The other day Marty invited some neighborhood kids over to help with a mailing she brought home from work.  Before they got started, she sent 12-year-old Heather across the street to fetch 13-year-old Jasmine, who has been part of our fellowship from the very beginning.  Heather returned a few minutes later, alone and puzzled. 

"They were in there, but they wouldn't open the door" she told Marty.  "Jasmine's mother said you need to call her." 

You should know that Jasmine's parents, Jacob and Mariah, are good people who have had hard lives.  They generally steer clear of our dinners, but I've gotten to know them pretty well just stopping by their house.  They have been hurt in some awful ways, but they have worked hard to keep their family together.  They have also supported their youngest daughter's friendships with all of us.  Until now.

"Jasmine can't hang around with you people anymore," Mariah told Marty over the phone a few minutes later.  "We know who you are."

Marty was confused.  "Who are we?" she asked.

"You're reptiles," Mariah replied matter-of-factly.  "You don't want to be reptiles, but you are."

Marty was even more confused.  "What are you talking about, Mariah?  Who told you this?"

"It is a Prophecy from the Most High," Mariah replied. 

By now, Marty felt sick to her stomach.  "Please, Mariah," she said, "I don't understand."  She heard Mariah ask her older daughter Jade to explain, but Jade never came to the phone. 

After Marty hung up, Heather and the other kids told her they weren't surprised.  Evidently, they had been hearing strange things about us from Jasmine for a few days.  Later that afternoon, I went across the street to talk to Jacob face to face, but he wouldn't even look at me.  No wonder.  Reptiles, it turns out, is his storefront church's euphemism for children of Satan.

If all of this seems bizarre or ridiculous to you, well, I can see why.  But to me, to all of us here, it seems tragic as well.  Suddenly, because some crazy storefront preacher has appointed himself as prophet, and because extraordinary suffering has made Jasmine's whole family somewhat paranoid in the first place, Jasmine herself has been cut off from a circle of friends who have done nothing but bless and support her.

We have been rejected before, of course, albeit in ways not quite so bizarre.  Last year, when one of our favorite neighbors suddenly would no longer speak to us, it took me months to find out that her oldest daughter, the victim of a boyfriend's molestation, had demanded her mother have no relationship with any man, including me.  Over and over again, people in this neighborhood who are starving for love and friendship draw close enough to us and one another that they can almost touch those things, only to push us away for reasons that don't always make sense.  And it hurts, every time.

Of course, given who and where we are, I always expected us to deal with lots of rejection.  After all, this is a hard place filled with hard people who have learned the hard way to beware of strangers.  What I didn't expect, however, was that so many people would reject us long after we had proven our goodness to them. I should have, of course, being a student of Jesus. 

I won't insult your intelligence by spelling it out, but I will say this much:  God knows better than anyone how it feels to have someone take the full measure of your love and throw it back in your face, even when both of you know they're going to have a hell of a time trying to live without it.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

[see all posts in this conversation on New Monastics and race.]

The very first mark of the New Monastic movement is to relocate to the abandoned places of the empire.  However, after quick research, most of the social justice-geared intentional communities I found were either directly inside or in very close proximity to major cities. While there are enclaves within major metropolises that have seen the scourge of the empire, most of the American landscape is drenched in suburban and rural locales set far and away from the residual financial welfare the empire produces. And if that is the case, then the rationale for the privileged suburban dweller to relocate to urban hubs needs reexamination. 

I believe there is a contingent of people that the Most High will call to relocate from suburban and rural places to preach, teach, and serve neighborhoods in urban areas. I would like to believe that these people are willing to fulfill the call of the Lord, counting the cost of their decision -- perhaps reluctantly but with open minds and open hearts. These individuals are to be revered for their desire to be about God's business.

Conversely, there is a growing population that relocates to the so-called "abandoned places of the empire" because of the proximity to all of the amenities and economic promise the empire seems to trickle down. The draw of experiencing the "big city" cannot be ignored, no matter what the overarching humanitarian desire might be.

