Deon K. Johnson: As America marks its 250th year, the church has a crucial role to play in accurately telling the nation’s story (long version)

Fifteen-minute read. A shorter version of this interview is also available. 

As an 11-year-old in Barbados, Deon K. Johnson — now the Rt. Rev. Deon K. Johnson — felt drawn to a sacramental life.

“Our parish church was always open, and it was just down the street from my school, so I was that kid after school who would find myself in the church standing behind the altar and acting what I saw on Sunday morning, so it kind of began there,” Johnson said.

A sense of call solidified during the process of confirmation, but Johnson still resisted for years, only to be encouraged forward by a village of advisers.

Since becoming the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri during COVID, Johnson’s ministry has come to include a practice of writing daily prayers that he shares through social media. And, as the diocese’s first bishop who is Black, openly gay and an immigrant, he has recently spoken publicly, including with NPR, about a traumatic year for his family. In 2024, his husband, who was born in Mexico but came to the U.S. as a young child, was separated from Johnson and their son and daughter as part of the federal immigration crackdown.

Johnson spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne about his ministry, life and family, as well as the crucial role the church can play as America’s 250th birthday is observed. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: Would you tell us about your call story?

Deon K. Johnson: Confirmation in Barbados takes about a year, because what they really want you to do is to make sure that this is what you’re committing yourself to but [also] to find out what your place in ministry looks like.

The priest at the time insisted that we had to go and be engaged in every single ministry of the church, because he really wanted us to figure out, Where’s your place in this faith community? I was an impetuous child that looked at them and said, “I want your job.” But in many ways, I also resisted answering this call.

It’s biblical in some ways. God calls, we say, “Yeah, yeah, not me,” and God wins.

That’s what’s happened in my life. I immigrated to the United States when I was about 14 and continued to just say, “Hey, church is important to me, but I’ll go get a job out in the world, and at some point I will think about this whole ordination thing.”

I went off to college, and it was there that I finally began to come out to myself. At that time in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we had controversy going on around banning gay marriage and everything, and the church was also continuing to wrestle with all of that.

I said to myself, “Surely this church does not want me.” Yet my priest at the time kept saying to me, “You need to consider going to seminary. I think that God’s calling you to something.” And I kept saying to her, “Thank you, but if God wants me to do this, God will figure it out.”

Her way of letting God figure it out is that she talked to the bishop, and she set up an appointment for me and told me, “Oh, by the way, you’re meeting with the bishop next Wednesday.”

In the back of my mind, I thought, “He’s going to say no, and I’ll just continue with how things are going.”

Strangely enough, I get to that meeting, and he said, “I see a calling.”

I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

F&L: Still trying to talk yourself out of this.

DKJ: I kept trying to talk myself out of it, every step, and at every step someone showed up and said to me, “No, this is what you need to be doing.”

I developed this practice that if people say the same thing to me independently three times, I need to pay closer attention to it. That has served me well throughout my ministry and throughout my life.

When it came time for ordination, I kept going, “OK, God, what do you want? You tell me.” And at every step people have stepped in and said to me, “We really see this in you.” Even when I fight it, they’re able to see it sometimes.

The same thing is true when I became a bishop. There’s a really funny story about allowing my name to go forward to be bishop. I had been in a previous search, and I had said to myself, “Yeah, no, I don’t want to go through that process ever again.”

[Then] one of my friends called me up and said, “Have you seen the profile for the diocese in Missouri?” Another calls me up and says, “Have you looked at Missouri?” I said, “I looked at it. The deadline is too soon. I do not have time to write the essays and fill out the application, because it’s a tedious process. Maybe if they extend the deadline.”

The next week she calls me up and says, “I’m holding you to what you said. Look online. They just extended the deadline until the end of the month.”

I filled out the application, sent all the things in, and this is how it ended. The gift is I’ve had people who at every step have said to me, “You need to respond to this.” It was ironic, coming from a village [in Barbados]; in the village, you think of what’s best for the community rather than what’s just best for me. It really is a community who discerns. It takes a community — it takes a village — to help us actually discern our call, especially when we’re trying, like Jonah, to run away from our call.

F&L: Your family has a history of immigration. You are from Barbados; your husband is from Mexico. You all have gone through a time of trial in this moment of a crackdown on people who have come here as immigrants. Can you talk about your family’s experience?

DKJ: This is a very difficult season no matter where you come from. It is focused on folks coming from the Latin American, Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s affecting everybody.

I am an immigrant, my parents are immigrants, I’m married to an immigrant, and this is our lived reality. With my husband, I have to repeat this often: We were doing everything right. He was brought here as a child, he was approved for DACA, was working, doing all the things, aspiring to that American dream.

We got married, and we filled out all the paperwork. I have advanced degrees, and I can barely get through figuring out the paperwork in English. We’ve done all the paperwork, and everything was filed, and we got a letter saying that we needed to go to Juárez in Mexico for our interview at the U.S. Consulate.

