219^th General Assembly
2010

(continuing the Witherspoon Society Commissioner Orientation)

Everything Presbyterian progressives need to know in order to be effective participants in the Assembly. This is a wake-up call that will include a continental breakfast, interactive sharing, worship, and information about GA issues. Come, meet people, and be energized for our week together!

Hilton Hotel. Tickets: $27.00

[published in the Spring 2010 Network News, and posted here on 6-15-10]

Our biennial membership meeting will give us all a chance to celebrate about the “holy union” of Voices and Sophia and The Witherspoon Society for our first face-to-face gathering.

The Board will report to our members on our activities, plans, and concerns, and will invite all of those present to express their own hopes and suggestions.

One major item of business will be the nomination and election of new officers.

If you want to suggest someone (including yourself!) for consideration as a Board member, please contact Co-Moderator Bill Dummer and tell him all about it. You can email him at gardenerdummer@yahoo.com, or phone him at (414) 475-0076.

Kwanzaa Community Church, Minneapolis

[published in the Spring 2010 Network News, pp. 42-45, and posted here on 6-5-10]

Though the adversity and afflictions of its members and the neighborhood may seem grim to some, the ministry of Kwanzaa Community Church stands as a beacon of hope and transformation in the community. While intentionally celebrating African American culture, Kwanzaa practices an ethic of radical inclusion both as a worshiping community and through its community engagement efforts. The basic philosophy of the congregation is to merge the church and the community, or as co-pastor the Rev. Alika Galloway puts it, “to get them in, raise them up, and send them out.”

Kwanzaa Community Church, PC (USA), grew out of a declining, aging white congregation in north Minneapolis. This new church was chartered in 2002 by the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, partly in response to demographic changes in the neighborhood of Highland Presbyterian Church, whose leadership wanted to provide for a continued Presbyterian presence that could relate to those changes. As the only African American Presbyterian congregation in Minnesota, it was designed to serve as a model for church development. Its aim has been to provide ministry to a poor, urban, transient community that was increasingly populated by unchurched African Americans. Kwanzaa’s Hawthorne/Jordan community has one of the highest murder, addiction, and single-parent family rates in Minneapolis and the highest teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS infection rates in the entire nation.

Theologically the church might be called genuinely evangelical: they are open and inclusive, value relationships, and their outreach is in a style of “merging into the community.” As Alika Galloway puts it, this church doesn’t choose mission projects, they are a mission project. Their goal is to be out working with and engaged with the people in their community, many who are poor, disadvantaged, oppressed. In the words of the Brief Confession of Faith, they seek “to hear the voices of people long silent,” and follow the style of liberation theology, with the Exodus serving as the core narrative of their life and mission. All Kwanzaa’s work is based on the belief that every life is significant and that every life has meaning and value; the Kwanzaa community is therefore called to take action; they live the words of Dr. Gwendolyn Brooks, that “we are each other’s business.”

This style began to take on form in the early years of the 21st century, with the opening of the Freedom School, which is now in its ninth year. It follows the model developed by the national Children’s Defense Fund, as a five-week, intergenerational summer program designed to teach the love and power of learning through reading and other activities. It targets African American children ages 6 – 18 who are at risk for failing in school. It is the only congregation-based Freedom School in the Twin Cities, and only one of two in the nation that goes through Senior High.

The school uses both of the congregation’s church buildings, as well as one public school building and the local technical college. It offers a reading enrichment program using the model developed during the time of the Civil Rights campaign in the South, and employs a number of adults and high school youth as staff. It also provides a feeding program, which is especially important during the summer, since the students are not getting meals through their school lunch programs. As growing hunger problems have become apparent, the program has been expanded so that siblings and parents are able to get food as well.