Indeed, there is quite a difference between the called and the drawn. When we as followers of Christ truly submit to the calling of God to preach good news to the poor, our first inclination should be to find the poor already in our midst, and deliver the message to them -- allowing them the opportunity to take that message home to their families and other neighbors, ensuring salvation for themselves and their households. The statistics are very clear: There are 1 million more impoverished Americans in the suburbs than in urban centers. Rural poverty among single mothers is at astronomical levels. Food stability is most scarce in rural areas. The further a community is from metropolitan areas, the more difficult it becomes to secure steady income, adequate wages, and affordable housing.  In fact, the majority of affordable housing is created in urban areas. Moreover, the infrastructure of social services is more readily available to urban dwellers. However, in suburban and rural areas, social services and affordable housing are somewhat of an afterthought. Looking at the composite of my own community, statistically many of us might actually reach more poor people if we lived in our hometowns than in our assembled New York City home.

The fact remains, the poor are all around us. If we are diligent in our search for the poor to preach to, to teach and serve, we need only look to our neighbors. We should realize that urban areas are not synonymous with poverty, nor are suburbs synonymous with privilege. When we get honest before the Lord with our preconceived notions about the people we believe are the poor and the least of these, we may find that the least of these are our next-door neighbors -- and not the urban ethnic enclave dwellers we so readily flock to.

We must be transparent with God and honest with ourselves when considering service to the poor. Being drawn to an area doesn't justify relocating to it. And being called to a place doesn't make you drawn to it. Throughout history, many people have been called to service, but were reluctant to go. Their reticence did not stop them from accomplishing revolutionary things for the kingdom of God. We must be diligent in seeking out the will of the Lord, and not be persuaded by the people, places, and things we are drawn to. If we are not diligent, we will lose our credibility and risk alienating, offending, and further marginalizing the very people we sent ourselves to enlighten and enfold in God's flock. We must make every effort to be led by the Spirit in all that we say and do to ensure our households experience the power of God through salvation in Christ.

Sharaya Tindal is a member of Radical Living, an intentional community in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Learn more about their community in this article in the New York Press.

[see all posts in this conversation on New Monastics and race.]

I've been on lots of roads trips, but none of them compare to The Walnut Hills Fellowship's weekend journey to Chicago.  Start to finish, it was a thing of rare beauty.   We had been talking about it for months, of course, but I think most of our neighborhood friends still didn't really believe it was going to happen.  After all, people around here are always talking about things they don't really intend to do.  As plans firmed up the week before we left, however, people got nervous in a big way.  All of a sudden, nearly everybody had a reason they couldn't go. 

At first I was shocked that people who had never been on a real vacation were ready to throw away such a golden opportunity because they couldn't afford new traveling clothes, or because there was no television or smoking in the dorm rooms were staying in, or because we decided against beer-drinking and spending money in the interest of group solidarity, or because they were less than thrilled with one or another activity on our itinerary.  It angered me that my friends were so inflexible, especially because most were contributing little or nothing at all to the trip.  Fortunately, just before I shot off my mouth at dinner the week before we left, Karen and Mark set me straight:  Our neighbors weren't ungrateful.  They were terrified. 

There I was, an educated and experienced world traveler, talking about familiar attractions like the Navy Pier and the Magnificent Mile, secure in the knowledge that I would be driving one of the vans, holding lots of cash and a handful of credit cards, along with my unlimited-use cell phone and a long list of Chicago friends in case of an emergency.  There they were, with no such knowledge and no control whatsoever, being asked almost casually to just relax, follow directions, and unquestioningly trust me and my more privileged buddies with their lives.  Really, it's a wonder we made it out of town at all. ... 

The months of May and June are always a special time for school commencements. And, each year, I really enjoy my opportunities to give commencement addresses at universities and seminaries across the country. But the one I gave last week was very special indeed.