We went to the interview, and the interviewer said to my husband, “You’ve not lived in Mexico for a very long time. I think you need to spend some time there. You may not be going to the United States for a year.”

[Previously] everything had been approved. All of his background checks and everything said, “Here is a model person with children, family, trying to do all the right things.”

The response was, “You’re going to have to stay here for a year.”

We had to quickly figure out going from two incomes to one, [from] having one household to two, taking care of kids, distance. We had to try to figure out how to navigate all of that.

I recognized the privilege that I had in being able to afford to do two households, to be able to get on a plane and all that. A lot of our immigrant siblings don’t have that privilege. There was a lady behind us [at the consulate] from Oklahoma who had driven through a snowstorm to go for her interview, had just had a baby months earlier, and who was told, “You have to stay in Mexico for three years.” Can you imagine having a newborn that you’re not going to see until that baby is three years old? This is how our system is working.

It was a very difficult year for both of us, him being in a place where he had never lived for a significant portion of his life and us on the other side trying to navigate.

At the end of the year, he had to do all of the things [at the consulate] over again. The person who interviewed him said, “Why did you take a year to come for your interview?” He said, “Your colleague told me that I had to stay in the country for a year.” She looked at all of this paperwork and said, “That makes no sense.”

I have to keep emphasizing, I recognize the privilege that I have in being able to do what we did. I think often of folks who don’t have that privilege, whose spouse or son, daughter, brother, sister is in a country where a lot of them have no connection. What’s worse is the family that’s left behind isn’t able to actually go and spend time with those people who have been detained or deported. It was and continues to be something that I’ve been passionate and feel strongly about, just because this isn’t who we should be as a nation.

F&L: You had shared this story within the diocese as it was happening, but it was not widely known.

DKJ: I shared with the clergy. I had to go visit all the congregations of the diocese, and I still have to live out my vocation. I can’t stop being bishop for a year. I shared it with the clergy and with the instructions, “I ask you to pray for us. Please do not share this publicly.”

I didn’t want to put my husband in jeopardy of any kind during that time, and I also didn’t want to show up [and] the whole congregation to be, “Oh, we’re so sorry,” to kind of reignite the whole thing. It was helpful to me to have the clergy know but not share with everybody else. It was quasi-public, but not quite [public].

F&L: Since it has become more public, what has been the response?

DKJ: I’ve had people who reached out to both of us, sharing similar stories, or saying, “I didn’t quite understand that this is how the system works.”

I had somebody send me a message on social media saying, “If you all had just followed the process, none of this would have happened.” I had to respond by saying, “Do you honestly think that as a bishop I’m going to break the law to try to make this happen? Think about what you’re saying.”

I unfortunately read some of the comments on the NPR story, and some people [said], “They were just trying to game the system.” It’s kind of like I get the narrative that you want this to be, but the reality is very different than what you expect, not only the financial cost to families having to go through green card processes but the emotional toll that it takes.

We are still living with, if he is out driving somewhere, the possibility that he could just be picked up for no other reason than having a broken taillight or a flat tire or something. Who knows? That’s just the reality of living in this season in the life of this nation.

F&L: The way I became aware of your ministry is the daily prayers you write and share on social media. Could you talk about those?

DKJ: I became a bishop in the middle of COVID. I decided, “Let me just put out a prayer in the morning,” and I would pull a hymn or something that was meaningful to me or gave me comfort, just as a way of saying to people, “Look, this is happening, but we can still be deeply grounded.”

Every morning I’d start off finding a prayer from somewhere and just putting it out. Then I said, “This isn’t too bad. Let’s see if I can write a prayer occasionally.” So, I started writing. Occasionally, I would put out one or two among the others, and people were responding to the ones that I wrote more than the ones I was finding and sharing.

It continued to evolve, and I thought, “I’m just going to do this through COVID. I will just continue to write a prayer.” Once COVID is behind us, I would stop and continue doing the things that I was doing.

COVID came to an end, and I stopped for about a month. My inbox got flooded by people, “We didn’t get any prayer. We’re looking forward to your prayer.”

It now has become a part of my daily spiritual practice. A lot of the times the prayer that I’m writing is the prayer that I need to hear or the prayer that I need to be praying.

People will say to me, “Do you sit down and plan out a month’s worth of prayers or something like that?” Nope. Part of my routine has been getting up in the morning to get our son out to school. In the quiet between waking him up and him going to get dressed, I would sit, read the news, and something — like a word, a phrase, an image, something [while] reading the news or staring outside, looking out the window — would spark a prayer. That just continued.

I was on vacation last week, for instance, and we decided to go on a cruise, so I suspect that this week’s set of prayers is going to have a lot of water imagery. The prayer this morning was about a lighthouse because we sailed past a lighthouse. They’re whatever’s happening, sometimes what I’m feeling in response to what’s going on.

