Disciple: Mission Endowment Grant Spotlight: Walking the Walk
How street ministry is leveraging community assets in southeast Winston-Salem
By Summerlee Walter
In January 2014, the Rev. Chantal McKinney, current vicar at Ascension, Advance, began to hear a new call. She followed it out into the community of east and southeast Winston-Salem, into growing, ethnically and linguistically diverse neighborhoods, including Waughtown. She followed it through the streets, on foot and in her car. She followed it into local shops, onto people’s front porches and through ramshackle apartment complexes.
Along the way, McKinney gathered fellow journeyers who were hearing similar calls. They went out, two by two, dressed simply and fed by Bible study and prayer, and met their neighbors. They spent most of their time listening – for how God moved in people’s lives, for what gifts they had to offer, for their longing after Christ and community.
The burgeoning ministry, known as Christ’s Beloved Community / Comunidad Amada de Cristo, became formalized on May 1, 2015, when funding from the Mission Endowment Grant the project received became available for use. On May 2, a local community organizer joined McKinney, now also the Missioner for Beloved Community, to lead a day-long training for the core group of lay people who had gathered around the vision of street ministry in southeast Winston-Salem.
Many of those 18 people from seven countries would form the Core Leadership Team for Beloved Community. They include members of St. Stephen’s and St. Anne’s, Winston-Salem, and St. Clement’s, Clemmons; clergy from local Episcopal churches have also joined McKinney in the streets, as have the Rev. Tom Brackett, The Episcopal Church Missioner for New Church Starts and Missional Initiatives, and the Rev. Anthony Guillén, The Episcopal Church Missioner for Latino/Hispanic Ministries. A trip to the Lutheran/Episcopal Latino Missioners’ Conference in February 2015 put McKinney in contact with the North Carolina Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which has resulted in a growing connection with Christ Lutheran Church in Waughtown. The ministry has taken hold because it began with deep listening grounded in Biblical practices of evangelism and techniques of asset-based community organizing.
COMMUNITY NEEDS, BIBLICAL SOLUTIONS
The neighborhoods members of Beloved Community walk are rich in places of worship and community, but there is no sacramental presence. Many of the neighborhoods’ Latino immigrants grew up Roman Catholic but now live too far away from a Spanish-language Mass or one of the city’s four Episcopal parishes to attend a familiar liturgy. Others in the neighborhood have struggled with addiction, incarceration or other life experiences that have left them feeling unworthy to attend church, despite the stories many of them share about how God is moving in their lives.
“I saw how our denomination’s gift of sacramental ministry is still needed in this neighborhood,” McKinney explains.
Those who walk with Beloved Community take their marching orders from the instructions Jesus puts forward in the Gospel of Mark: “He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.” (Mark 6: 7-9) These and other passages of Scripture formed the basis of the training held in May 2015, and members of the Core Leadership Team always gather for Bible study before heading out in pairs to walk the neighborhood.
Equipped with a partner and prayer, members of Beloved Community then turn to the techniques of community organizing as they engage in conversations in the street. They seek to identify the assets found in even the most economically depressed neighborhoods, and they listen deeply for the unique gifts each person they encounter has to offer. The goal is to identify the strengths already present in the community and to help community members build around those gifts. [Photo: The Rev. Chantal McKinney, Missioner for Beloved Community / Comunidad Amada, and members of the Core Leadership Team before they walk the neighborhoods of east Winston-Salem.]
“The neighborhoods we walk are integrated – Latinos, Blacks, Whites – but Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in our society,” McKinney explains. A bilingual, multicultural ministry, Beloved Community mirrors the neighborhoods in which it is based and seeks to shape a church that looks like its community. It takes its name from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision for an integrated society.
“The movement in the Church over the last decade has been a recognition that the future of the church – of this country – is Latino and Asian, and therefore the ministry of the church should reflect that, otherwise the church is not relevant to the people who live in our communities,” Guillén explained. “Whether we have a church in a location or not, there are times when, because of Jesus’s mandate, our job is to go out. [McKinney’s approach] is not the norm, but that’s part of the beauty of it, it’s a new model.”
BUILDING INTO THE FUTURE
The work McKinney currently does with Beloved Community mirrors her earlier efforts to establish the ministry; she still meets with everyone she can – including people who now approach her because they’ve heard about the ministry and want to be involved – and then she listens.
“I’ve tried to be very faithful with being present in the streets,” McKinney explains. This ministry of listening has uncovered gifts throughout the community. One woman who had overcome addiction offered herself up as a mentor. Another time, McKinney and her ministry partner for the day started a conversation with a man sitting on his front porch.
He shared that recently a family down the street lost a loved one to gun violence and didn’t have the money for a funeral. Taking matters into his own hands, he found a red bucket and went door to door, asking neighbors to pitch in to help cover the costs of the burial. Even though he did not share a common language with many of the families on whose doors he knocked, he knocked anyway.
“He told us ‘The church doesn’t want people like me’ because he’d spent most of his life in prison,” McKinney explained. “But what he offered is more worthy to God than the most successful endowment campaign. He’s like the widow who gave the last of what she had.
“We asked if we could stay in contact because he has a real gift. That’s what we do: We look for people’s gifts and try to build community around the ways people are already doing God’s work.”
A TESTIMONY
For years, my awareness of the apartments around St. Stephen’s, Winston-Salem, has created a certain dissonance. Clearly the people living around us are not the most fortunate people, economically speaking. Yet, they are there, week in, week out, year after year, and, beyond acknowledging that fact, I have done nothing. The more I have done nothing, the more preconceptions have formed about them and about me and about potential relationships between them and me, all of which encouraged me to continue doing nothing. Having been provided with an opportunity to get beyond that, and encouraged to do so, I was able to compel myself at least to try.
When I did, my preconceptions died a very quick death.
I found myself engaged by each person I encountered. There was warmth. There was depth. There were hopes and concerns. From the lifeless, single dimensional figures my imagination had projected onto them, they emerged as delightful human beings, worthy of whatever attention I can offer, not simply for their benefit, but hopefully for our mutual benefit.
- Al Whealton, parishioner, St. Stephen’s, Winston-Salem
Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina.
Tags: North Carolina Disciple