Last Wednesday evening, June 11, I was blessed and honored to give the commencement address at Sing Sing Prison. The New York Theological Seminary offers a program of theological study leading to the degree of Masters of Professional Studies, with all courses taking place inside the walls of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. In twenty-six years this extraordinary and courageous seminary training program has graduated hundreds who then go on to ministry, both inside the prison system of New York and back in the community when their sentences are finished.

I have often told the story of the first time I visited this unusual and inspiring program at Sing Sing. My book, The Soul of Politics, was being read by the students as part of their seminary curriculum, and I received a letter from the prison inmates themselves, inviting me to meet with them and discuss my book. It sounded interesting, so I wrote back to ask when they would like me to come. A young man wrote to me on behalf of his fellow Sing Sing students saying, "Well, we're free most nights!" He went on, "We're kind of a captive audience here!" The prison authorities were very accommodating and I got to spend several hours with about 70 guys in a crowded room deep in the bowels of the infamous penal institution.

The animated book conversation was one of the most stimulating and rigorous of any I've ever had. I vividly remember much of that discussion, and especially the riveting comment of one young man who said to me, "Jim, most of us at Sing Sing come from just about four or five neighborhoods in New York City. It's like a train. You get on the train in my neighborhood when you are nine or ten years old, and the train ends up here....at Sing Sing." But this young man had experienced a spiritual conversion inside of that prison, and was now enrolled in the New York Seminary program training pastors to work inside the prison system and to go back and work in those neighborhoods from which they had come. After the session that night, the young man came up to me to say goodbye, looked me in the eye, and said, "When I get out, I am going to go back and stop that train."

A few years later, I was in New York City to speak at a town meeting on poverty. Guess who was up front, helping to lead the meeting? I immediately recognized two of the young men I met that night at Sing Sing--Julio Medina and Darren Ferguson. Last week, Julio came back to the commencement at what NYTS calls their "North Campus," now as an illustrious alumnus who spends his days running a very successful drug rehabilitation program in NYC. Darren was being the newly installed pastor of a church in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Queens where some recent shootings had him out on the streets that night instead of at the Sing Sing commencement.

These are very special graduates. To get to where they were last Wednesday night, twelve men had to overcome so many obstacles. I told them, in my commencement address, that they "had an advantage." The advantage they have is in knowing what faith really means, how much it costs, and how it can completely change your life and the world. They know that faith is for the big stuff. And they know that if you have faith, even the size of a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains. And that's what these men had to move to get to this place on a warm Wednesday night in the visitors' room inside Sing Sing prison. They got to take off their prison jumpsuits, and put on shirts, ties, and graduation robes to wear in front of their beaming and tearful mothers and fathers, wives and children, extended family, and so many friends.

Theo Harris was selected by his fellow students to give the "class reflection." He spoke of the "School of Hard Knocks" whose three core curricula were "street education, peer pressure, and ghetto economics." He said all his fellow class members had to go through the school of hard knocks before they got to go to this school of preparation for the ministry. Theo said he had learned "the greatest lesson of my life....that no one is beyond redemption. That is what sustained me, that is what motivated me, and that is what brought me to where I am today: redeemed." He then named each of his fellow graduates, observed their special gifts and vocations, and then concluded, "We have expressed our desire to make a meaningful contribution to our community. Now, all that remains is for us to go out among them, roll up our sleeves, and really make a difference."

It was a night of rich gratitude and profound hope. And while I have often been inspired by the faces of the young bright graduates facing me on brilliant spring days of school commencements, I have never felt more grateful and more hopeful than I did looking into the spiritually-chiseled faces of these redeemed graduates on a summer's night at Sing Sing prison. Thanks be to God.

I won't even try to describe all of the maddening details of finding a HUD apartment for a homeless, no-income family that consists of a mother, five kids under the age of nine, and a nurturing father. It suffices to say that after three weeks of slogging through that kind of absurdity and ugliness, I began to understand why the mother, our friend Jaleena, tried to kill herself when her original building got condemned. Even with all that, we barely managed an awful apartment, and by the time we did, most of the furniture Jaleena had left in the old place had been stolen by her former landlord.

