Ghetto Reunion 5 comments

By Andy Whitman

When I was twenty-two years old I moved to the ghetto. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a new Christian, my life up to that point had been primarily informed by Woodstock and Timothy Leary, and the prospect of stained glass windows and choir robes seemed as alien to me as life on the moon.

So I moved in to the inner city with forty hippies, Jesus Freaks who set up shop in what passed for the most dangerous neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

We were a self-styled “New Testament Church,” which was shorthand for “after 2,000 years, and thousands of missteps, we’re finally going to get it right.” Getting it right, in our case, meant a radical identification with the poor, living in the midst of and serving the least and the lost, sharing the good news of salvation and backing it up with our very lives, pouring them out in concrete acts of love and compassion.

God only knows what the neighborhood denizens thought of these proceedings. Forty idealistic, educated, and very white long-haired freaks, with their snot-nosed kids and their guitars and chickens and goats and Bibles, moved onto 17th Avenue, right down the street from Camp’s Carryout, which got robbed at gunpoint every Saturday night. I would imagine that we were viewed with some skepticism and derision.

I stayed there eight wondrous, terrible years. I met my wife there. I formed some of the deepest friendships of my life there. And perhaps, in some small ways, I’d like to think that we had a positive impact on our neighbors. I hope that some of the little kids we tutored have gone on to escape the hopeless cycle we saw enacted again and again.

We cleaned the place up, if not morally, then at least physically, and when we left the neighborhood was less unsightly than when we arrived. But in the end the ghetto won. The hippies grew up, got married, and started families and careers. And suddenly it wasn’t that appealing to envision little Sarah or Joshua meeting the crack dealer on the corner. We all left, for the simple reason that we could. We had the emotional and intellectual and cultural capital to make a break for it, and we did.

Every year, on December 28th, the increasingly thin-haired, thick-waisted remnants of that failed experiment meet to catch up on life and to remember our shared time together. We reconvened just a few weeks ago. More than thirty years later, it’s evident that we got a lot wrong. And more than thirty years later, given the sizable turnout that shows up for these yearly reunions, and given the fact that many of these people travel great distances to be there, it’s evident that we got a lot right.

It was a silly, naïve notion. “Stupid,” as my friend Jeff told me a few months back over lunch. Jeff and his family are now firmly established in a nice denominational church. He wears a suit on Sunday mornings, and his hair is short, and he prides himself on being a part of a long and vital church tradition. “I look back on those ‘Let’s all hold hands and be the church’ days with some embarrassment,” he tells me.

And I understand. I recall the interminable wrangling over every theological issue imaginable, the need to re-invent every single doctrinal stance and claim it as our own, the inevitable hubris that accompanies any attempt to be “the New Testament Church,” and the underlying disdain for all the poor brothers and sisters who had it wrong for lo these two millennia.

It’s not a shining legacy. And it wasn’t all peace and love. Some of the naïve hippies got robbed at gunpoint; a couple of the women were raped. No one escaped unchanged or unscathed.

The irony isn’t lost on me when I realize that from that tiny house church a suburban megachurch of more than 10,000 people emerged, and that the massive parking lot of that church is filled with Beamers and SUVs. Old hippies never die. They just become Republicans, and discuss their golfing handicaps and stock portfolios.

And so I wonder about the legacy. Is my friend Jeff right? Was it all for naught? Was it all just a silly, idealistic, misty vision that faded once people grew up and got some sense? Did we dabble in radicalism, only to become dreaded Average Americans?

Maybe. But I don’t think so. The thirty or thirty-five people who show up every year tell me No. They are doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, and they are those who have never been able to hold down a steady job, and who have suffered from debilitating mental illness, and who have lost their marriages. Some have watched their children walk away from everything good and important and choose addiction and enslavement. Life has a way of battering the crap out of you, even when you are the incarnation of the New Testament Church.

All I know is that in the midst of a stratified world, every member of that bizarre, failed little community is an equal. Every person is greeted warmly. We laugh and remember together. We cherish one another as individuals who shared a common life together, as friends and brothers and sisters in perhaps the best and most inclusive sense. I would like to think that this is not Average America.

I look forward to that reunion every year. And I feel challenged every year to work through what our common vision now means several decades down the line, in a very different life. I desire and pray for the generosity of spirit, the crazy change-the-world idealism that characterized those turbulent, wonderful years.