"I gotta hurt ya before I can help ya," the preacher thunders, foreshadowing the blunt sermon on sin that is to follow. Murmurs of "that's right" and "uh huh" can be heard as the congregants nod knowingly. Pastor Hamon Cross Jr. of Detroit's Rosedale Park Baptist Church-authoritative in an oversized white robe with black accents-peers over the wire-framed half-glasses he wears low on his nose and offers straight talk about God, sin, self, and society. His straightforward exhortations are coupled with an unsentimental, persevering love.
As Washington policy analysts debate plans to get and keep people off welfare, the Cross combination is transforming lives in Bright¬moor, a ghetto subdistrict in westside Detroit.
Lives like Leslie Miller's.
Ms. Miller grew up in group homes most of her life after being taken from her abusive mother at an early age. At 18 she was released from the state's care, attended college for one year, and then just drifted-sometimes homeless, sometimes not.
She met Pastor Cross at a Campus Crusade for Christ retreat. Mr. Cross listened to her history; challenged her to forgive her mother and herself; and invited her to come by the humble whitewashed church building that houses Rosedale Park Baptist. In the summer of 1986, Ms. Miller joined the church. Now, after eight years of the congregation's straight talk and tough love, she has turned her life around.
Throughout the late 1980s, the church helped Ms. Miller pay her rent and fuel bills so she wouldn't be evicted. But she is quick to acknowledge that this sort of help was not the real key to her transformation. "They weren't just giving me money," she explains, "they were reaching my seared heart."
Pastor Cross became the father Ms. Miller never had. "I was lazy at some points," she admits. "There were times Pastor Cross would come and bang at my front door, and yell that he needed me to do some work for him. So I'd get up at 7:00 a.m., get dressed, and go over there. And he'd say, 'I don't really have any¬thing for you to do, I just wanted you to get up. You don't need to be sleeping all day.' I'd be so irate!" she laughingly confesses. Mr. Cross exhorted Ms. Miller to strengthen her character and set life goals. But he couched his moral challenges in a compassionate love expressed in concrete actions-like taking her out to dinner to celebrate her birthday.
In March 1991, the congregation's faithfulness to Leslie Miller was put to an additional test when she became pregnant out-of-wedlock. It devastated her. "I felt like I'd let Pastor Cross, and God, down."
Panicked, she decided to handle the situation the way she'd dealt with two previous unwanted pregnancies: She'd get an abortion. But Mr. Cross said abortion was not an option. He insisted that the crisis was not hers alone, and that the congregation would confront the challenge with her. She decided to have the baby: Mr. Cross's sister offered to be the birthing "coach"; and Mr. Cross's brother provided the much-needed financial support. Other congregants gave emotional and material support and offered parenting pointers. "The church just pulled together," Ms. Miller says, her voice beginning to break. "Even though I had put them all through so much."
She had a little girl, Stormy, who's now a playful three-year-old. Glancing to Stormy across the cluttered living room where we sit, Ms. Miller says, "The church has helped me to groom a young lady, to take responsibility for myself, and to teach my daughter love and responsibility-the things I didn't have grow¬ing up."
This support, she believes, has helped her escape from what many people considered her inevitably grim destiny. "I grew up with all kinds of abuse," she remembers. "I've been abused by just about everyone possible you can think of. And they say the cycle continues, and, true enough, it can. But when you got a church run by a pastor who believes in God's vision of how the world should be, and how we should be, you can't go wrong."
Ms. Miller admits: "At ten years old I was told that I was either going to end up in jail, or dead, or in an insane asylum. And there's been many times that I almost ended up in all three," she recounts, leaning back in her worn, dark chair. "I spent most of my teenage years as the wrong kind of leader. But Pastor Cross is teaching me how to be the right kind of leader."
Other inner-city Detroit residents also need the "extended family" Rosedale Park Baptist Church provides. The church building sits near stereotypical burned-out and boarded-up apartments. Youth pastor Dennis Talbert says that most of his youth group is composed of youngsters from "the projects." Like Hamon Cross, Mr. Talbert is also a straight talker, blunt about what these troubled youths need from the church.
"What these kids look for," Mr. Talbert asserts, "is someone they can trust. Someone who will love them unconditionally. They have an innate ability to determine whether you really love them or whether you're out serving them because you feel it's the goody-good thing to do." Perhaps because of the demands Mr. Talbert makes, he has had trouble recruiting adequate numbers of volunteers. "It's very difficult to get adults who are willing to put the time in."
To be effective with these troubled kids, the volunteers must become "surrogate parents," Mr. Talbert asserts. Recently he spoke with Cheryl Miree, a church volunteer who works with junior high girls. "Cheryl told me that last Sunday, one of the girls pulled her aside and said, 'Miss Miree, how come you don't own me?' And Cheryl said to her, 'What do you mean, own you?' The girl replied, 'When you introduce me, you introduce me as Tamia. But when you introduce your son, you introduce him as "this is my son." So Cheryl asked her, 'Does that bother you?' And Tamia said, 'Yes, it does.'"
Mr. Talbert explains: "Tamia says this because she wants the connectedness. These students are wise enough to realize that they come from a disjointed surrounding at home, and they're looking for something solid to hold on to."
Rosedale parishioner Mary Jackson-a cheerfully maternal, middle-aged black woman-knows many of the boys and girls in Mr. Talbert's youth group personally, because they are her neighbors. The Detroit News once called Ms. Jackson the "Mother Teresa" of the Smith Homes. Her concern for ghetto kids motivated her to quit her job, sell her home, and move into the Smith Homes in 1984. Since then she has endured a crack-dealing neighbor and some near misses from stray bullets ripping through her front door.