So there I was last Saturday, along with our friend Kwami (the nurturing boyfriend), loading and unloading a truckload of secondhand bunk beds and bureaus, wondering how long my surgically-repaired ankles and arthritic hands would hold up. I could have found somebody else to do it, of course, but no one I trust enough to do it right. Strange as it sounds, moving donated furniture into a family's worn-out HUD apartment is a delicate job.

It wasn't about the furniture, after all. It wasn't about all the phone calls, waiting in line, sidewalk hot dogs, application fees, and driving all over town. That stuff is valuable sometimes, but it sure isn't enough to keep us here in this neighborhood on a bad day. No, the real job - the job that keeps us here - is about communicating genuine, garden-variety love to vulnerable, poor people who may feel that they aren't worthy of your interest, let alone your friendship.

To do that well, you can't act too cheerful about giving up your Saturday. On the contrary, you have to whine about the heat and swear out loud when your thumb gets crushed between the couch and the doorjamb, like you would if you were moving your sister's stuff. You take the beer if they offer it, and hint around if they don't. Either way, you let the guy know he'll be helping you move some of your stuff soon enough. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but I can't really explain it to you. Nobody can. That's the problem.

These days I encounter lots of people who want to love poor people, just like Shane Claiborne or John Perkins or Dorothy Day or some other radical Jesus-follower they've heard of or read about. Some of them want to move to the inner-city, or to an African slum, or an Indian orphanage, or a Native American reservation. Others want to reach out right where they are. Either way, their enthusiasm for serving God's people in need is positively thrilling to me. And yet...my first instinct is to keep them away from Jaleena and Kwami.

Perhaps it would be easier for us to welcome these people if we were running a soup kitchen or a shelter, but we have no program standing between us and our neighbors here. We have no clients, after all, only friends, and given all the differences and fears and brokenness among us, keeping those friendships genuine is a tricky business indeed. I am often amazed at the beauty of our little fellowship, but I am always aware that it must be protected.

So then, forgive me if I complain about my sore ankles and aching hands, but then won't let anybody but Kwami help me with the furniture. It's my job after all, and I'm glad to have it.

P.S. For those of you looking for an update, Bobbie hasn't yet passed her truck driver's license test, but she hasn't given up on it either. It turns out she has four tries before she has to start all over again. Her school will keep working with her for as long that takes, but I still fear Bobbie's opportunity may be slipping away. Honestly, she's going to need more grace than I'm used to counting on. Pray for us.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs (www.bartcampolo.com) about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship (www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org) in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year (www.missionyear.org), which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

Sojourners' June issue features a cover story by Amy Green and a column by Jim Wallis about the new paths of young Christians, plus a set of mini-interviews with 10 next-gen Christian leaders. Here's a taste: part of Sojourners' interview with Mark Wallace, the Facilitator for School Violence Prevention, K-12 for the Newburgh Enlarged City School District in Newburg, New York. People's journeys often follow a complicated path, which can include becoming an "emerging leader" much later in life. After serving almost two decades in Sing Sing prison, where he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and helped found the Rehabilitation Through Arts program, Mark Wallace is a youth worker and mentor.

Sojourners: How would you describe your job or leadership role?

I am more or less a mentor/counselor, I would say, [or] group therapist. The [Newburgh School] district has allowed me to set up a classroom setting where young men and women from diverse ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic-status backgrounds, can come and actually voice their concerns, their opinions, and deal with whatever issues or hardships they may be faced with. We get into the heart of all types of matters, whether it be racism, gender, community, policing, how they feel about school, the curriculum, their ambitions, their goals--short-term, long-term--you name it, we talk about it. It's been very refreshing for the students because they feel that here is a forum where somebody's finally listening to what's going on in their lives.

As you think about your work, what's your biggest passion?

