Teaching Power in Detroit

The conversation starts something like this – Me: I think you would be great to lead this project.  Response:  Oh, Pastor, I just couldn’t possibly do that. 

Sometimes the above response is merely an act of humility.  Yet it may also be a natural response to deny one’s own gifts, and especially the skills and abilities others see in us.  But in Detroit, conversations like this take on special importance.  We are a city that has been abandoned by the powers that be, where the safety of our block is mostly up to us, and the beautification of our neighborhood happens only on our own watch.  When we deny our own abilities, we also deny our own power.

The Bible talks about power.  In Acts chapter one, Jesus is about to depart the world and leaves the work to the few but dedicated followers who remain.  Jesus tells them that the Holy Spirit will come upon them and they will “receive power from on high” (New Revised Standard Version).  In this case Jesus is telling them that they will survive, come together, be sent out, and so forth.  It is known among Christians as the beginning of the Church.  Jesus could have said a lot of things will come upon you: confidence, faith, fearlessness, hope.  Yet he said, “power.”  It is an important word.

Power is the ability to get things done.  The basic foundation of community organizing teaches that organized people and organized money, in short, power, is the most effective way to accomplish our goals.  Unfortunately we have taught ourselves that power is a negative thing.  Really, we let others teach us such nonsense so that they can keep power for themselves.  The culture of mainline Protestantism teaches that we are to be humble, which easily translates into giving up our power.  Such teaching is dangerous, especially to people of color, women, people of low income, the lesbian, gay and transgender communities, and anyone who lives under a system of oppression. 

Teaching people to have less power is safer, easier and more expected, but it is also oppressive and destructive.  Teaching less power forms the basis of all forms of oppressive systems, including racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and more.  Here is what they hope we believe: In order for you to have power, others must have less.  For African Americans to have access to higher education, it must mean they are asking people of European descent to stop going to college.  To allow lesbian or gay people to have access to marriage or health benefits must mean we are asking heterosexuals to redefine their own marriages.  Neither example is true.

Corporations, government entities, development corporations and more teach us in Michigan and Detroit that we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Power, however, is not a finite resource, and we can have it.   In fact, we do.  Detroit will turn around, and does every day, when we understand the power we have to transform the way we function.  The rules placed upon us are only rules if we choose to follow them.  Every day we must remind ourselves that this is our community and we have the power to change it.  We are the powers that be.   We remind ourselves every day because each day structures and interests are telling us we are not.

Street Level Religious Freedom

As the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS continues through Sunday, March 11^th, thousands of Detroiters are living with HIV.  Rates are high, but we do not know how high since reporting is still relatively inaccurate due to several economic, cultural and social factors.  The ministries of Spirit of Hope reach many positive people each month.  Some of our guests do not know they are positive, but many more do.  While some are on the protease inhibitors that modern medicine has made possible, others continue to struggle with issues of unstable income, ever changing housing situations or the insobriety that keeps them from the drugs that will prolong their life.  Fear and ignorance compound the problem, creating confusion.   The health status of many begins to decline when the urgency of treatment is ignored. 

So, what if a doctor, clinic or health provider, in the midst of all of this chaos, decided not to treat people with HIV because it was against their religion to treat diseases that can be transmitted sexually?  Preventing the spread and providing treatment for HIV infection and AIDS is a difficult task in Detroit.  Nevertheless, hundreds of individuals through various health agencies break their backs and risk their hearts to get to the streets and reach those who will allow themselves to be reached.  It is saintly work.  Balm in Gilead, Gospel Against AIDS, AIDS Partnership Michigan and many others do the hard work.  The question begs to be asked again: What if that doctor, clinic or health care provider decided not to treat people with HIV because it is against their religion to treat diseases that can be transmitted sexually?

The doctors, clinics and health providers receive federal grants, insurance subsidies and public services.  Do they have a right to deny services because of their beliefs, or does the funding they receive negate their ability to protest?

