Dispatches from the Quiet Revolution: Sandtown
Baltimore, Maryland
*Read "Wheelchair Missionary," an article about Alan Tibbels, which was featured in The Lives They Lived, the 2010 New York Times obituary round-up.
"We came here out of repentance, to learn from our neighborhoods and just be a part of the community," said Mark Gornik, a young Presbyterian minister, who in 1986, moved with his best friend Allan Tibbels into a row house in the Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown-Wincester, both motivated by John Perkins's theology of community development. "As white Christians, we believed it was vital that we turn from our complicity in a culture that is anti-black, anti-poor and anti-urban and turn to the biblical obligations of justice and reconciliation. We came to listen, to learn, to build friendships, and to live out our faith. When people would ask us, 'What are you doing here?' our answer was always the same: 'We are here to be neighbors'".i
At the time Gornik and Tibbels relocated to Sandtown, unemployment soared above 50 percent in a neighborhood where Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had been educated in public schools and where jazz greats Fats Waller, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong were once regular attractions at the Royal Theater.ii In the wake of plant closures and deindustrialization in the late sixties and early seventies, the population of Sandtown dropped from 50,000 to 11,000, infant mortality and teenage pregnancy rates became the highest in the country, and hundreds of houses were abandoned and boarded up. The median income was $8500 a household, and the community displayed the grim rituals of the postmodern ghetto: drug crews working the corners, Ford Explorers cruising slowly down littered alleys, and dirt bikes speeding through streets and across vacant lots. Sandtown was a warren of hopelessness in a city of 40,000 abandoned homes that lost a thousand people each month in suburban flight; and yet, as Gornik and Tibbels discovered, Sandtown was also a neighborhood that many people still called home.
The year before moving to the city, Gornik had interned at Voice of Calvary in Jackson. Although he assisted the construction crew and worked on staff at the community center, though he did not feel prepared to rehab entire buildings, nor was he convinced that the Mississippi model could be applied to the urban northeast. Tibbels faced a different challenge. During a pick-up basketball game several years earlier he had suffered a broken neck after getting undercut on a lay-up. Yet Tibbels felt called to leave behind the suburban home where his new life as a quadriplegic had become technologically manageable. In Sandtown, he became a familiar sight to residents, the bearded white man spinning down the middle of the street in his motorized wheel chair, making himself available as a friend and neighbor.
"We held tightly to a commitment of God's shalom, but we had no plans or programs. Instead of imposing our own agendas, we sought to place our lives in service to the community. We wanted to do something to help the community resurrect hope, to fight nihilism. We would make the road by traveling it together."
In time, Gornik row house on Mount Street and Tibbels on Stricker became the two bases of a twelve block "focus area" called New Song Community. With strong neighborhood leadership and financial support from Baltimore churches and philanthropic organizations, a slate of wholistic programs was created under the auspices of New Song Community Ministries: a health center, job-placement program, private Christian school, legal cooperative, youth services cooperative, community church, and a Habitat for Humanity project, which Jimmy Carter launched himself on a festive spring day in 1992. Establishing the church was a decisive step in anchoring the ministry in the community, since many of the community building initiatives that survive the first blush of excitement are based in common worship. All these commitments have formed the context within which Gornik thinks theologically.
"I found that Christian doctrine in its unreconstructed mystery has profound implications for social existence. Like the doctrine of justification by faith. You take that idea to poor people and they will be moved to new self-understandings: the idea that I am saved by a merciful God, not because I have been able to do anything to earn salvation, but as a result of God's goodness. Or take the idea of unconditional grace: the idea that God has saved humanity quite apart from anything we could do ourselves. So our social standing, our economic background, our education, our race—none of this matters to God because he looks at us as his dear children reconciled by the blood of Jesus.
"I cannot escape my background as a white male born into a world of options and privileges. But I can and should struggle with my obligation as a Christian to view the city in all of its forms and conditions through the eyes of the stranger, the excluded, and the poor. Christian reflection on the inner city must emerge out of relationships: the bonds of commitment to Christ and his peace for the poor. In Christ's fellowship with the poor, in his identification with the depths of suffering through the cross, the cries from the depths of the inner city are also his, and the plea that all things might be made right becomes a yearning in the Spirit of God for God's reign of peace.
"Poverty is a constant assault upon dignity and humanity. But Jesus says, 'you count'. So you count. Now, let's create a community where that can be embodied."iii
In 1999 Mark and his wife Rita Azalos, a family physician with training in addictions medicine, moved to New York City to give their support to the start of New Song Harlem. Sandtown native Laverne Stokes had become Co-Executive of Sandown Habitat for Humanity with Tibbels, and the organization continued to flourish, with 40-50 houses rehabbed each year and as many as 10,000 volunteers assisting in the work. Under Stokes's direction, Sandtown fully incarnates, in an intense urban landscape, the civil rights movement's mission of developing grassroots leadership committed to economic empowerment and incarnational organizing.
"I grew up in an unjust system," Stokes says. "And yet we are all in trouble now because of it. So the key thing is how do we get out of it? It takes all of us working together. We've got to know that it's going to be a long term investment, it's got to be sharing resources, it's got to be educating everybody's child-everybody's child has the right to be educated. You're going to have to examine your hearts and be truthful. What New Song means to me is fleshing out the true gospel. You see, just loving people draws them into Christ."iv
Notes
i Mark Gornik, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 171.
ii John Kiess, "A New Song in Sandtown," Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of Virginia.
iii "Our urban ruins", Mark Gornik, To Live in Peace, p. 238.
iv Laverne Stokes, Conversation with Workgroup on Lived Theology and Community Building, University of Virginia, December 16, 2000.