The next week on Sunday we moved into the next phase of the project, continuing an orientation mindset, but also beginning to reach out and develop more relationships as well as share the gospel. After church, students went in small groups (2-4 students) to some of the church member’s houses to eat dinner, and then these families would be our hosts for the week. We stayed the week in their houses, living in an inner city neighborhood, on a street named Etzel. This gave us good access to resources on how to reach out and affect poor neighborhoods, and also gave use a location near where many of the students of the school program the church will be putting on (starting this Monday, the 18th) live. I stayed with one other student in the basement of a couple that have two kids (ages 3 and 5). The family is a part of a group of people from the congregation of the church that have decided to move together to a predominately black, poor, inner city neighborhood in order to help stabilize the neighborhood and combat the gang activity, drug use, and violence that have plagued the history of the neighborhood. Today, the neighborhood is much more stable and has attracted more honest low income families and empty lots are selling (rather than being sold for back taxes), much as a result of the actions of the families moving onto the street and in the surrounding neighborhoods. There are other pockets of families where members have moved into the neighborhoods, and these areas are becoming more stable as well. Because the violence in the neighborhoods has been, for the most part, gang related, these families have less of a risk of being the target than those involved in gang activity. It has been amazing to see God at work through these people and to see the ways that they are moving out into more and more neighborhoods in the inner city.

We’ve also continued to learn about God’s heart for the poor, and His amazing love for us. We did much of this through a weeklong study of the Sermon on the Mount, which we did for five days, three hours a day. During the evenings we split the team into two groups to do Bible Clubs in two different neighborhoods. Our theme for the summer is Biblical Super Heroes, so our week we focused on the story of Noah and making it applicable to the kids, as well as fun. Because many of these kids are the ones that will be attending the school that fourteen of us will be teaching at, we also spent a lot of time (before, during, and after Bible Clubs) developing relationships and trust so that we could better serve and love them. A large number of them come from single parent families or have been abused or disregarded as unimportant by their parents and family members, so are in desperate need for someone to love them and someone they can trust. The other group went into a predominately Somali refugee neighborhood and tried to do a Bible Club similar to ours, but found that only one or two of them could speak any English, so they worked to develop trust and relationships despite the language barrier, playing soccer and football with the older kids, and blowing bubbles and playing with the younger ones. This opened the door for us and the church to help them later, and later in the week they had enough trust of us that a family brought one of their young boys to us and through a series of signs showed us a festering sore and wanted us to see if there was anything we could do for him. A few of our team members then asked and looked around and found where they might get cheap medical care, and plan to go back there and take them there. During the week I also worked with a couple of the other guys on the team to set up the woodshop for next week.

Sundays we spend at the church, New City Fellowship, which is an amazing church with a heart for multicultural worship and racial diversity, as well as effective outreach into these diverse communities. Most of the service, except the sermon, is translated into French for the large French speaking African immigrant population in the area and in the church; there is also a “French Church” that is held during the sermon, where that pastor gives a different sermon in French for the French speakers. Songs are sung in a variety of languages, including Swahili, Congolese, English, Spanish, French, and others. The service we were at had a guest preacher that was talking about his missions in the Congo, and his stories were quite extraordinary. He is going back there in about a month, after a year sabbatical in the states.

When we were down there, we did some work in the office to help them make the transition to a non-profit organization and then did a bit of demolition work taking electrical conduits out of the basement ceiling. Over a million pounds (conservative estimate) of scrap metal have been hauled out of the building, and it has undergone an amazing transformation. It is a few blocks from Etzel, where the church has many of its members living in the community. We’ve also spent time working with the church as it sets up a second location of its “free store,” which is a place for underprivileged people (especially immigrants that come without much of anything) to get the clothes and basic furniture they need. We will probably spend most of our time at More than Carpentry until we go to Jubilee, which was our assignment, though they unfortunately had much of their staff out the first week or so we were planning to work with them, and so were unable to organize what we would help them with. However, I really have enjoyed seeing More than Carpentry and how just a small family can start up a ministry. It’s taught me a lot about grassroots ministry and the effectiveness of that. Even in the smallest of ways they’ve been helping the community. When they first started doing work on the iron works and made it a point to keep the sidewalk in front of the property clean and free of trash, other neighbors took notice and started to clean and take care of their properties a bit more. It’s been great to see a ministry like that that can provide hope and help to a neighborhood, even with just a staff of two (and the help of their kids).

The computers are pretty old, and many have operating systems going back to Windows 95, but they serve the purpose of providing a word processor or other basic needs for things like papers for their kids to write for school and other things for which they might need a computer. We’ve gotten into more of a routine this week, and have time for small group study and discussion, worship, and at several points during the week we have had speakers come in and talk to us. The pastor of the church has been teaching a series to us he calls “Sonship,” a version of which (like I think all of their sermons) is available online. Nearly all the members of the church have been through a class involving the lessons in that series, though we will, unfortunately, have to make do with a substitute for some of the series, as that pastor is going with some of the congregation’s members to Kenya for a mission trip. They do this trip annually I believe, and have connections with some people there that they work with when they go there, and support during the year. The father in the family I stayed with on Etzel is one of the other people going on the trip as well.

The other worksites are progressing well, too. While most of the people are at the school (14 of 25) that New City Fellowship puts on, we have people at 3 other sites, including ours. Two people are working with a ministry called Oasis, which reaches out to newly arrived immigrants. Saint Louis is the second largest immigrant destination in the United States, as well as the largest Bosnian City outside of Bosnia (40,000). There are also many other immigrant groups, and the location of the Oasis ministry is on the juncture of several different immigrant communities. It is a new ministry, at least in this regard. The ministry gets truckloads of furniture people and businesses are discarding and redistributes it to new immigrants. This aspect of the ministry started when the people there would go visit immigrant families, even ones that had been in the states for many months, and they found that they would still be sleeping on the hard floor, without any furniture. So they started bringing what furniture they could find or get donated to them and start establishing relationships with new immigrants through the gift of furniture and clothing (especially winter clothes, which most immigrants from Africa and many other places lack).

Others are working at a place called La Clinica, which is a medical clinic primarily serving the Hispanic immigrant community, and it provides cheap medical help for those without insurance nor the means to pay for it, costing $15 or $20 for a visit. There are five students working there, each of whom has some sort of pre-med, pharmacy, or nutritional schooling. They’ve done a variety of tasks that the staff has been unable to do, as well as translate from Spanish to English for the doctors that come in to help (for those that know Spanish or the language of the patient).