Kwanzaa’s newest project is the Northside Women’s Space, a drop-in space that is scheduled to open in May, which is designed to provide women and teens who trade sex, or who are “in prostitution,” a safe and holistic space based on the values of empowerment, respect, dignity, integrity, community and hope. This space was birthed out of research conducted in 2007 by Dr. Lauren Martin. Dr. Martin began working with Rev. Alika Galloway and Kwanzaa two years ago, when their paths crossed at a women’s health conference. Both had been working toward sustained and lasting capacity building and trauma healing with African-American women in north Minneapolis – Kwanzaa focusing on HIV/AIDS and Dr. Martin focusing on sexual exploitation. The two identified a common cause and began visioning for the drop-in space. This program will be housed at Kwanzaa, and is designed for short-term engagement that will lead to and solidify long-term inter-generational impact and change. The cycles of poverty and prostitution are inter-generational; lasting change requires that we address the immediate concerns associated with those ‘in prostitution’ and implement a long term and comprehensive strategy that will change longer-term cycles and destructive patterns of behavior.

Women caught in the cycle of prostitution are among of the most vulnerable members of our community. According to research conducted by Dr. Martin, the population of people trading sex in north Minneapolis is 87% female, 90% unemployed, and 82% African-American. They have experienced a startlingly high rate of multiple traumatic events (80%), such as child abuse, rape, domestic abuse and more. Most are precariously housed or homeless and less than half completed high school. When asked about trading sex, about half first traded sex before the age of 18, at least 33% knew a close family member who also was involved in prostitution. Most had children (75%) and said they traded sex to “make ends meet”. One woman who was interviewed said: “I don’t want to do this. I have kids, no job, no pampers and the ’frigerator is empty. What else am I supposed to do?” Women who trade sex have multiple unmet needs, yet they are completely disconnected from systems of care in our society, networks of support, and their own self-worth as human beings.

In the short term, the drop-in space will begin to build trust with people who trade sex and work to meet immediate needs through a vetted network of referrals. These immediate needs include: food, a place to sit, personal hygiene supplies, safer sex items, testing and support for sexual health, and a kind ear. Once trust and confidence is built with individual women and collectively, staff will begin the intensive work of reducing poverty by connecting women with the resources and supports they need to build their own capacity to get themselves out of poverty/ prostitution. These long term goals include employment, chemical dependency, healing from trauma, primary care (rather than just sexual health), transitional and permanent housing, and a shift in self-perception.

One of the latest additions to the list of programs is a community garden, aimed at helping people get food when their financial situations are more precarious than ever. The city of Minneapolis had donated half a vacant lot for this project to create a garden which anyone in the community could use. However, somehow the lot was given to Habitat for Humanity. Having lost that valuable plot of land, the congregation has decided to tear up the front yard of the church, and all other available land around the building. As Alika Galloway puts it, “We don’t need grass, but we do need sweet potatoes.”

In 2008, Kwanzaa launched a comprehensive HIV/AIDS public health campaign – Sidewalks Saving Lives – that utilizes professional artists and intergeneration community members to create and paint HIV/AIDS prevention messages on the sidewalks of our urban neighborhood.

The initiative trains youth ages 13-22 in basic community organizing techniques and engages the community to paint sidewalks utilizing the ABC’S of HIV/AIDS prevention. Be Abstinent – Be Faithful – Use Condoms. In September of 2008, youth from Kwanzaa Community Church and other community partners, mentored by ten professional artists, painted the first ten of twenty sidewalks across North Minneapolis with artworks reinforcing HIV/ AIDS prevention messages; ten communities were engaged and invited to participate in the event. On September 26, 2009 ten additional sidewalks were painted.

The Sidewalks are painted all on one day in order to create energy, enthusiasm, and public and media awareness. Each site is constructed by a team of one professional artist and ten intergenerational community members who received an extensive HIV/ AIDS education prior to the event. Each site is assigned a community organizer who promotes and encourages community participation. Every location has an HIV/ AIDS expert who educates, shares information and encourages testing. Test sites are located throughout the community and are available throughout the event. Transportation and food are also provided.

The Nia-Imani Center has been part of Kwanzaa since the early days. It engages children and youth who are involved in the street culture, as well as their parents, in year-round programs of tutoring, crafts, and a youth development program which helps them develop as whole persons.

One program has a distinctly international focus: Peace Jam sent kids two years ago to Colorado, and in 2011 will be sending a group to Peace Jam in South Africa. A group from the Peace Jam program met with Desmond Tutu when he visited the Twin Cities a couple years ago.

The forms of engagement with their community continue to multiply. A few more samples:

Every fourth Sunday a special worship service is held for people in recovery, with co-pastor Ralph Galloway arranging and leading it. Out of that group, some 40 men gathered for breakfast at the church one morning in April.