A well-known young adult shelter is located down the street from Spirit of Hope.  A religious institution, they appropriately receive government grants and services, along with private money, to do the important work of sheltering the hundreds of Detroit young adults left out of the system every month.  The public and religious partnership assures enough resources to create a successful program that neither on their own might be able to do.  Yet the staff is known for its mistreatment of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.  Mistreatment may be an understatement.  Bullying and abuse from resident to resident happens under the staff’s watchful eye, not only without protest, but sometimes with affirmation.  Former residents and staff have confirmed this.  Do the principles of religious freedom allow this organization to discriminate and abuse some clients even though they receive public money?

A wing of the religious establishment is up in arms in our country today because they are being required (but not really because of exceptions allowed by the president) to cover contraception for women.  Many, but probably not all, of those religious-based health care centers receive public funding of some sort.  Do they have the right to deny services?

When will wealthy men lose health services and have their lives put at risk because of supposed religious freedom?  Progressive Christians, admittedly not getting the microphones much in this debate, know the truth: The Christian faith is being used by conservatives to abuse, discriminate against and mistreat members of our families, communities and churches.  The reprehensible arguments are cloaked in deep ignorance of the lives of those on the edges and fueled by fear of people who look, think and live differently from religiously conservative parts of American culture.

Religious freedom does not give license to deny health care access to the sick, abuse the LGBT community or criminalize being a woman.  Neither does the Bible.  The neighborhoods and streets of Detroit are the living highways of public and religious policy.  Let us get out of our heads and open our eyes to the reality of policy and its affects not merely on corporate or partisan American politics, but the consequences on the ground in our own families, faith communities and neighborhoods.  Life is too short to let the powers that be play games with our sister and brother’s health and well being.  Start the fight by getting your HIV test.  You can do it confidentially and for free during worship at Spirit of Hope this Sunday, March 11th.  That is true religious freedom at work.

Spiritual LGBT Life in Detroit

Not one month into my tenure as pastor at Spirit of Hope in Detroit, the first guest in our community kitchen came out to me with his positive HIV status that was threatening to develop into AIDS.  It counts as one of the most humbling moments of my life.  A twenty-six year-old spiritual student of life, allowed to wear a plastic collar attached to his neat black dress shirt, is exposed to the reality of a man one generation older who lives on the streets.  The man and I still talk regularly, but I do not know how or if he defines his sexual orientation, nor do I know anything about his sexual activity or gender preference.  I do not even know how he contracted HIV. 

Many in our Spirit of Hope community who define themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender are with us in the first faith community that ever accepted them.  Not only our members, but many we serve and with whom we live in our near west and southwest sides of Detroit are estranged from family, friends, their home faith communities, their workplaces, neighbors and more.  Yet the differences between the LGBT community defined in our church community, and the publicized and funded arm of the movement fighting for deserved civil rights, are all about economics, race and often even gender.

As the national conversation about the rights of the LGBT community revolve around marriage, our local community focuses on survival, on the man who came out with his HIV status.  While I do not know his sexual orientation, I do know that the LGBT community here has embraced and supported him.  At the risk of over-dramatization and negating the joy that outweighs the hurt in our community, it is not unheard of for our people to face beatings, homelessness, health risks and just plain loneliness in a world that is hostile to their, and our, very existence. 

Marriage issues are important.  Marriage rights put front and center the reality of the existence of LGBT people in our country.  Marriage rights, when achieved, will increase the visibility of people suffering from oppression throughout our community.  Yet we in the movement must be careful, because marriage rights must not be our final goal.  The goal must be the lifting up of all members of our community in every context and reality of our peoples’ existence.  Marriage is one of many tools to achieve that goal, but not the only one.

The prevention of HIV, the housing of those who are rejected by family and friends, the building of relationships across racial and gender lines while being aware of systems of discrimination and prejudice, the use of our wealth to build long lasting systems of hope and the support of our LGBT elders who never had the luxury of being fully out must be at the top of our agenda as well.