Ms. Jackson runs a weekly Bible club pro¬gram for about 30-40 youngsters at the Smith Homes. She's also trying to improve their lives by challenging their parents and the government bureaucracies that oversee the Smith Homes.
Ms. Johnson's 1984 Ford station wagon crawls through the narrow alleys of the Smith Homes past rows of two-story apartments with peeling yellow paint and vertical stripes of black soot-the scars of previous fires. Four-year-olds run about unsupervised outside; at one point, Ms. Jackson gets out of the car to extract a pink-clad toddler from a mud hole. Only a few adults are out.
After passing by three male drug dealers loitering in front of one building, Ms. Jackson waves to a thirty-something man carrying a broom who crosses before her car. (Safely out of earshot, she confides that this man beats his girlfriend; the woman has taken refuge at Ms. Jackson's place after some fights.) Many windows in the neighboring apartments are covered only by newspaper or old sheets, and Ms. Jackson explains that the complex originally was supposed to provide curtains to the residents but they never materialized. Government promises of financial aid for jobs, education, and renovation programs have gone unfulfilled as well.
She drives through "The Hole," the south-side of the Smith Homes where the most violence and drug dealing occur. It is only slightly more dilapidated than the rest of the Smith Homes. In the small lots here, unlike many others in the complex, there is no fresh laundry hanging out to dry. And a greater percentage of the units in The Hole are boarded up. Some are crack houses, but Jackson says there has been less noisy activity from that end of the complex since city police have recently redoubled their efforts to flush out the drug dealers.
Past The Hole is a middle-sized, nondescript, rust-colored building: the complex's community center. "They have so much red tape about using this facility," She complains. "It just stands there most of the time closed and locked with nothing going on."
From the community center to the "play¬ground" area: Though the weather is uncharacteristically warm and pleasant, the "playground" is bereft of children. The deserted lot is not yet covered with snow and the littered grass could stand mowing. A rusted metal slide stands to one side; to the right are two swingset frames-without swings. Ms. Jackson reports angrily, "I've been trying for ten years to get the city to provide us some swings and repair the slide. And they just promise and promise but don't do anything."
Ms. Jackson is blunt not only about what the government has neglected to do, but about what the Smith Homes residents are failing to do for themselves. Many residents "just don't want to be bothered" with her efforts to improve life in the projects.
Some residents have been on welfare for many years, she explains. "The mother lived in public housing and the daughter lives in public housing, and it's just going on and on. The cycle must be broken." Ms. Jackson has tried to encourage the mothers to take advantage of free, local programs-such as GED training, parenting classes, and recreational activities for kids. "But they just want to stay in their own little worlds," she says. "Most of our residents are just too lazy to get involved."
Ms. Jackson is most disturbed, though, by the entitlement mentality she witnesses in the welfare recipients. "They think somebody owes them something," she comments dis¬dainfully. When she suggested that the wel¬fare mothers whose children attended the church's week-long summer camp pay a token fee, the mothers were outraged. "It's not like they don't have any money," she argues. "They can afford to get their hair and nails done and wear leather coats that working people can't afford. So they should be able to pay $50 to send their child to camp for a whole week." The mothers' entitlement mindset and unwillingness to accept respon¬sibility "are deeply embedded," she says.
Sabrina Black, the church's counseling ministries director, agrees with Mary Jackson's assessments. "Helping people develop the mindset to get off welfare can take months of counseling," Mrs. Black says. "People on public assistance get comfortable. They get used to the idea that someone will take care of them and that all they have to do is stay home and have children."
Individuals coming to the church for its free counseling services can expect straight talk and personal challenge. Clients receiving counseling pledge to attend a church each week during the period they are in counseling, and must bring the counselor a church bulletin and sermon notes to prove they went. They also are asked to study specific scriptures bearing on their problems and to be prepared to discuss them in the counseling sessions. Some of the people find this approach too demanding and drop out after their first or second counseling appointment. But Mrs. Black asserts that others thrive on the challenge.
The counseling materials emphasize scripture study because, as Mrs. Black puts it, "the renewing of the mind is the key to change." Support groups are helpful, she is quick to acknowledge, but changed patterns of thinking and behavior are the bottom line.
The straight talk at Rosedale Park Baptist includes encouragement as well as exhortation. Pastor Cross tells his congregants that they are "winners." "You are always on God's mind," Mr. Cross reminds them as he paces across the worn burgundy carpet lining the sanctuary. Holding up his Bible, Mr. Cross plants himself up front in the center aisle. "There are promises in here that you can believe. You are going to make it!" he proclaims.
Monica Johnson, a physician who directs the church's "medical mentoring" program, preaches the same message to the underclass kids with whom she works. Her program exposes 18 students to career opportunities in the medical profession and links them with Christian volunteer mentors with whom they meet weekly. Kareem, an 11th-grader who grew up in the Smith Homes, wants to be a physical therapist. Donald, a recent high school graduate from a poor family in Brightmoor, longs to be a surgeon. (Currently in just his first year of college, Donald has already started studying for the MCAT exam he'll take three years from now as an entrance requirement for medical school.) Johnson's mentoring program is helping students like Kareem and Donald to set their vocational sights higher than they might otherwise.
The younger children at church also hear positive straight talk. At the church's tutoring session for junior high youth, the students bragged to me about their improving school marks. One girl proudly thrust her recent report card, dotted with A's and B's, toward me, while her friend loudly informed me that she too was on the honor roll. Tutors like Cynthia Hood instill an achievement-oriented mindset into these children. "It doesn't matter what environment you live in," she tells them. "You can succeed."
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