Wallace: The kids themselves. The students. I'm a "people" person, so to watch, say, for instance, a young man or woman who comes in who really may be anti-social--they may act out in unproductive behavior--to see them come through this process and then at the end of the school year, just have this 180 degree turn. For me, that's the best reward I could ever receive, or anyone could, because it's life we're talking about here. For me, that's the greatest reward I could receive--that I've helped affect someone's life, put them on the right track.

As you work with the youth, do see them as different in any way from youth of previous generations?

Each generation always says, "oh man, these kids today are not like we were." That could be in my mother's era, her mother's era. There are differences, I guess, in each generation. I find with these young men and women, that they really, in many cases, are more disrespectful towards adults than in my generation. And a lot of them are very angry and very bitter. There are many factors that we can attribute this to. But what I've come to find is that a lot of them, given time to reflect, will come out of that negative, rebellious type of phase that they are in.

A lot of things that have been taken away and cut back from. A lot of these kids in Newburg, they don't have anywhere to go. They come home from school and all they have is the block. When I was young you had boys' clubs, you had the YMCA, you had PALs (Police Athletics Leagues). The kids up here, they don't have any place or anywhere to go.

A lot of them are just angry. That's why gangs thrive so much. They just want to be a part of something, without realizing whether it be negative or positive, and not really taking that into consideration. You want to be a part of something, you want an identity, you want to feel like somebody. And sometimes saying, "I'm a Blood," or a Crip, or MS-13, or whatever it may be, is saying that you are somebody, because a lot of the time they don't feel like they're anybody.

And, may we ask, how old are you?

I'm 45.

Amen. That's a great decade to be in.

Wallace. Yes it is. My father used to tell me--he said, "Son, you're not going to start to live until after you're 30." And I didn't understand, but now I see.

Unconscionable: adjective

1. not guided by conscience; unscrupulous.

2. not in accordance with what is just or reasonable: unconscionable behavior.

3. excessive; extortionate: an unconscionable profit.

I have had some "unconscionable" things on my mind a lot lately as I have been working with the 20-somethings who make up Orlando Food Not Bombs and University of Central Florida’s Rock For Hunger. All three of these definitions of the word apply to the actions of the city of Orlando, in enacting an ordinance to try and stop these groups from sharing food with the poor and homeless in downtown Orlando.

Orlando Food Not Bombs (FNB) has been sharing food with the poor and homeless in Lake Eola Park since the summer of 2004. Some local business owners and residents, who were upset with seeing the poor fed in the park, complained to city government leaders. The mayor and city council reacted by passing an ordinance specifically designed to stop FNB from sharing food. The ordinance limits a group that is going to feed 25 or more people to no more than two such feedings in a park per year, and requires that a permit be obtained.

When the ordinance was first passed, the groups moved to the sidewalk and streets a block or so away from the park, but after continued city harassment moved back to the park. FNB, acting with churches and groups such as Code Pink and the ACLU, began sharing food in a manner that strictly complied with the ordinance. Each group would serve no more than 24 people, had a table clearly labeled with its name, and the dishes (which are collected and washed) were counted to make sure there were no more than 24.

Despite all of this, on April 4, 2007, at the conclusion of an Orlando police undercover investigation that, according to the Orlando Weekly, cost taxpayers $65,000, FNB member Eric Montanez was arrested. His alleged crime: feeding more than 24 people. His weapon: a ladle.

The result was twofold. One: A jury who understood the concept of "unconscionability” found Eric “not guilty.” Two: The arrest scared away groups and people who were participating, especially some of the church groups, who were afraid of being labeled "law-breakers."

Yes, it is unconscionable to let people go hungry, in a city of plenty in a nation of plenty. It is a higher magnitude of unconscionability to persecute those who feel called to serve the poor and subject them to arrest and prosecution.