Nine years ago, not long after I talked to the man mentioned above, I walked three blocks from Spirit of Hope to a local, more fundamentalist Christian youth organization that has a strong influence on many youth in our community.  In those three blocks, I walked past abandoned and falling structures, one functioning drug house and several groups of youth milling about at bus stops and on street corners.  Upon my arrival, one of the adult advisors at my destination informed me that the biggest threat to our youth is the rapid expansion of lesbianism in Detroit high schools.  It was as if there was a Santorum bubble around this man that did not allow him to see reality, including the reality of a gay pastor standing before him.

Faith leaders must step forward now to teach and, if necessary, to shame those who abuse outsiders to uplift their own moral righteousness.  Soon we begin the annual National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS (www.nationalweekofprayerforthehealingofaids.org ).  Women’s history month is here in March.  Pride celebrations begin in June.  Every day of the year we have an organization supporting and sheltering youth in Detroit and vicinity (www.ruthelliscenter.org ). We must lift up all of our community and get out of our spiritually neutral closets. 

And to my fellow leaders in the establishment LGBT fight for justice, we must turn our eyes to our entire community.  Race, gender and income are serious parts of our struggle.  It means even more risk for our entire community that lives at the precipice of demoralization every day, especially in Michigan where beating up the LGBT community is a conservative sport.  It may not feel like we have privilege, but comparatively, many of us do.

We have strength in numbers.  Even battered and journey-weary travelers have power in the binds of common purpose.  More people are on our side than we think.  And even when we cannot see it happening, conservative shackles always yield to the spirit of justice that resides in the base of our historic living faiths.  Truth always wins, even if it takes time to come out.  Let us all come out together.

Faith Groups a Detroit Lifeline

Every now and then I get the strangest looks walking into a group of hip, relatively new Detroiters working on development plans for the city or our church neighborhood.  The looks come because I am wearing my clerical collar.  Even when without the uniform, my presence is often questioned with side glances, questioned expressions or hesitant greetings of “um, nice to see you.” 

What do you do with a clergy person at a development meeting?  Or when planning new street art projects?  Or building a board for a new non-profit?  Am I there to give them lectures on abortion, gay marriage or contraception?  (Pro, pro, and pro, just for the record.)  Do they think I am going to take up a collection?  (Well, only if they ask me.)  Worse yet, will I try to “save” all of them in Jesus Christ?  (I usually do not carry my life preserver.)

Spirit of Hope (www.spiritofhopedetroit.org ), the Christian community where I serve as pastor in Detroit, serves almost 11,000 free meals a year.  We give out 50,000 pounds of food in our pantry.  Thirty young men are mentored every year in our Pray and Play Basketball League.  We built Spirit Farm, four city lots of love to grow food for ourselves and our neighbors that also beautifies a stark major intersection in the city.  Forty people attend our weekly Spirit Spit Open Mic.  Forty families are served each year with our own Sunshine Community Preschool.  Countless neighborhood meetings, projects and programs are launched from our property annually.  We clean up local vacant lots, parks and the streets.  We provide a place for some to dry out from their addiction, be welcome in their HIV status and find power in their respective sexual orientations or gender expressions.  Addicts who lost everything at the casino down the street come by for gas money or a ride.  And yes, we do have Sunday morning worship where we praise God and participate in the sacrament. 

So yes, we have opinions and a stake in the future of our neighborhood and our city.  We will be at every table possible to influence the physical, cultural, environmental or spiritual direction of our community.  Hundreds of small and middle-sized congregations all over Detroit are making a difference.  When people fall through the cracks, we are there.  And in Detroit, hundreds fall through the cracks every day. 

While those who grew up in the city usually know the value of faith communities to Detroit, many newcomers near the center-city do not.  Of course Christian leadership of the past several generations has done a phenomenal job of alienating, abusing and hurting people, something for a later blog post.  Nevertheless, the micro-level work of countless churches has been essential to Detroit.  Many neighborhoods would not exist today without them. 

