They skip rope between junked cars along 11th Place. They play one-on-one basketball in narrow dirt alleys, using a plastic bucket tied to a chain link fence for a hoop. They wrestle on the patchy grass courtyards of public housing projects. They're children, and Ward 8 on Washington, D.C.'s notorious southeast side has plenty of them. According to the 1990 census, fully 33 percent of the residents of Ward 8 are under age 18.
Some of these kids face not only poverty, but the challenge of "raising their parents," Tony Yates, a street-wise minister at Anacostia Gospel Chapel and long-time resident of Ward 8, tells me. "A lot of the parents are strung out on drugs; a lot of the mothers are out `tricking' as prostitutes," Yates says.
Chugging along through S.E. Washington in Yates' "vending truck" -- a kind of 7-11 on wheels -- we pass the broken-down and boarded-up housing projects made infamous by the national media's coverage of the "murder capital," and spot one such mother. She races up to the truck and asks Yates to change a bill. Her matted hair and wild eyes indicate what Yates whispers sadly to me as she walks back toward the rowdy young man desiring her "services": "She's high on crack." A little later in the route we pass two plainclothes cops frisking a young man while curious children look on from a short distance.
It's conditions like these that motivate Anacostia Gospel Chapel (AGC) -- a small, independent Pentecostal church which meets in the bottom floor of a red-brick apartment building in the thick of the rough southeast ghetto -- to try so hard to love kids.
The church's best-known effort to do so is Camp Dynamite, a week-long summer camping program which thousands of Washington's inner-city youngsters have enjoyed since 1973. Less visible, but arguably more important, are the ways the little church helps kids by strengthening the inner-city's fragile, critical institutions: family, school, and neighborhood.
Sister Evandalene Dorsey has attended AGC since it began ten years ago. Divorced, Dorsey was looking for support in raising her three daughters and was attracted by the church's emphasis on children. "As a single parent, I've not had the daddy there to reinforce what I teach at home," Dorsey says. "I've depended on the consistency of the teaching here at church -- that's been my real back up at home." She says her family has "reaped the benefits of consistent Bible teaching:" two of her daughters are currently in college while her eldest hopes to enter medical school soon.
All three are Christians.
Tenth grader Wayne Keys agrees that the church "reinforces" parents. Keys says he was running with "the bad crowd" before he got involved in church. He hung out with older guys who drank a lot. "With them, girls were pieces of meat," Keys adds. "Now I see them as young ladies. My mom taught me that difference," he continues, "but I never really put it into effect until I got into the church."
The men of AGC have been Keys' role models. Worship leader Darrell Hudson talks music with him, and Keys is learning about sexual ethics from Tony Yates -- who recently preached a sermon at the teens' meeting entitled "Don't Get Caught with Your Pants Down."
Herb Fader, a writer who moved into the neighborhood and joined the church in its beginning years, reports that AGC has recently started a "Boys 2 Men" program to help young, largely fatherless, inner-city boys avoid the ghetto's typical traps of drugs, promiscuity, and crime. Adult mentors will meet weekly with elementary school boys, maintaining friendships with them through young adulthood. "What we're trying to do," Fader explains, "is to build up the boys' sense of self-worth and instill in them a tenacity to grow up to be men who take up their proper role in society and in the church."
Despite the church's strong focus on reaching males, over half of the adult parishioners at AGC are female. "One problem we've had here," Fader says, "is that there have been boys who've been saved through Camp Dynamite, who've grown up in the church and benefited from its fellowship and teaching, but then reach their late teens or early twenties and leave the church."
"Brother Bob" Mathieu, AGC's senior pastor, says the church does have strong male role models and that some of the men who've left did so because they got married or moved. Nevertheless, he too says that training up local leaders to carry on the church's ministries has been challenging.
Church leaders have invested years in some young people who, as Mathieu puts it, "got upwardly mobile and moved away and forgot where they came from." Still, both Mathieu and Fader are hopeful that the boys with whom the church is now working will see the necessity to stay and help the community.
Men like Fader, Yates, and Mathieu aren't only role models for the boys of the church. Joyce Peebles says Brother Bob has been a substitute father to her two teenage daughters too.
Peebles is another long-time member of AGC. She converted to Christian faith when persistent church members from AGC overwhelmed her with their caring while one of Peebles' daughters was deathly ill. Church members called Peebles daily to check on her and the child. They'd also drop in regularly, often with an armload of groceries. And they shuttled her to and from the hospital and various doctors appointments. Clasping her hands together, Peebles says fervently, "there was so much love at the church."
Now Peebles and her daughters live in a small apartment two floors above the church sanctuary. The girls, too, have become Christians and have had to withstand the considerable peer pressure of public schoolmates to have sex and do drugs. Peebles reports that if she's having difficulty communicating with her teenagers, Brother Bob will mediate. But Bob's "fathering" to the church youth goes beyond this, she explains: "He will go out on a job interview or to college interviews with your child. He's a family-oriented minister."
