COMMENTARY: Being there: A learning center for street life

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) UNDATED _ There is a vacant lot near my home where children and drug dealers gather to play basketball. Bordered on […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ There is a vacant lot near my home where children and drug dealers gather to play basketball. Bordered on the south and east by building walls and on the north and west by city streets, its uneven, glass-strewn surface, complete with a makeshift basketball court, provides a testing ground for yet another generation of NBA wannabes.


Far more ominous, however, is its function as a learning center for our community’s young people. It is here their indoctrination in”the street life”begins to take root.

I live in what is largely a working-class, inner-city community. Made up of families from an eclectic assortment of ethnic backgrounds, including Guatemalan and Vietnamese immigrants, my neighborhood is a hub of activity, both legal and illegal.

Commuters passing through the neighborhood during the morning and at night move briskly to avoid encountering drug dealers and petty thieves. In between, prostitution and other crimes are the order of the day.

For the children, most of whom live in single-parent households apart from their fathers, life before and after school includes coexisting in a too-easy peace with the purveyors of the underground economy. The children run errands for the drug dealers and accept treats from them. They receive, and likely pursue, both the adults’ approval and chastisement.

For their part, the men are not the”Big Mack”Daddies of the crime world. Most of them are high school dropouts who work sporadically and supplement their incomes through drug activity or some other illegal hustle. Their periodic disappearances _ particularly during cold weather _ generally mean they are in jail. Come spring, they will re-emerge, like the flowers, in full bloom.

As a pastor whose ministry is primarily in prison, I see the progression from vibrant child, to indifferent adolescent, to remorseful adult convict on a daily basis. I also see the lack of consistent intervention on the part of the church to help alleviate the situation.

In my neighborhood, for example, there are three large church buildings housing four small congregations, two of which share one building. In at least two of the churches, both pastor and congregation live outside the community, making outreach within the community nonexistent.


Question: How can we make the love of God real to those outside the faith when those within the faith won’t share it? How can we minister God’s peace when the ministers of that peace aren’t available to minister?

To be sure, these are difficult, heart-wrenching issues. Because of the vastness of sin in the world, no church can ever fulfill its entire mission. Indeed, much of my own anguish over my neighborhood is due to the limit my prison ministry places on my time.

Nevertheless, the indoctrination of our young people continues. Every person who becomes part of a prison church is someone whom the neighborhood church failed to reach.

DEA END ATCHISON

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