As Detroit development becomes more foundation-based and government grant-orientated, smaller organizations, including faith communities, are being left out of the conversation.  It is our responsibility as those communities to make sure we are at the tables of influence and cross streets of decision-making.  However, without community power-brokers paying attention to the faith-based work going on in their neighborhoods, they will miss a massive resource.  Without the street-based voice and experience-soaked souls of the faith community, decision makers and resources holders will fail in understanding significant dynamics of the places they seek to transform.  The largely hands-off approach of mega-church non-profit corporations, local foundations and government agencies cannot make up for personal relationships that are the building blocks of our communities.  Of course faith communities are not the only places these relationships happen, but they are among the oldest, most stable and most reliable.

Still, many are hesitant to work with us.  Yes, we will challenge.  We will bring up issues of class and race, and the more progressive of us will also name gender and sexual orientation as places of justice that must be planned for in development projects.  (I remember some years ago, as I began to speak at a development corporation meeting, a member cursed me out under his breath out for bringing up the issue of racial injustice, again.)  However, it is better for difficult and life-changing conversations to happen at the beginning of a project than the end, when opportunities for buy-in and local support are long gone. 

Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, members of the UCC, and hundreds, even thousands of others are here sweating and loving this city.  We ignore them at our own peril.   

A Big Failure

In a conversation this morning I was reminded that I am a failure.   That was not the intention of the person speaking with me, but a conclusion I came to on my own.  It is a striking realization.  After four weeks of a mini-sabbatical, it has been difficult getting to a place of reflection, debriefing, healing and letting go.  Perhaps more than nine years of significant failure takes its toll on the back, shoulders, head and heart of anyone living and working in a place like ours in God’s city of Detroit.

The truth is Spirit of Hope fails far more often than it succeeds.  I am not going to say that twice because it is hard enough the first time.  More people go back to their addiction than come out.  For every victory at Spirit Farm we encounter two more obstacles.  When new souls come to the community they bring their gifts, but also their baggage.  As many people reject us for being welcoming to same gender loving people as embrace and admire us.  With every place we provide positive change and improvement in our neighborhood there are several places that get worse.  No matter how much change we affect, the push back against us seems so much stronger.

Spirit of Hope fails in programming all the time.  We believe we have the greatest idea, support from the community, and the tools to make it happen.  Somehow, it flops.  If we were a sports team we would be up for the first round draft pick every year because we always have the worst record.  Still, without question, the only ministries, events and programs that matter have come from major failures. 

Wisdom knows, in the midst of failure, whether to abandon a ministry or program altogether, or modify it for improvement.  Wisdom knows how much to invest oneself in the heart and life of another person, knowing that person is likely to abandon the love being offered free of charge.  Wisdom grants strength to heal, dream and hope even when clouds of heaviness seek to weaken, harm and depress.  Wisdom is the spirit of hope that has become the very stitching in the seams of those who work for love and justice and change. 

Sitting at the feet of Dr. James Cone at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, just a few weeks after the events of September 11^th, 2001, when our nation was screaming for blood, he reminded his students that Jesus was a failure.  A success would have made Jesus king or emperor, embracing his teachings and making his words and calls for justice the mainstream thought of the culture.  However, Jesus died poor, rejected, and murdered for his beliefs and his lifestyle of bringing liberation to the people. 

Failure is a lifestyle.  All those who dip their toe into the pond of justice work will find it cold and treacherous.  Not many, especially not many with privilege, will stay there long.  The failure becomes too heavy of a burden and the water is too deep.  Yet failure is necessary, because every now and then the powers and clouds of ugliness and oppression yield because they cannot take it any more.  The push, the wind, from those who are not afraid to be failures, becomes too strong for them to remain in place.  

The Woman In the Sun

 

As she removed her shirt, exposing her breasts to the late day Detroit sun, I crashed the lawn mower into the sign that said, “Spirit of Hope.”  She is exposed, changing clothes in a space without walls.  Across the street from my lawn mower crash, the western rays were catching full glimpse of her curves and beauty marks, while her face showed no sign or irregular thoughts or discomfort.  She was half naked at the bus stop at a very busy six-way intersection, and she didn’t seem to care.