Anacostia Gospel Chapel is shoring up the schools in Ward 8 just as it is strengthening local families. Linda Moody, President of the D.C. Board of Education, reports that a number of schoolteachers in the local S.E. district come from AGC (including the Mathieus' own adult son and daughter). And Brother Bob has an office right inside the local Terrell Elementary School where he can talk with students.
The church also helps local schoolchildren through its learning center -- a narrow, computer-laden room above the sanctuary where 8-16 kids are tutored each day during the academic year. Pithy moral injunctions and brightly colored posters line the walls. Above one row of computers Bob Mathieu's wife Sharon has posted words from the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) -- big words like "facetious" and "inadvertant" -- on bright orange construction paper, each with a brief definition. The children learn one vocabulary word each week. It's clear that the church believes inner-city youngsters can pursue academic excellence just as successfully as do more economically-advantaged children.
Indeed, according to Sister Dorsey, the church "makes a big thing" out of educational achievement. "For years and years we've had a graduation banquet to honor our students," she tells me enthusiastically. "It's a beautiful, formal occasion; a really big celebration."
Apart from the practical help the tutoring center provides, the church also helps local schools by teaching young people old-fashioned morality. Last year, school board president Linda Moody reports, the school district integrated a new "values education" program into English classes to help build character. "There's little training in the households as far as values are concerned," Moody says. The schools can't do this job alone, and Moody argues that preachers like Brother Bob help by teaching young people love, respect for others, obedience to authority, honesty, and fairness.
The moral challenges posed from the pulpit may be too much for some inner-city residents, though: Anacostia Gospel Chapel has not seen tremendous growth. About 70 to 90 people attend Sunday morning worship regularly. This is, however, many more than when the church first started in the Mathieus' garage.
Bob Mathieu is relatively unconcerned about the numbers. Like any church, AGC desires to grow, but its focus is more on nurture of current members and service to the community rather than fast-paced growth. Rather than worrying a lot about how to get more people into the church, Mathieu's emphasis is on taking the church out into nearby neighborhoods through a "Church in the `Hood'" program. Each Tuesday night, congregants gather in the common room of an apartment building in nearby Congress Park to provide a worship service for local residents there. Church leaders hope to start several other "churches" in additional housing projects over the next few years.
About three months ago, Tony Yates, Brother Bob, and some kids were milling about outside the apartment complex where a Church in the `Hood' meeting was about to begin. "A car drove up and we heard `pow! pow! pow!' and somebody said, `They're drivin' by shootin'!'" Joyce Peebles relates. "Pastor Tony yelled `Duck! Get down, they're shooting.' The windows in the apartment above us were shot out, but no one was hurt," Peebles adds. "We still went on with the prayer service."
Such stories are fairly familiar fare from inner-city Washington. But church members at AGC are quick to point out that the Southeast neighborhood has gotten too much negative press. As we drove about the neighborhood one rainy evening, Bob Mathieu said: "Southeast is perceived to be the worst part of D.C. People who live in other parts of the city don't want to come to Southeast. They think that everyone who lives in Southeast is out ripping and running," Mathieu continues. "Our folks bristle at that because there are also a lot of good things going on around here."
Mathieu has a point. Much of landscape in Southeast is ugly -- abandoned, boarded-up apartments used for crack houses, littered lots, and junked cars. But many streets sport tidy cottages with well-kept lawns. And the newspapers do talk more often about the criminals in the neighborhood than about the law-abiding citizens.
But church members are also realistic about the problems of their neighborhood. As Tony Yates puts it, some S.E. streets are "combat zones" of violence, drugs, and prostitution. And the children AGC wants to save walk those kinds of streets. So the church is trying to reclaim the streets -- and local residents report some modest improvements.
Joyce Peebles recalls that when she first moved into her apartment two years ago, she would hear gunfire every night. "We still have the problems now, but it's not as bad ... gunfire is not as frequent." Philip Busey, a retired apartment manager who lives across the street from the Mathieus, says it's "pretty quiet" in his immediate neighborhood. A local school principal credits the church's "prayer walks" through the neighborhood's trouble spots for the positive changes.
"The prayer walks are great," Peebles enthuses. Typically 25 to 30 church members participate in the night-time marches. "We may go to a corner where we know there's drug activity being transacted, and we form a circle and we pray and sing songs right there," she says. "We have children and grandparents there, and people stop to listen or to look at us. And prayer has changed a lot of areas that we've prayed for," she reports. Some corners where drug dealing and prostitution were common are no longer the site of such activities.
Recently, though, Sharon Mathieu was washing dishes and looked out her window to see a prostitute ply her trade in the middle of the day with a client in a parked car across the street. The church knows its work in reclaiming the neighborhood is not yet finished. "It's real hard walking the Christian walk here," Joyce Peebles' 16-year-old daughter Nakia says frankly. But Anacostia Gospel Chapel is helping youth like her know they're not walking the straight and narrow path alone.
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