I love to write, so it’s a way for me to continue to write, to do something creative, because a lot of my time as a bishop is so challenging. [This is] some time to have a creative outlet. It has become now a foundational part of my own spirituality to write these prayers in the morning. It feels odd when I don’t.

There are seasons when the prayer is literally “Oh God, get me through this day.” And I recognize sometimes that if I’m praying that, it’s giving other people permission to pray the same thing.

Or — we’re seeing some terrible things happen. Being able to name those things in prayer and to live in that space of not knowing how to respond is prayer unto itself. I’m hoping that, because my prayers feel real in many ways, that they give people permission to be just real with God.

F&L: We are in a fraught season as the nation marks 250 years. As you consider past, present, future, the experiences of so many, what would your message be to the church in the most expansive sense?

DKJ: I think the message for the church is that we have to be the keepers of the story. In a season where we’re attempting to erase stories or to tell the stories, as the old people say, “from a slant,” I think the church’s role, especially as we look at 250 years of the American experiment, is to be the keeper of the stories, to tell the parts of the story that are not being told.

We hear of all the things that have happened in the last 250 years, going all the way from, even earlier, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to yesterday. There’s a lot that has happened, and unless we are able to reckon with both the past and the present, it dims the light for the future. I think the church is called into telling the story but also into naming.

In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church, the priest or the layperson, whoever was getting ready to baptize a baby, would lean into the godparents and say, “Name this child.”

It wasn’t just about getting the name; it was about God naming and claiming that child by name, saying, “This person belongs to God.”

In some sense, I think that is part of the role of the church right now; we have to name and claim the stories of those who are being pushed to the side. We have to be the keepers of those stories, of our Native American siblings who were displaced through genocide in our nation. We have to tell the stories of slavery and its atrocity and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and segregation. We have to tell those full stories and not just the cleaned-up versions that make it into textbooks.

I’m a firm believer that those individual stories really do make a difference in getting people to recognize that this isn’t about some event that happened. These are real people’s lives.

I’ve been doing some research on my ancestors, which, for most people of African descent who came to this country or to the Caribbean islands, etc., through enslavement, there is very little [documentation]. But the church records tell stories.

One of the stories that I found is I have a sixth-generation great-grandmother whose name was Eliza Hutchinson, who was enslaved. She went to the church to have her daughter baptized. Mind you, there was no father listed on the certificate; maybe that was the master, but she went to have her daughter baptized.

It’s the vital statistics; you’ve got the name, age, occupation, all the things, but in the margins the priest wrote, “Beautiful singing voice.” I know nothing of Eliza Hutchinson except that she had a beautiful voice to sing, but just that little snippet of my history, knowing that that’s the legacy that she had left fills out the story of what slavery was. That’s why I said that I think that the church is called to name and tell the story, especially in this season.

I think it’s the one place where we can help move this society closer to the dream of God. Unless we tell the truth about our past, we will always be entering into the future without having a full vision.

We have to name and know the trauma that slavery had both on the slaves and the enslaver. Name the trauma that our Native American siblings endured genocide. Call it genocide. When we say, “the displacement or the removal” — let’s name the thing. Let’s stop trying to make this sound as though it was, “Oh, they came and just simply moved a tent community.” There was intentional destruction and death, but until we actually are able as a nation to name those places, to recognize that the good pieces — and the bad pieces — of our history are what make us who we are, we will always be telling and living out only a part of the American dream.

F&L: Do you have any idea what your prayer on the Fourth of July will be?

DKJ: No. That was one I have been thinking about. I try to do a little bit of a reflection on the big High Holy Days. I have some little threads, but I have not woven them together yet. But I think it’s going to center something around the lines of what divides us does not define us.

I’ve been seeing the 250th anniversary all over the place, and I keep hearing about the division. I keep reminding myself, “The things that divide us really don’t define us.” If we look past our division, we are all compassionate. We all want mercy. We all want caring. We want to be seen. We want to know that our lives matter.

I think that those folks who just … Democrats that hate Republicans and Republicans who hate Democrats and independents who hate whoever they want, then we are letting the things that divide us define us, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Someone said America is a dream, and we get to shape what that dream looks like, if we can get back to the basics of recognizing [that] the things that keep us apart really do not define who we are as a people or as a nation. So, look for that line in one of the prayers.

The last piece that I would add to all of what we’ve talked about today, as someone who came to this country from another culture, [is] a recognition that we all come from someplace else. In God’s creative diversity, we make it work, if we can see past our own shortsightedness.

Western culture’s version of the Christmas narrative rests on idyllic scenes of a serene manger and adoring visitors, often lit by a warm, ethereal glow. Well-known and beloved carols have canonized such familiar images, and this shiny vision permeates children’s pageants, pastors’ sermons and popular culture — from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to Hallmark movies.

But beneath the familiar comfort of the Christmas story lies a radical truth that often goes unacknowledged. In “The Remarkable Ordinary,” Frederick Buechner wisely observed that we often see “what [we] expect to see rather than what’s there.” To grasp the radical truth at the heart of Christmas, we must move beyond the sanitized depictions and confront the reality of the incarnation. The Christmas story, stripped of its veneer, is far messier and uncomfortable — yet perhaps ultimately more hopeful — than we realize.

The dissonance between the idealized nativity scenes and the harsh realities of the world into which Jesus was born is striking. Jesus entered a reality much like that of the millions in the Middle East today, particularly in places like Palestine, Israel and Lebanon — a world of political unrest, economic hardship and social injustice.

These areas, scarred by generations of conflict and displacement, mirror the turmoil of the first Christmas. The Holy Family were themselves refugees as they fled Herod’s violence, a stark reminder of the plight of countless individuals in the region who are displaced by war and occupation.

This messiness is not incidental to the Christmas story; it is integral to the gospel message itself. The prophet Isaiah foretold a messiah who would be “despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3 RSV), a prophecy echoed in the humble circumstances of Jesus’ birth. Micah 5:2 prophesied his birth in the seemingly insignificant town of Bethlehem, further subverting expectations of a powerful king.

The incarnation — God taking on human flesh — is a radical act of solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. It is a profound demonstration of kenosis, the self-emptying love of God that Jürgen Moltmann described in “The Crucified God.”

To understand kenosis is to understand that God chose to pour out divine power, to become vulnerable and dependent, as a demonstration of ultimate love and humility. This kenotic love challenges traditional notions of power and offers a model for humble service.

This is the same kenosis we are called to embody when we seek to understand the suffering in today’s world. It’s the empathy we need in order to grasp the fear of the teenager rejected by their family because of their identity, the pain of the refugee fleeing conflict, the frustration of the person trapped in economic inequality. It compels us to see the humanity in all, to bridge the divides that create distance between us, and to work in solidarity with those who struggle for justice and equality in every corner of the world.

The angel’s proclamation of “good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10 NRSV) takes on a revolutionary tone when viewed through this lens. This is not a joy that ignores suffering but a joy that enters into the world’s pain, transforming and ultimately redeeming it. Christ’s birth, therefore, is not a retreat from the world but a radical reordering of it, a declaration that God’s love transcends our notions of power or purity.

This reordering is further emphasized in Jesus’ own ministry, in which he consistently reached out to the outcasts and challenged the religious and social structures of his time. He proclaimed, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3) and challenged his followers to care for “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).

More than a quaint tale of a baby in a manger, the Christmas story is a subversive counternarrative to the dominant cultural norms that prioritize power and privilege. It elevates the lowly and challenges the status quo, calling us to embrace the marginalized, resist injustice, and work toward a more equitable and compassionate world.

The Christmas narrative also challenges our understanding of hope. It is not a passive waiting for a miraculous rescue. Rather, it is an active engagement with the world, a commitment to participate in God’s ongoing work of redemption and reconciliation. As the rabbis taught, “The work of creation continues, … and it is man’s glorious privilege to help finish it.” The Holy Spirit, who equips and directs believers to be agents of God’s love and justice in the world, empowers this active hope.

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, we are invited to enter into this story of “God with us.” We are invited to encounter the divine, not in the halls of power or the places of privilege, but in the margins, among the vulnerable and the forgotten. We are called to participate in the ongoing story where God’s love continues to break in and bring hope and healing to a world in desperate need of both.

We are invited to move beyond the familiar images and encounter the radical message at the heart of the nativity. It’s a call to find courage in a faith that doesn’t shy away from the world’s challenges but empowers us to work toward a more compassionate and just future. True hope requires action and calls us to participate in God’s redemptive work.

An authentic, messy Christmas story offers a message of love, radical transformation and enduring hope. This is the message that has echoed through the centuries, inspiring countless acts of compassion and justice. This story, drawing on the words of the poet Placide Cappeau, is the true “thrill of hope” that causes the weary world to rejoice.

Don’t tell the Rev. Luis Cortés that Esperanza is something special.

It is, of course. And he appreciates the compliment. But he doesn’t think that an institution like Esperanza, which serves the Latino community in North Philadelphia, should be special.

“A place like Esperanza should be normative. We have 30 neighborhoods in the city; there should be 30 Esperanzas,” he said. “There should be 30 places where you can participate in the arts, where you can learn about and play music, where you can experience different forms of dance, where you can learn photography, where you can learn how to add and subtract.”

Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the same things that everyone needs for a good life, he said.

Founded in 1987, Esperanza seeks to help the residents of Hunting Park, a majority-Latino neighborhood, have the same opportunities that other residents of the city enjoy. It focuses on education and economic development, including affordable housing, schools, housing counseling, immigration legal services, workforce development, youth leader training, and a fully accredited branch campus, Esperanza College of Eastern University.

The organization — its name means “hope” in Spanish — has more than 600 employees and a budget of more than $70 million and is a model for other institutions across the country.

Cortés, who is a Baptist pastor, worked with Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia to found Esperanza. He earned an M.Div. at Union Theological Seminary and a master’s degree in economic development from Southern New Hampshire University. 

In this interview, he talks to Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about why he founded Esperanza and why he thinks institution building is key to social change. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: You have a goal of building an “opportunity community.” What do you mean by that?

Luis Cortés: Our ontology has a set of concepts and categories, and the relationships between these are fundamental. There is a Creator, and there are the created. Those are givens, as fact. So we start there. The other thing that’s given, as fact, is that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes.

If you believe that, then you must believe that we should try to provide a great opportunity for everyone to become that which God would have them become. To be in service to humanity is to assist everyone to develop to their highest potential. That’s our modus operandi.

This understanding then is followed by the question, what do you do with the poor? The mission work is to create a place where you provide all residents the opportunity to live a quality life. What must you provide for people to reach their ultimate goals, to be able to serve humanity better despite their economic situation and to have them feel they have a good quality of life?

This is what becomes an opportunity community, the development of all things needed for individuals to reach their potential. As an example, we built a theater and we have cultural pieces, like teaching dance, teaching music, all from a cultural perspective.

All people come from and have a culture. We have a language, we have music, and for Latines, we are in exile — we’re away from where our culture was based.

What do we do to create an opportunity community — a community that understands your class and your culture and helps you build so that you can have a great life staying here in this neighborhood or you can use what you learn here and have a great life elsewhere?

F&L: How did Esperanza begin?

LC: I was the founder of Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia in 1981, an outgrowth of developing a field education system for Latine students at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was about 26 clergy from about 18 different denominational entities.

These clergy were all in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, and they had never really worked together until we organized as a field education consortium. As a group of clergy, when we would get together, like any group of highly motivated concerned citizens, we inevitably become active on challenging issues of the day.

We were getting together to discuss field education, quite mundane. And then all of a sudden, conversations shifted to, “They shot a guy here last week” or, “The police did or didn’t perform,” and we just moved in the direction of the conversations and became a civil rights organization.

During that time, Pew Charitable Trusts did a study on religious institutions, and as a result, we got funded for three years to start Esperanza and to work in clergy education. The clergy hired me to do it, with the mandate to do the clergy education and create a proactive organization, Esperanza.

In the beginning, the more we helped an individual family, the more it hurt the local church. As we helped individuals, the family moved farther away from their church, eventually joining a suburban congregation.

What we learned as a group was, it doesn’t matter if our people leave to improve their lot, as long as we create an institution that remains to assist those that stay or can’t get out.

Our philosophy became that we will work together to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We began working on that theory of institution building where we could control the mission and agenda of our community, as opposed to the present-day external control.

We as Hispanic people in this nation have never focused on this on a large scale. We’ve never created our own institutions. What we do is we assume that we will inherit the institutions of America as we become a larger part of America. But that is not how it works. The institutions that provide for and control our neighborhoods are all managed externally: police, fire, schools, streets, most businesses.

So we decided we only wanted to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We had enough Hispanic institutions that were doing social service, so we decided to not compete with our follow Latine agencies. We focused on education and economic development.

We wanted to do education because education is the first step and we understand institution-building as economic development.

When we first got started, it was like, “How do we help people?” Now it’s, “How do we help our institutions help people?”

F&L: How did you come to appreciate institutions in this time when there’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of distrust, a lot of anger around institutions?

LC: Since our nation’s beginning, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that it is associations and the institutions that they create that make Americas unique.

We’ve got to think positive. We serve our communities and our neighbors. So if everybody would do as well as they can at their community-serving job, whatever that is, we should be headed to a better place.

As the religious population lessens, there will have to be alternative institutions that defend the rights of the poor. Historically, the church has responded to the poor first through charity, then the development of institutions like hospitals or schools. Advocating to change unjust laws.

If that faith role dwindles, we have to figure out who or what replaces that. I see that as a major problem for the future.

F&L: In addition to the institutions, you are making change in individuals. The documentary “Esperanza: Hope for Our Cities,” for example, shows that commitment. Why do you stress self-belief, grit and confidence?

LC: I went to public school in Spanish Harlem. When I got to elementary school, they said to me, “You can be president of the United States.” And I looked around, and it’s old, it’s decrepit, it’s dirty, it’s outdated, and I’m like, “Nah, no way.”

For many people, it’s hard to self-motivate if you don’t see anyone else around you achieve success. We need our youth to “make it.” Last year, in our graduating high school class, we had MIT, two people at Carnegie Mellon, and one girl went to Wellesley, among a plethora of state colleges and universities. It is now normative.

Part of our model is we must have modern equipment. The space must be super clean. Visitors come to our place and they say, “Wow, this is so clean.” It’s a compliment. I understand. But it also says something about their expectation.

When I’m told, “Wow, this place is clean. This lab is so modern,” what are they saying? That in their preconception of economic poverty, they did not expect a first-class lab here. They did not expect, because of the economics, this place to be spotless. They do not expect your top five students to go to those schools, and you have one of the top college-graduating high schools for Hispanics. They do not expect that.