A month later, six more FNB members were arrested for violating another city ordinance, “disturbing … (the) repose of any individual ....” The specifics of their offense: protesting the anti-feeding ordinance outside a restaurant venue where the mayor was holding a campaign fundraiser. Again, even in a country with a president who confines dissenters to fenced-in “free-speech zones” out of the line of sight of where he is appearing, last month an Orlando jury who understood the concept of “unconscionability” found them all “not guilty.”

Orlando Food Not Bombs and Vagabond Church of God have filed suit in federal court in Orlando to overturn this unconscionable ordinance. This matter has been working its way through the courts for more than a year and has survived all of the city's legal challenges to stop it. The federal court trial begins in Orlando this week. Let us pray for a court that understands “unconscionability.”

Rev. Alan Clapsaddle is a Social Justice Advocate/Blogger in Orlando, working with the National Homeless Coalition and LA2W.org. Alan serves at First UCC Church of Orlando.

There are plenty of times I miss running a legitimate ministry organization like Mission Year. Like when I'm breaking down my "office" every night so my family can eat at the kitchen table, or hand-addressing the envelopes for our donation receipts. (Don't get me wrong; I love having to send out those receipts). Or when I'm desperately bribing Roman and his buddy with combo meals at Wendy's to help me move yet another apartment-load of stuff for yet another family in crisis, instead of simply assigning the job to some interns. Trust me, being small-time is hard on the ego.

But then there are those magical moments when being small-time means you get to make things up as you go along.

A few months ago I found myself sitting in the sparsely-furnished, HUD-subsidized apartment of our beloved Bobbie Williams, trying to figure out how such a tough and strong-minded woman got into such dire straights. I won't trouble you with the details, but suffice it to say that in her nearly 50 years, Bobbie has seen more than her share of bad breaks and worse men. Indeed, she feels quite certain she's better off hungry and alone in this little place than cared for and abused in half a dozen others. Still, she knows she could do better.

On that day I visited her, while Bobbie was wearily describing her latest attempt to land a minimum-wage job at a restaurant downtown, I noticed a brochure lying on her coffee table, advertising one of those big-rig truck driving schools. "Where did you get that?" I asked casually, hoping she wasn't back to entertaining men.

"Oh that," she said, her voice brightening as a big smile crossed her face. "That's my dream, which I've been dreaming from the time I was a child. All the other girls wanted to be singers or actresses, but all I've ever wanted is to be a long-haul trucker."

I laughed at first, and Bobbie laughed too, but before long we were deep in conversation about the hard life of a trucker, and about her father forbidding her to pursue it after high school, and about what kinds of resources it would take for her to pursue it now. She told me all about it, the way a lifelong sports fan tells you all about their team, but I didn't mind. In this kind of ministry, genuine dreams are few and far between.

Over the next few days, I kept thinking about Bobbie Williams and her dream of earning a secure living by driving a big rig all over the country. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it seemed.

Bobbie couldn't even pay her rent most months, let alone save $4,000 for tuition. When she wasn't taking care of her grandson, she was out hustling food for herself. She didn't even have a driver's license, for crying out loud.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you? You know Bobbie's in trucking school right now, almost ready to test for her CDL, and you know who loaned her the money (or gave it, if it turns out she can't pass the test). A ghetto grandmother with a GED and a sketchy past might not be a good enough risk for a legitimate ministry organization, and trucking school might be too expensive to build into an ongoing employment program. But none of that matters because we're just the small-time Walnut Hills Fellowship, and Bobbie's been with us since the beginning, and this feels like as good a time as any to take what any lifelong sports fan would recognize as a Hail Mary shot at giving a dear sister a much better life.

If you haven't yet stopped to ask whether or not Bobbie is a certified Christian, or to calculate the chances of us actually getting paid back even if she gets the job, then I think you're connected to the right little faith community. If what you're wondering about instead is how she felt about finally getting behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler ("Incredible!"), or whether everyone else in our fellowship is excited about her opportunity ("Hey, did you hear Bobbie got three out of four on her straight-line backing test?"), or if we're all feeling the pressure as the test day draws closer (Absolutely), well, maybe you should start thinking about moving to Walnut Hills yourself.

