishioners—actual residents of Rosewood? And when most
pastors are trained more in preaching, study, and counseling instead of
community development, local economics, and gang violence, how could
area churches wisely respond to Rosewood's challenges?
The way forward opened up when Rosewood's Gresham and
Portland precincts reached out to apartment managers and a half-dozen
area churches. The concerned cops knew they could only do so much as law
enforcement, particularly among residents harboring distrust toward
them. The police knew they needed Rosewood's stakeholders to help break
the cycles of fear, addiction, and violence that smother it.
Resulting from this outreach has been the Rosewood Initiative,
an ad-hoc nonprofit meant to catalyze neighborhood renewal. It
functions as something like a neighborhood association for this
borderland, a voice for those without one. And it has brought police,
apartment managers, churches, and interested residents together to take
hold of Rosewood's future.
Revitalization began with listening to neighbors and
understanding what life on the ground is really like. "True, meaningful,
and lasting social change will come from the people closest to the
situation," says Jenny Glass, the AmeriCorp volunteer behind much of the
Rosewood Initiative.
She and others discovered that the collapse of social
capital in Rosewood is tied to the apartment complex's individualistic
culture and architecture. "When you have an area full of strangers, then
no one cares what happens," says Lt. John Scruggs. "If you have an area
full of connected folks who know one another, people care, and then
they call or take action."
In a neighborhood whose architecture resists redemption, stakeholders found that healing begins with relationship and community.
Can a Café Turn Around a Neighborhood?
Listening to the neighborhood revealed a strong hunch that relationship and community might be possible if
there were somewhere for it to happen. They yearn for a so-called
"third-place" to gather that is neither home nor work. Presently
Rosewood's only options are strip clubs, dive bars, and a greasy-spoon
diner.
To get community going, Jenny has helped the Rosewood
Initiative spearhead opening the Rosewood Café. "The café is an
important piece of what we are doing, a great strategy to get people
working together," she says. "It'll be a neighborhood hub of positive
activity that will start a ripple effect throughout the community—we
hope!"
Hope, indeed. Money is scarce out here. Launching the
Rosewood Café isn't like a multisite church opening a coffee-shop
campus. Nor is it comparable to well-connected artisans curating a
MacBook-lit, gourmet espresso mecca. This café will be done by Rosewood, for
Rosewood. Neighbors and members of nearby churches are all pitching in:
carpenters and plumbers volunteering the heavy lifting and others
donating the furniture and computers for the space. Hays's congregants
have been among those getting this cafe going, dabbling in Vander Veen's
hope for becoming "church-with."
To be sure, church-operated cafes are en vogue
among American church planters and international missional movements,
but this is a different situation altogether. Even the most progressive
and out-of-the-box cafe-churches have some ownership of the space. That
Rosewood Café will be operated by volunteers and owned by the nonprofit
strongly breaks script for most crema-keen churches, where
church control of the café can always carry the hint of colonialism to
neighborhood stakeholders. Here, the café's future will be beyond the
terms of any one church, because it isn't here strictly for any one of the churches.
In this way the future may be uncertain - how long will
tightly budgeted small churches be able to sustain enthusiasm for such a
partnership? Neighborhood renewal is a long journey, much longer and
slower than the short shelf-life of banner-and-campaign ministry drives.
"It's a lot to ask of an established [religious] organization to
participate in secular community-based action, even though it is very
much in line with what many of them believe," says Jenny.
In so many ways, Rosewood's future is open, unsettled.
Her renewal will not come from any single one of these efforts—mercy
ministries, addiction education, the cafe, or more vigorous apartment
management. It's hard to feel certain about seeing God's hand in it by
focusing on one of them. But as one observes the steady confluence of
these focused efforts, a wider subsidiary field of God's serendipitous
sovereignty begins to emerge. It doesn't take a semiotician to read the
signs: Rosewood's abrupt constellation of do-gooders and stakeholders
reveals the slow workings of the city-healing Spirit of Christ.
More hopeful still, for those with eyes to see, I have a hunch there are Rosewood stories everywhere waiting to be told.
Brandon Rhodes is the husband of Candice and a doctoral
student at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, where he is studying the
impacts of automobility on North American churches. Brandon is applying
this research as a Grassroots Storyteller and Field Guide with the Parish Collective. He has written for This Is Our City about the Springwater community.