The men on my side of the street looked my direction and wondered what the reverend would say and do.  The best I could do was a shrug, and continued mowing as if nothing unusual was happening at the bus stop, to the woman at the well, across the street. 

This sister’s exposure and Mary Magdalene scandal became the fuel for hen-ish male conversation, gawks and lustful glares.  Exposed to the world, her issues were laid before us in a way we men on our side of the street would never understand.  She was naked, her issues lay bare before the world. 

We are in a neighborhood where a woman’s struggles are exposed.  In Rick Santorum’s America the scandal was a naked woman at the bus stop.  How dare she expose herself to anyone that walks by?  Whatever will we tell our children?  In our Detroit neighborhood, the scandals are a lack of affordable housing for this woman, lack of mental or physical health treatments if she needs them, not enough police to protect her from harm and not take advantage of her themselves, more liquor and drugs than quality food in the neighborhood, not enough quality early childhood centers.  I can list many more scandals exposed by her undressing that day.

This woman is getting naked on a corner of judgment, where naked women of her kind, her ilk, are scrutinized every day.  Judged by men in suits sending out proclamations of righteousness while remaining behind closed doors with blue pill erections.  Placed into categories of hopelessness by those who know them least, but who judge them best.  Exposed to the world?  Many have no choice.  Always naked no matter how many sets of clothes are in their bags or on their back. 

                      

With her new shirt in place, she reached for her waistband, and in one fell swift motion pushed her loose-fitting pants to the ground, underwear too much of a burden on such a day as this.  The cackling of the male hens crescendo as necks twisted heads in this direction and that.  Her former outfit was placed neatly in her bag, a new pair of pants pulled out in a deliberate, not too hurried, not too slow, dressing process.  With all in place, the awaited bus pulled to the corner, consuming the rays of the sun that once fell upon this naked human sister, and she was gone. 

I choose to think her only exposure that day was that of her naked flesh.  It is the only thing I can see clearly, without further assumptions, guesses or pseudo-psychological evaluations or judgments.  I don’t know a thing about her issues.  But perhaps if we all got to know each other a bit better….

The Baptism of a Dead Teenager

The title is jarring, but it is the only one that comes to mind.  The certificate is sitting right here - a baptism certificate for Andre.  He had been visiting Spirit of Hope with his best friend for some time when they both declared their intention to join the church and be baptized.  As the day came closer, Andre was less consistent in his attendance.  Time passed and his friend was baptized, but Andre dropped out of sight.  The certificate was prepared and ready.  He would come back, right?  It was set aside.

A few months later, two years ago January 7^th, we learned that Andre had died.  He had been baptized into a different life.  In a day of poor decision making, he tagged along on a robbery with an older acquaintance with great influence on him.  It was the house of a police officer, and Andre was shot as they tried to enter.  And he was gone.

Andre is gone, but his baptism certificate remains, never baptized.  At least once or twice a month I look at it on the shelf in my office.  In a world as intense as Detroit it is easy to lose track of a sister or a brother.  We lost track of Andre.  Damn it.

Tomorrow, on the day of the year when the church recognizes the baptism of Jesus, we are going to burn that certificate at Spirit Farm, along with prayer cloth and other sacred items.  As the prayers turn from cloth and marker into dust, ash and smoke, they will be put into the universe.  So will the potential of the life of Andre and his baptism.

With time, ash and smoke turns into hope.  Part of Andre’s name is in the name of one of the babies in our congregation.  It does not feel like a lot of power, but it is something.  Baptism of the Spirit, by the fire of the Spirit, will live past the few minutes of the fire we start tomorrow. 

May the fire of the Spirit lead us to watch out for one another, bother and cajole one another.  May the fire of the Spirit teach us.  May it open our ears and our hearts.  May it burn in us the memories of the failures and the victories. 

Teach us, Spirit.  Baptize us every day.  Grab us.  Hold on to us.  Do not let go.