We don't have a real office yet. We're always having to move stuff. But we get to make things up as we go along, and take chances on people that nobody else would take chances on, and hold our breath together. And we get to do all that with the almost giddy confidence that all the love in the world is on our side.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs (www.bartcampolo.com) about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship (www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org) in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year (www.missionyear.org), which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

For as long as I can remember, I've ended my letters and e-mails with the encouragement "Keep the faith." I must have picked that up from my father, since he's the only person I know who signs off the same way. It might have been more lucrative for me to have picked up "It's Friday, but Sunday's coming!" instead, but I've always preferred the flexibility of the simpler phrase. Not everyone who hopes for God's grace is a Christian, after all, and we who are surely hope for more than that. We hope to be happy and successful, for example, however we measure those things. We hope that our parents love us and that our marriages work out and, more than anything, that our kids will always be safe and sound. We hope for such things, at least, unless we have learned to know better.

On the Monday morning after my last letter, a mother and daughter from our fellowship showed up at our side door. Terry is mentally handicapped and deeply damaged. Her daughter has her own set of issues. For months we'd been planning a summer move from their dangerous, filthy, heatless apartment building into a cute little duplex we've been fixing up around the corner, but all of a sudden we were too late. "Tanya got raped in the hall last night," her mother said, and from then until now we've been walking on the dark side of love.

The sequence of what followed doesn't matter, and I couldn't remember it even if it did. The hospital, the detectives, the rape crisis center. Getting that evil building condemned, relocating them in our duplex, finding bedbug-free furniture for Terry and Tanya, finding helpers for the move itself. The girl's bad behavior as our houseguest, her mother's worse behavior as a parent. The questions, the doubts -- the guilt for questioning and doubting. And then, as if piling on, the quick meltdown of a promising young man we've lavished with attention and opportunity for the past seven months, and the crude suicide attempt of a troubled young woman whose phone call for help I failed to return the day before.

What does matter, I think, is the way all those things have been eating away at expectations of goodness and order I didn't even know I had. It's been awhile since I believed everything happens for a reason, according to some grand plan, but evidently I've hung onto the notion that love always makes some kind of difference, even in the midst of chaos. Even that somewhat less-ambitious worldview, however, seems to be no match for just this one little neighborhood, let alone the world itself.

It isn't the suffering here that's getting to me, but rather my neighbors' dull, matter-of-fact attitude about it. Tanya hasn't been fazed much by her rape, her counselor tells me, because she always expected to be hurt that way sooner or later. After all, her mom was raped three times as a girl, receiving no follow-up care or counsel, which may explain why she can offer so little now in terms of emotional support. The meltdown guy? He walked away because we called him on a lie and it never occurred to him that we might just forgive him. The girl who tried to kill herself? She lives in Terry's condemned building and has nowhere to go with five children under the age of 10. One missed call was all it took to convince her nobody cares enough to help.

It seems to me that these are the poorest of the poor in spirit, the ones who hope for next to nothing. To survive in a place like this, some people learn to live almost completely in the moment. They know better than to expect any ongoing goodness or order. They keep no faith. We have come to love them, but the longer we're at it the more I am haunted by the fear that nothing – not even love – may be strong enough. I can celebrate the ways our intentional generosity touches some of our neighbors, but I can't ignore the fact that both their natural hopelessness and the dysfunctions that inspire it are quite capable of breaking us. Or at least of breaking me.

If that happens, however, it won't mean I was wrong about Grace, but only that I overreached my limits. And if it doesn't happen, it won't mean that love always makes a difference, even in the midst of chaos, but only that I managed to keep the faith.

That's all I'm hoping for now, for starters at least.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs (www.bartcampolo.com) about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship (www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org) in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year (www.missionyear.org), which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

We've gotten enough calls and e-mails from folks concerned about my state of mind for me to think it's probably time for a more upbeat post. If you've been among those worried, you can rest assured that I'm far from despair. On the contrary, I can't remember ever feeling more alive than I have these past few years in Cincinnati, in spite of all the trouble and confusion we've found here. My worldview surely has been shaken some, but my soul is safe and sound.

Not to boast, but, amidst our many mistakes in starting over as servants of God, it turns out that Marty and I did right the single, most important thing we had to do right: We didn't try to do it by ourselves. If nothing else, we have learned on this adventure that loving people well - and loving poor people especially - is a team sport. And if I feel alive and well instead of utterly defeated, it is mainly because the other members of our somewhat intentional community here give me strength and security on a daily basis, whether or not they mean to do so.

I say 'somewhat intentional' to avoid giving the impression that we are some kind of religious order, with formal rules and a common purse and a weekly regimen of prayer. If you thought that, I'm afraid you'd be sorely disappointed when you came for a visit. What we are instead is a handful of families and individuals who have moved next door or around the corner from each other on purpose. This is so that we can share our lives and our meals and our stuff more easily, and so we can all love the same neighbors without having to walk very far. We still have our own jobs and houses, but because the houses weren't very expensive the jobs don't take all our time, and there's more left for each other and for the folks we're trying to bless one way or another.

For example, recently, when Marty and I weren't sure about inviting a struggling kid who's on his own to come live with our family, we ran next door for Karen's advice. The week before, Karen, Ric, and Marty handled the whole Monday night dinner party because my plane home from Vancouver was delayed. The other night, Sarah walked over to talk through her career options now that she knows she doesn't want to be a massage therapist forever. The night after that, Sarah offered to tutor the neighborhood girl the rest of us just couldn't fit in.

If that kind of give and take sounds appealing to you, well, join the club. Especially for those of us with kids, it is a pure joy to have such wonderful brothers and sisters around to help raise them. And when it comes to coping with the often absurd consequences of our beloved neighbors' bizarre combinations of poverty, neglect, and dysfunction, well, we're all better off with plenty of partners to share the load.

Out on the road as a speaker, when people tell me they admire the sacrifice of our 'radical' inner-city ministry lifestyle, I can't help but smile. If they had any idea how amazing it is to daily be surrounded by the kind of love, support, understanding, and practical help that my family takes for granted here, I think their admiration might turn to envy instead. After all, who else gets to live so close to their friends?

Please don't worry. This street-level ministry stuff is indeed much harder than I remembered, mainly because I know better now what it means for a child not to have a decent parent, or for a parent not to have a decent job, or for a family not to have a decent place to live. But it is richer now, too, because I also know better the true value of love, which is our God. And because here, in that knowledge, I am not alone.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs www.bartcampolo.com about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year www.missionyear.org, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

On Easter Sunday sermons about new life and transformation, resurrection and redemption abound. At our church we celebrated the baptism of a young man living in a half way house and doing work-release in our community. The genuine hugs and welcome from the mostly black congregation for this young white man were warm and genuine. One church member sponsors work release, another church member picks up the four to five who come for events and church, and this young man felt touched by God in the welcoming community. He stood holding the baptismal candle and asked God and us for help for the journey of restoration ahead.

Three to four thousand people are released each year into our low income, African American, two square mile community. National statistics show a 67% recidivism rate, with costly results in human lives and our national pocketbooks. Congressman Danny Davis has been pushing and cajoling Congress for six years to pass the Second Chance Act, helping former inmates reenter our communities with funding for job training, substance abuse treatments, housing, tutoring, etc. The bill finally passed the House and Senate.

In his summation, Congressman Davis noted that major religions speak about resurrection and redemption, and that is how lawmakers should view helping ex-offenders reenter society and rebuild lives. He went on to say, "We are a country that preaches redemption in our churches, synagogues, and mosques. That we can practice what we have preached is what we want to show with this measure."

It will take God's touch in peoples lives, people willing to reach out and help, along with government's assistance to really reclaim the many lives from incarceration and recidivism. This is but a small, hopeful start to new life.

Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners.