Having Nothing, Possessing Everything

Finding Abundant Communities in Unexpected Places

Michael Mather

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802874832
• eBook ISBN: 9781467451147
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Pastor Mike Mather arrived in Indianapolis thinking that he was going to serve the poor. But after his church’s community lost nine young men to violence in a few short months, Mather came to see that the poor didn’t need his help—he needed theirs.

This is the story of how one church found abundance in a com-munity of material poverty. Viewing people—not programs, finances, or service models—as their most valuable resource moved church members beyond their own walls and out into the streets, where they discovered folks rich in strength, talents, determination, and love.

Mather’s  Having Nothing, Possessing Everything  will inspire readers to seek justice in their own local communities and to find abundance and hope all around them.

1

Into the Inner City

Young people, from ages four to eighteen, gather outside the door to Broadway Church. It’s lunch time, and they’re waiting for the doors to open. They are a rollicking, joyous mass. Bodies push against one another, laughing, a hum of activity and life. The faces show differing shades of blackness: brown sugar, sepia, coal, smoke, and midnight.

As the lunch hour grows near, the bodies move even closer together. The crowd pulses and shakes. The crowd is energy. Individuals are blurry. Now a young woman with a knife is moving among them, but no one notices the glint of steel in her hand. She raises the knife, aiming at the back of the young woman in front of her.

Out of the chaos, another young woman sweeps into view. She holds a broom in her hands, and suddenly she is between the knife and its target. She moves the knife-wielding woman away from the crowd. She pushes her down the street. She is both hurried and deliberate. She’s not going to turn away.

Who is this young woman with the broom? What possessed her to get involved in that fracas? She hears I’m asking about her, and she swoops into my office and throws herself into a chair. Exhausted, exhilarated, she says, “I’m going to be the next Martin Luther King Jr.!” I believe her. She introduces herself. “I’m Seana Murphy. I live half a block up the street, with my parents and my sisters and brothers. Are you the new preacher?” Seana has an exuberant, confident smile, even with the sweat from the summertime heat and the encounter beading on her face. She is calm. In control. She is seventeen years old and a high school senior. She knows the young woman with the knife, has known her for years. “She’ll be all right,” she says.

More than two decades later, Seana tells me that the woman who’d wielded the knife is a good mom with a decent job and a quiet life. “Weren’t you scared?” I ask, long after that tumultuous day.

“Of course I was,” she says. “The whole time I was sweeping her down the street, I was praying, ‘Please, God, don’t let her push that knife down my throat. Please, God, don’t let her push that knife down my throat.’ ”

Here it is—violence and destruction in the midst of life, and the people of this place in all their beauty and power. I’ve spent over thirty years of ministry at the intersection of violence and beauty, in the company of remarkable people like Seana and the woman with the knife.

More than two decades later, Seana tells me that the woman who’d wielded the knife is a good mom with a decent job and a quiet life. “Weren’t you scared?” I ask, long after that tumultuous day.

“Of course I was,” she says. “The whole time I was sweeping her down the street, I was praying, ‘Please, God, don’t let her push that knife down my throat.’”

Welcome to Indianapolis

In 1986, just one year out of seminary, I came to Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. Broadway’s building was a cathedral. Its towering presence was evidence of the grandiose aspirations of those who built it. Many neighbors called Broadway “The White House” for the way it soared above the other buildings in our part of the neighborhood, for the complexion of most of the congregation, and for the quasi-governmental role, as a social service agency, it played in their lives. It took me three years to find my way, comfortably, around the immense building without getting lost. In fact, I didn’t spend much time in the building—my job at the church was as the pastor in the streets. I was appointed to oversee Broadway’s outreach ministry in our inner-city neighborhood. Mrs. Miller, who lived down the street, called me “the hoodlum priest.” My parish was the streets. In 1986 Indianapolis was a genteel city, caught between past glories and present uncertainties. It was also a city long on compassion but short on justice, as the senior pastor at Broadway in the eighties and nineties often said.

The neighborhood around Broadway—including the large homes once occupied by prosperous white families—was falling into disrepair, the result of age, little capital, and negligent landlords. Children played curb ball; they didn’t have many other options. On nearly every block, concrete steps rose from the sidewalk to squares of grass and weeds, empty lots where houses had once stood, where families had slept peacefully in bedrooms overlooking the street, and where meals had been shared in kitchens and dining rooms.

Ninety years ago, the streets had been newly paved for the business people and teachers who walked from their homes, down their steps, and onto sidewalks shaded by the fruit trees the city had planted between sidewalk and street to entice their young professional class to move off the farm and into the city. The young people in those homes had walked to Broadway Church on Sunday mornings, some coming from just down the block and others crossing the College Avenue and Central Avenue bridges spanning Fall Creek and its adjacent parkway, the southern border of Broadway. In those years, the wide parkway, the flowing waters, the blooming trees—all spoke of promise and of the commitment the city had made to this place and these people. There were porches on every home—some houses even had porches on the second floor as well as the first. People expected to see one another.

