09191
March 10, 2009

Relationships and reconciliation

Charlotte, NC, church does hard work ‘worth doing’

by Erin Dunigan
Special to the Presbyterian News Service

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of stories about congregations engaged in significant outreach and evangelism ministries, reflecting the General Assembly’s commitment to “Grow Christ’s Church Deep and Wide.” ― Jerry L. Van Marter

LOUISVILLE — First Presbyterian Church of Charlotte, NC, has been a downtown church from the beginning. Since 1821, to be exact.

During that time it has seen its neighborhood change dramatically and has faced the decision of many historic downtown churches — stay downtown, or follow congregants to the suburbs?  First Presbyterian is one of the churches that made the decision to stay.

Though its neighborhood is beginning to gentrify a bit with Charlotte’s program of ‘urban renewal,’ the primarily white, upper middle-class church members no longer ‘look like’ their more urban, economically struggling and racially diverse neighbors.

In the midst of change, First Presbyterian has taken to heart the General Assembly’s grassroots evangelism emphasis, Deep and Wide. This commitment to grow Christ’s church deep and wide focuses on evangelism, discipleship, servanthood and diversity. First Presbyterian Church, in the Presbytery of Charlotte, has been weaving those four strands together.

“The church has had a long history of reaching out to its neighbors,” said Jessica Patchett Anderson, child and family outreach coordinator.

So when the neighborhood began changing, the church began asking, “How do we meet people who are different from us? How can we be in partnership with different neighborhoods?”

That question led to two partnerships started about 15 years ago with two communities in the western part of Charlotte — Lakewood and Westerly Hills.

Lakewood was a community that had been tagged by the city itself as ‘at risk,’ going downhill and rife with transiency, drugs and violence.  The church helped partner with the community to build a pre-school in the early ’90s. Since that time, the relationship between the church and the community has ebbed and flowed.

In Westerly Hills, the church established a partnership with local schools. When the school system decided to return to a program of neighborhood-based schools, the folks of First Church knew that the schools their children attended and the schools the children in West Charlotte attended would hardly be equal, so they looked for ways to address that, including providing tutors, money and field trips.

First Presbyterian, then, could hardly be described as uninvolved in its community. But a few years ago, people in the church began to reflect and wonder whether they were making a difference in a systemic way. They realized they were not making the relationships that they wanted to.

Anderson was hired as the child and family outreach coordinator as a result of these realizations.

“The church realized they wanted to help foster these long-term relationships by creating partnership with neighborhoods, schools and churches and to train our own people to think about our relative privilege, issues of systemic privilege, generational poverty and factors in our city that have caused divisions or inequities on race, class and neighborhood,” she said. “Part of my job is friendship and networking, and part of my job is to help dream up how to make our partnerships more authentic.”

Often that means working with the communities of Lakewood and Westerly Hills, rather than for them.

In Westerly Hills, First Presbyterian has joined with a community-organizing group called HELP (Helping Empower Local People) to partner with the elementary schools, parents, teachers, principals and other local churches.

“We are working together to try and empower parents in a school where folks think that parents don’t participate or want to participate,” Anderson said.

The group held a dinner in January to bring together parents and community and school leaders. Parents were able, and willing, to share their concerns for their children and their neighborhoods. Members of First Presbyterian provided childcare, served dinner, took notes and encouraged parents to voice their concerns.

“In a situation where lots of parents and children feel hopeless, the church was trying to provide a presence of hope that together, we can do something great,” said Anderson.

This ‘presence of hope’ is not just something the church says or believes — it is something that First Presbyterian is working to do.

For six weeks each summer, the church hosts an enrichment and educational program for 50 children. Last summer two of those children were living with their grandfather while attending the school. On the way home from an event at the church the grandfather had a heart attack and died. Anderson, hearing the news, went to the hospital to be with the mother of the two children, the daughter of the man who died. The hospital’s chaplain had called Anderson and asked her to come, explaining that the woman did not have anyone else.

The church ended up providing space and leadership for a memorial service, as well as assistance for the daughter, a mother of five. Members of the church have provided friendship and support and have tutored her kids, helped with childcare and provided an internship for the 16-year-old son.

“We are saying, ‘There is hope. You can get through this. We are going to be here — not just with words, but to demonstrate Christ’s love to you,” Anderson said.

Crossing boundaries such as race and class is not always easy, she said, but it is worth trying to navigate.

“We have to be honest about the fact that there are some people with more, some with less,” she said. “What are we going to do about that?”

She noted the importance of education and reflection on the part of the church members. Who are we, what power do we bring to the relationship and what stereotypes are attached are all questions that they seek to ask themselves.

Recently, a family from the Westerly Hills neighborhood joined the church.

“This changes the dynamics of how people think — our partnership is no longer an ‘us’ and ‘them’ thing,” Anderson said.