Whatever prejudice they brought in begins to be challenged, right? It’s like — look at this: MIT, Harvard, Penn. When they see that, they say, “Something special is happening.”

While there may be truth to that, it’s only special because other people won’t do it. Our team at Esperanza figured out how to do it, creating a culture of opportunity.

I believe there’s nothing that we can’t do. It’s just about how much time you have and what are your priorities. People ask me about this all the time — “How did you do it?”

Well, you find the need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution behind it, then find the next need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution that survives until it can thrive.

F&L: You mentioned the cleanliness, and you also insist on giving Esperanza’s students and other participants the best in other ways. Why is that important?

LC: We start with the concept that we should have what any community has. If you look at most communities and the arts, for example, they have access to experiences and ways to learn; they have ways to experience music, acting, dance and painting or visual. We have to create the avenues.

First we got the theater, and then through the theater, we do dance. But we also brought the best of the region. So the Philadelphia Orchestra plays at our theater; Opera Philadelphia sings in our theater; the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra plays at our theater; Philadanco and the Philadelphia Ballet dance in our theater.

We communicated to these arts institutions, “When you come to our neighborhood, it has to be your A team.” Normally when they go to a community, they send the B and C team so they can work and practice as they serve a neighborhood project. At Esperanza, if the A team ain’t coming, you don’t come.

The artistic talent also has to give time during the week to work with students. Not just Esperanza schools, but there are about 10,000 public school children in our neighborhood. They do workshops and our community youth interact with them. After their theatrical performance, they sit and answer audience questions for 15 minutes. We have found the arts groups love these interactions as much as our residents do.

F&L: You also work on gentrification. How much of an issue is that for you?

LC: The bottom line is that urban communities near centers of our American cities where working-class Spanish-speaking people live are being dismantled by an upper middle class and above who wants their land and their housing so they can capitalize economically and culturally. It is happening everywhere.

Cities are happy with the gentrification or displacement of our neighborhoods, because it means a better tax base for the city. So when the city gains, the economically disadvantaged lose. That’s a constant struggle.

We need to build up equity in Black and brown communities. The No. 1 equity builder in Black and brown communities is not giant companies; it’s mom-and-pop commercial shops and home ownership. What we can show is, as we lose the housing, these mom-and-pop shops are destroyed.

So, the real question is, do we really want to help Black and brown people, or are we just saying we do while we actually cash in on their assets?

In America, they’re taking our neighborhoods under the guise of mixed income communities. In St. Louis, Black neighborhoods are being bought up by universities. West Philadelphia, it’s universities and science centers. North Philadelphia, it’s another university and the corporate needs. So they push people out of their long serving neighborhoods.

Today, young professionals don’t want to spend money on a car to live in the suburbs. They prefer to live in the city, not have a car. They’ll just Uber and use the money saved on transportation for restaurants and recreation, which is fine. But the economic burden falls on the economically disadvantaged, who need to move farther away to more expensive housing, losing the businesses that cater to their needs.

It’s interesting that progressive communities are the ones that gentrify Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s not the conservatives. Conservatives avoid minority communities, while progressives enjoy moving into a culturally mixed neighborhood until they extinct the original ethnic group that was there.

Progressives move in during their early professional career, purchase housing cheaply, live there for five years and make six figures on their “investment.”

It’s a real interesting dynamic where we fight the conservatives on one side and we have to fight the progressives on the other. They do have one thing in common: they’re white.

The role of the church should be different. How do we talk to progressives to say, “Listen, I know you can make money by moving into my neighborhood, but you’re hurting us. How do we really build a mixed income community?”

There’s a dynamic that’s happening in our country. San Bernardino, Phoenix, Calle Ocho in Miami, San Antonio, Philadelphia. Chicago, with three distinct Hispanic neighborhoods. They’re all under the same pressure.

F&L: How do you keep from being overwhelmed when everything you describe is extremely complex? It’s difficult. Yet almost 40 years later, you’re still hopeful.

LC: I am a minister. I believe in God. And in the end, we are all called to serve others. Despite all the problems, our job is to persevere and pursue. And persistence is the name of the game.

In 2011, the Rev. Paul Abernathy, then an Orthodox priest fresh out of seminary, started a neighborhood ministry in the Hill District, a predominantly Black section of Pittsburgh that had long suffered from economic decline. He did what he could to make an impact: providing food and clothing, offering comfort or a prayer when someone was in distress. But he soon realized there were even deeper needs.

“What really struck me early on,” Abernathy said, “was the immense amount of suffering.”

A person would come in asking for help getting a doctor’s appointment or a bus pass and would end up talking about eviction, gun violence, systemic racism, unemployment, food insecurity, abuse, addiction or incarceration. 

The serious experiences that came up all represented ongoing traumas. It reminded Abernathy of the post-traumatic stress he had been warned about when he was an Army staff sergeant in Iraq. Moreover, the traumas affected everyone in the neighborhood.