The church moved to the Broadway location in the late 1920s, when this neighborhood, thirty blocks north of downtown, was the suburbs. On Sunday mornings in the 1940s and 1950s, cars double-parked on Fall Creek Parkway in front of the church, bringing young families to join in the swelling chorus singing the rising city’s hallelujahs. The sanctuary, a cathedral, was full, with chairs set up down the center aisle to welcome the growing crowd.

As more and more black families moved into the neighborhood in the late 1950s and 1960s, what had once been a suburban white neighborhood became the black inner city. The pews emptied, and the streets held only scattered parked cars on Sunday morning. The rise and fall looked swift from my perspective. But those who remained told stories of years and years when the community room in the church was full of people eating together at church and community functions, and staging plays, talent shows, concerts, madrigals, and festivals that brought joy to their lives.

Things had changed. Those who remained at Broadway saw what was happening but felt powerless to do anything about it. They were grieving. A way of life they felt they understood was changing. Their neighbors and friends were leaving because black people were moving next door. Broadway members were leaving its pews for churches nearer their new suburban homes, and many of the members who stayed felt anger, confusion, and despair. For me, a young pastor arriving after the neighborhood and church rolls had already changed, the stories I heard about Broadway seemed like the striations on the cliff walls I saw out West, revealing the eons that had passed long ago. But for many of the people at Broadway, the changes were an open wound.

In the 1980s, the hum of conversations between families on their front porches gave way to the deep, bone-rumbling beats of music booming out of cars filled with young men. The many children and teenagers who now filled the unrepaired streets and broken sidewalks eclipsed the relatively few children who had walked the streets decades before. In the 1930s and ’40s, life on the then-white streets had filled the city with hope and energy. Two generations later, the young black and brown people on the streets outside Broadway filled the white city fathers and mothers with fear. The fruit trees were disappearing, almost all gone. And in their place were patches of brown matching the complexion of the new residents—the vanishing fruit trees a signal of the barrenness the city seemed to see when it looked at the new generation.

The parking lot for Broadway now served as a gathering place for young people. Young men played basketball (and sometimes football) there. A drill team of young women often lined up in the parking lot. The steady beat of the drill team’s moves, punctuated by stomps, reverberated with the syncopation of the basketball popping off the asphalt and into young men’s hands.

These same young people lined up to eat lunch in a basement room of the church or to quench their thirst at the water fountain. But only for special events did they make their way into the community room—and never into the holy space beneath the soaring ceilings of the sanctuary.

Broadway’s congregation was predominantly white, aging, and liberal. Over the decades, the men and women of Broadway had developed the staples of white mainstream Protestantism’s approach to urban ministry. There was a food pantry, a summer program for neighborhood kids, a tutoring program during the school year, and a giveaway of toys, food, and clothing at Christmas.

Part of my job, as the associate pastor, was to work with three other congregations whose members often volunteered in one or another of Broadway’s programs. Philip Amerson, Broadway’s senior pastor, created an innovative committee made up of a pastor and a layperson from Broadway and each of the other three congregations, along with a couple of representatives from the neighborhood. It was called the Broadway Community Project, and it was the group to which I was accountable. My job was to find ways to invite them into deeper relationships with the neighbors they were serving. I was to recruit more volunteers, both from the churches and the neighborhood, and to explore new ways of living and working together.

Am I the Savior or Something Else?

I thought I had been sent to Broadway to help. I would be Christ, or at least Christ-like, to the hurting, needy people of our neighborhood. I’d been trained for this work in seminary and raised on a vision of sacrificial helping from my earliest memories. Taking mission trips to Mexico with my parents, dropping coins into Sunday school collections for people in Taiwan, gathering up donations for a local food pantry—all these actions had taught me what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be a human, and what it means to be the church.

As the people I encountered through Broadway began to open my eyes to a new reality, I started to think that maybe I was also sent to Broadway to be a witness. Not only one who observes, but one who announces and testifies to what is happening. I was being invited to see the people—people I had once thought of as helpless—as powerful, brave people with both extraordinary and ordinary gifts. I was going to have to recalibrate my life, my work, and my practices if I was going to serve as more than a spectator, but not the lead actor.

It was called the Broadway Community Project, and it was the group to which I was accountable. Members of these other congregations often volunteered at Broadway’s inner-city projects. My job was to find ways to invite them into deeper relationships with the neighbors they were serving. I was to recruit more volunteers, both from the churches and the neighborhood, and to explore new ways of living and working together.

I believe that sometimes I am called to act. But in living and working in churches in Indiana, I came to see that those times are rarer than I had imagined. I discovered that most of the time, the action needed from me was shining a spotlight on the glories of the people in our neighborhood. I also learned that I could act behind the scenes. As the leader of an institution, I could help organize our work in ways that invest in the good gifts of our neighbors, rather than treating them as needy or undereducated, or, worse, as drains on the church’s resources. I could name the invisible beauty in the places of poverty: the gifts, talents, dreams, and passions—the abundance that is there to be gathered and celebrated and utilized in richly diverse ways.

At the Edge of a Knife

The rhythms that swept out of the cars in the street, the swells of the organ in the church building, and the language of the streets pouring out of young and old were teaching me a new song. But I wasn’t grooving to it yet. I was still moving to the rhythms of scarcity. My ears were tuned to what was missing. My hands were busy pounding out songs that invited those in the congregation to join in helping people in their emptiness.

But Seana and the young woman with the knife were proof of something powerful and puzzling. In every community—even the communities that are home to those we good church people label as underserved and poor—live men, women, and children filled with power and grace. That’s one of the refrains of the new song I was learning.

In seeing and recognizing the grace and power in Seana’s life, I was beginning to understand my own gifts—and my own shortcomings. I wanted to be the do-gooder who was sent to the inner city—to “the least, and the last, and the lost,” in the language of the church—to save and redeem. At the edge of a knife, in the brush of a broom, I began to see the power and agency in the people I came to serve. And I began to ask myself some important questions that shifted how I was seeing my calling, my work. What if I were to start treating the poor as if they were real people—people like me in every respect, except with less money? That would mean recognizing the abundance and power around me—and if I took that first question seriously, I’d hear it asking additional questions of me. I’d hear it inviting me to act in different ways, develop new practices, and tell stories from a different perspective.

I began to see that everyone around me wanted to be useful, to be needed, just as I wanted to be useful and needed. Whether it was a young man who sold drugs but wanted his sister to see him as a teacher, or a woman who worked hard every day to keep a roof over her children’s heads and food in their bellies, or an elderly man who lived alone and paid attention to all the children on his street, especially ones he suspected were being abused—all those people wanted to be useful, just as I did.

At the edge of a knife, in the brush of a broom, I began to see the power and agency in the people I came to serve. And I began to ask myself some important questions that shifted how I was seeing my calling, my work. What if I were to start treating the poor as if they were real people—people like me in every respect, except with less money? That would mean recognizing the abundance and power around me—and if I took that first question seriously, I’d hear it asking additional questions of me.

I began not only to notice the gifts of people around me, but to find a place for them in the life of the community. The problem was that I had no set of practices to guide me. All my training had been in helping people in their need, but now their talents, capacities, passions, and dreams were bumping into me, looking for some way to be expressed, to be useful.

I was paid to run the church’s programs for the poor, and sometimes I needed to pay others to keep the programs going. In my first years of ministry, I very rarely hired the poor themselves. Money flowed away from the neighborhood even though it was being used to serve the neighborhood. Slowly that turned around, and money began flowing into the hands of our neighbors.

I never liked school, but neighborhood ministry has been a continuous education. I learned from the wise elders in the streets and in their homes, from the young people in the parking lot, and from the church members at Broadway. My teachers were plentiful: Seana, the other pastors at the church, the old ladies in the pews, the young men who hung out on the street corners, the old men giving advice to the ball players on the court. I began to seek out other teachers: authors who wrote books I loved, economists who thought practically about low-income communities, and physicians who paid attention to the art of healing.

When I was preparing for ordination, a denominational official asked me what I needed to work on in my ministry. “I need to work on my risk-taking,” I responded. Did I know what I was saying? Not likely. Across the years I have taken more risks than I imagined I would. And I’m still learning.

Expecting Miracles

My first steps in trying to help people were programmatic. Programs, I thought, held the solutions. I was, after all, a child of church programming—as a kid, I’d attended Vacation Bible School, Sunday school, and youth group.

And yet those programs—or, rather, the Scripture I encountered in them—taught me to expect something grander than felt boards and packaged curricula. At Vacation Bible Sc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Fr. Gregory Boyle
• Preface: Finding Riches Where I Had Thought There Was Nothing
• 1. Into the Inner City
• 2. Hidden in Plain Sight
• 3. Noticing People’s Gifts
• 4. Getting Out of the Way
• 5. Making Sense of Money
• 6. Practicing Hospitality
• 7. Taking Learning Journeys
• 8. The Lights of Broadway
• Epilogue: Two Things Became Visible
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments