Street Psalms trains and connects leaders around the globe to build communities of peace

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

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,” she 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.

Invitation to a Changed Life

As the visioning of the congregation continued, [Arlington Presbyterian Church] members connected the crisis of their own congregational life to the life of the surrounding community. In 2012, APC realized they needed to set their priorities within their call from God to the neighborhood.

We really needed to stop asking ourselves questions and start knocking on our neighbors’ doors in a sincere, committed, and organized effort.

It wasn’t enough to do the intellectual discernment processes or for the congregation to assume they knew the needs of the neighborhood.

We were challenged to pay attention not to what we thought needed to happen, what we imagined the community needed, but to listen to what our neighbors had to say — to get to know and be in relationship with our neighbors and hear them.

Congregants rode buses up and down Columbia Pike [in Arlington, Virginia]. They talked with local business owners, teachers, domestic workers, any and all who make up the infrastructure of Arlington County. On Saturday mornings, church members set up tables in the church’s parking lot, located right next to a bus stop. They used the community-organizing strategies of listening sessions and one-on-one meetings to listen to the deep wisdom of the neighborhood.

One day in one of the villages there was a man covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him in prayer and said, “If you want to, you can cleanse me.” Jesus put out his hand, touched him, and said, “I want to. Be clean.” Then and there his skin was smooth, the leprosy gone. (Luke 5:12-13)

APC listened. They heard of people covered in debt and exorbitant rent. They heard of people longing to be healed from weary commutes, financial uncertainty, and living away from family and kinship. They listened as neighbors shared hopes, dreams, and ideas for their future, a future they wanted to be in Arlington County.

This relational work allowed a guiding question to emerge for APC: What is breaking our hearts in our neighborhood?

The stories of the neighbors broke the heart of APC, binding the well-being of APC up in the well-being of the neighborhood. Jesus pulled the congregation into the neighborhood streets, and they practically tripped over the need for affordable housing as they listened to story after story.

The stories signified the emerging incompatibility with the old and the new: as we began to think about jettisoning our 1950s building, we also started to rid ourselves of the 1950s version of Christianity that had captured our thinking. Our ministry shifted from “if we build it, they will come” to “we will go to the neighbors and build.”

It wasn’t about what we could do for our neighbors; it became about how we heard God’s invitation in their stories. How their stories became our stories together. …

For More of the Story, Go Around the Corner

There is a plaque on the outside of Gilliam Place [apartment building], created by an unknown entity, that says “Here stood the Arlington Presbyterian Church.” The plaque names how APC played a significant role in the life of the South Arlington community. The end of the plaque reads, “The Church property was sold in 2016, and the buildings were demolished in 2017.”

The end. It reads like a church obituary.

Not to be outdone by a building plaque, several APC folks want to put up a sign at the bottom of the plaque that reads, “for more of the story, go around the corner …”

Creating new wine for a new wineskin hasn’t been easy, and God isn’t finished with us. Right now, APC stands in the tension between our previous stories and the ones we hope will guide us forward. As we claim these new stories, we see ourselves sharing life and evolving with those in Gilliam Place.

I now realize how our new space has allowed us to begin living a new future together with our neighbors that would have been inconceivable in the old building.

We are still dynamically breaking open those old models of church. We stand in the community, asking questions about new ways and new directions.

We commissioned a new hymn to honor this new era of APC at Gilliam Place. We sing these words often in worship:

We have been called to listen and called to act, we have been called to tear down and called to build, and we’re still people on a journey, our work isn’t done. Keep us faithful in the way of love.

This hymn is a reminder that God is not done with APC even after this miraculous story. We’re still people on a journey, drinking new wine in a new wineskin. For all of this — for the old wine and old wineskin, for the new wine and new wineskin — we give God never-ending thanks.

Excerpted from “Gone for Good? Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition,” edited by Mark Elsdon © 2024 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.