“Even if someone didn’t have a direct experience of trauma, that trauma was all around, all the time,” he said.

Abernathy, who is African American and was raised Catholic, attended a Black Baptist church in college before converting to Orthodoxy in 2002. He became convinced that unless that underlying suffering could be addressed, any efforts to help his constituents wouldn’t last.

“I’ve seen too many people get jobs and lose jobs,” he said in a 2016 TEDx talk. “I’ve seen too many people get into housing and lose housing. Why? Because they have been traumatized to the point that they are not healthy enough to sustain the opportunities that were placed at their feet.”

True community development, he came to believe, first required healing.

Abernathy found two researchers at nearby Duquesne University who were specialists in trauma counseling and community mental health and facilitated a series of discussions with them and community members.

He learned that 65% of African Americans have a lifetime exposure to trauma — long-term, repeated experiences that are stressful or frightening. He learned that trauma can be passed from generation to generation, with tangible effects on health. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the average life expectancy in parts of the Hill District is nearly 20 years less than in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

These discussions ultimately led to the creation of the Neighborhood Resilience Project, a multifaceted, faith-based community outreach program headquartered in the Hill District, with Abernathy as its CEO and his wife Kristina Abernathy as its chief development officer.

Now in its 12th year, the project offers wide-ranging services, from a food pantry, support groups and educational seminars to a trauma response team that’s dispatched after incidents of gun violence. The project serves people not just in the Hill District but throughout Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. It’s also attracted attention from a number of communities elsewhere, all seeking to learn from a model Abernathy calls trauma-informed community development.

Food, clothing and dental checkups

On a recent Wednesday morning at the Neighborhood Resilience Project’s headquarters, a three-story building on the northern edge of the Hill District, social worker Kathy Pehanich is meeting with a woman who recently lost her job and came in for help with paying her rent and utilities.

Pehanich’s office is cramped — not much bigger than a walk-in closet — with cinder block walls painted white and hung with prints of several Orthodox icons. (Orthodox iconography can be seen on walls throughout the site: St. Luke the Evangelist, St. Thais of Egypt, Christ Pantokrator, Holy Mother of God, St. Nicholas and others.) Pehanich was a drug and alcohol counselor earlier in her career; she began volunteering at the Neighborhood Resilience Project one day a week and now is part of the paid staff.

Much like an emergency room staffer, Pehanich never knows who might walk in next — perhaps a job seeker needing help getting a birth certificate, a tenant with a rent payment overdue, a woman fleeing domestic abuse. In the winter especially, Pehanich fields calls daily from people needing a place to sleep, and she works the phones in hopes of getting them beds at one of the city’s homeless shelters.

Some regulars show up a few times a week just to socialize, have a cup of coffee or attend the daily Orthodox service at noon. The steady flow of clientele creates a sense of community that Pehanich didn’t sense when she was a substance abuse counselor and saw each client once a week at most.

In the basement, volunteers and staff have formed an assembly line, stuffing food items into plastic bags for the Backpack Feeding Program. The Neighborhood Resilience Project delivers more than 1,200 bags each week to 25 area schools, rec centers and other sites, where they’re distributed to children who need them.

“For some kids, their only meal is what they get at school,” said Bisrat Tesfagiorgis, who oversees the effort. “Our program works to make sure that the children are fed over the weekend.”

In the early years of the program, the food items (ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, animal crackers, small boxes of cereal, boxed juice) were delivered in a backpack — hence the program’s name. But getting more than a thousand students to return the backpacks for reuse each week proved unrealistic, so now the food is packed into plastic grocery bags.

The building’s lower level also houses a food pantry and a clothing pantry (socks in particular are always in demand). Tesfagiorgis remembers a recent incident typical of the multiple ways the Neighborhood Resilience Project can help.

A man showed up one day, upset about the death of a close family member. “We were talking,” Tesfagiorgis said, “and I was just trying to pray, asking, ‘How can I be helpful?’ Then he said, ‘I wish I could go to the funeral, but I don’t have anything nice to wear.’ So I brought him down here,” he said, gesturing to the clothing pantry. The man quickly found a suit and a pair of shoes, and — at least for the moment — his mood noticeably brightened.

On the third floor, a health clinic staffed by volunteer physicians and dentists provides free care to a clientele that largely has no health insurance. With two exam rooms, two dental rooms and a medical lab, providers can offer a range of primary care services and make basic medications available at no cost.

For more advanced care, the Neighborhood Resilience Project can refer a patient to one of its partners — a local cardiologist who has agreed to see patients for free, for example, or another free clinic that happens to have a pulmonologist on staff. In addition, according to patient care specialist Paige Sarkaria, many area hospitals offer financial assistance.

“We can refer a patient to a hospital for, say, an imaging procedure, and then we help them apply for the hospital’s assistance program,” she said.

Like most of the services of the Neighborhood Resilience Project, the clinic has grown. In 2022, it recorded 244 patient visits; in 2023, that number jumped to 421.

The health outreach isn’t confined to the Neighborhood Resilience Project building. A team of trained community health deputies spends time out on the streets, educating residents about health issues.

During the peak of the COVID pandemic, more than 100 deputies, often with Abernathy in the lead, went door to door to talk about how to stay safe from the virus — a special challenge in neighborhoods where multiple generations live together in crowded homes. They also recruited Black volunteers to take part in Moderna vaccine trials at the University of Pittsburgh, mindful that the pool of participants in such trials too often is predominantly white.

Psychological first aid

Perhaps the most innovative service that the Neighborhood Resilience Project provides, and the one that best exemplifies its trauma-centered approach, is the trauma response team. The team’s job is simple yet ambitious: to provide a healing presence — psychological first aid, they call it — at the scene of gun violence.

Each morning, four staff members gather in a room on the top floor of the Neighborhood Resilience Project building and begin to sift through the available information on any new homicides in the county.

The intel comes from social media, police reports, news stories online and tips from police or social workers. Ultimately, the staff may conclude that a deployment is needed, and the call goes out to a team of volunteers (who, like the staff, are trained in public safety, CPR, first aid and mental health first aid).

The staff and volunteers gather at the building, undergo a briefing on the details of the situation, pray together and then head out in one of two 31-foot RVs emblazoned with the Neighborhood Resilience Project logo.

They park near the scene for several hours; some team members go out canvassing, introducing themselves to people they encounter, while others wait in the RV in case someone knocks on the door and says, “I need to talk.”

The RV has water bottles, food, a private room and stuffed animals (“trauma teddies”) for helping comfort children. The idea is to serve as a sympathetic ear to whoever needs it: a family member of the victim or perpetrator, a bystander — anyone who has been affected. Sometimes they help the person notify relatives. Sometimes they pray. Often they hand out a card with the Neighborhood Resilience Project phone number and a list of other available resources.

Andre Jacobs is program manager for the trauma response team. A native of Pittsburgh, he served three deployments with the Marines in Afghanistan and suffered afterward with PTSD. He credits his faith with helping him recover — “I had to have the courage to say, ‘I’m not OK, God,’” he said — and sees his work with the trauma response team as a way of giving back.

“I would just be foolish not to pass on the teachings and understandings that I now have,” Jacobs said. He also makes sure that the team isn’t known solely for its work at the scene of tragedies; they’ve also set up a hamburger grill on occasion at various neighborhood locations — “you know, just to put a few smiles on faces,” he said — and they conduct educational programs to help raise awareness of the trauma that often underlies violence.

A team approach to reducing violence

The Neighborhood Resilience Project is also taking the lead on a countywide project to reduce gun violence. Allegheny County sees more than 120 homicides per year on average, according to county data, and while Black men make up just 6% of the county population, they are the victims in 66% of the homicides. Gun violence tends to be geographically concentrated, according to Abernathy.

“There are 30,000 blocks in Allegheny County, and of those 30,000 blocks, gun violence happens in 0.3% of them. About 90 blocks.” Several of those hot spots are in the Hill District.

In early 2023, the county’s Department of Human Services pledged at least $50 million over five years toward its new Community Violence Reduction Initiative, with an emphasis on a public health approach — treating gun violence as a disease and addressing its underlying causes.

It’s in sync with the trauma-informed approach that Abernathy embraces, and in fact, the Neighborhood Resilience Project was chosen to be the countywide convener of the effort. The Neighborhood Resilience Project hosted the first summit on violence reduction last June, bringing together 200 partners from organizations throughout the county.

“We talked about what collaboration looks like,” said Quinten Boose, the director of violence reduction at the Neighborhood Resilience Project. “We talked about the hot spots, the data, the generational traumas, the root causes — how are we as a county going to address that.”

Boose is a former Pittsburgh city police officer with experience as a special victims unit detective and crisis negotiator; in 2023, he finished a master of public policy and management degree at the University of Pittsburgh. His job in the countywide project is to corral hundreds of partners from dozens of community and government organizations to work together.

It’s early in the process, but Boose is especially intrigued by an approach called the Omaha 360 model, which heavily emphasizes the collaboration of multiple stakeholders. A primary component of the model is weekly meetings involving law enforcement and residents, to reduce the disconnect between police and community members. Omaha 360 led to a 74% decrease in gun violence over a 10-year period in Omaha and has since been used as a model by other cities.

Meanwhile, the Neighborhood Resilience Project overall is proving to be a model for other communities throughout the country. In addition to his TEDx talk, Abernathy has given numerous media interviews, convened two trauma-informed community development institutes, and hosted officials from such locations as Richmond, Virginia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Sarasota, Florida; and the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.

Some have replicated the Neighborhood Resilience Project in their communities or begun a variant of it. They are exploring ways that they, too, can adopt the Neighborhood Resilience Project’s goal: to heal neighborhoods, one block at a time.