A parenting program for parents of teens, with some five to twenty people involved each week, is held every Saturday morning. It is funded by a $50,000 grant from the City of Minneapolis.

The Lydia Project began within Kwanzaa Church, but is now semi-independent. It provides another group of women with empowerment and entrepreneurial skills, as they engage in such varied activities as sewing stoles, meeting with legislators for lobbying and door-knocking to do surveys in their community. One person commented, “It’s amazing how lives have been changed” by the kinds of sharing this very close (but not closed!) group does: telling and working on their life stories, clarifying their goals, and becoming whole persons.

One obvious question: How does one congregation do all this? The first answer is that many of the church members are very actively engaged, giving time and talent in many of these projects. But also Alika Galloway and others are very intentional about involving community agencies and organizations, as well as volunteers from Presbyterian and other churches, to do a lot of the work and provide substantial support. Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis has been a major supporter, along with many other congregations, large and small, conservative and liberal. The Freedom School dinners, for example, are provided almost entirely by other congregations.

As one friend put it, “Alika and Paula [the Rev. Paula Sanders, a member of the church staff, currently staffing the Local Arrangements Committee for General Assembly] do the fund-raising, grant writing, diplomacy, and lots of speaking.” Kwanzaa also gets help through a task force with people from partner churches, including Westminster, Stillwater, Christ Church, Church of the Way, Church of the Apostles, St. Luke, and North Como.

Here is a congregation engaging deeply in the life of its wider community, and sharing with them in confronting many of the most pressing issues of our day. We celebrate their witness for the Good News, and their action for justice.

For more about Kwanzaa Church, you might check out their website.  A suggestion, though:  Don't go to the site's home page, which is under construction and doesn't link to anything else.  Other than that, though, you'll find lots of interesting things!

Kwanzaa Community Church builds on past into community
[9-25-10]

At the PVJ Awards Luncheon during the 219^th General Assembly in Minneapolis, the group’s Whole Gospel Congregation award was presented to Kwanzaa Community Church, which carries on a varied, creative, and strong ministry in a sometimes troubled area of Minneapolis.

Now Presbyterian News Service has reported on how this dynamic congregation came into being through the good will of the members of Highland Park Presbyterian Church, an aging congregation in a changing neighborhood. They, with assistance from the Synod of Lakes and Prairies and the General Assembly, enabled a new, primarily African-American congregation to come into being.

by Doug King
[published in the Spring 2010 Network News, p. 46, and posted here on 6-5-10]

As we celebrate at the Voices for Justice luncheon the union of two progressive Presbyterian organizations – Voices of Sophia and the Witherspoon Society – we feel it is very appropriate to celebrate the contributions of two people who have played important roles in both groups, and have helped to bring us together.

Ann and Manley Olson, of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, were both present at the meeting called to create Voices of Sophia, in response to the hostility that arose after the Re-Imagining Conference. Ann served on the VOS Central Team, and as Treasurer of the group, for ten years. It was the two of them who raised the possibility of a merger with Witherspoon, and Ann was honored as VOS Sister of the Year in 2002.

Both of them have been active for many years at all levels of the PC(USA). In their congregation North Como Presbyterian Church, both have served as elders, and have been active in many different committees. Manley has been Clerk of Session and an occasional preacher and worship leader for the congregation. Ann is a member of the choir and Global Harmony Chorus.

In the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, Ann has been an enabler for Presbyterian Women, as well as moderator and chair of their Scholarship Committee. She has also been a commissioner or alternate for 19 years, as well as serving on and chairing various other Presbytery committees. Manley has been a commissioner to the Presbytery for 25 years, as well as being Moderator of the Presbytery, serving on the Council and chairing other committees.

Both have been frequent attenders of General Assemblies as observers and volunteers; Manley has been a Commissioner twice, and Ann has served once in that vital role. This year Manley is serving as cochair of the Committee on Local Arrangements, while Ann serves on the COLA Executive Committee. Manley served on General Assembly Council for seven years.

Manley has been a member of the Witherspoon Society for 25 years, a charter member, with Ann, of Voices of Sophia, and of Semper Reformanda and of Presbyterians for Restoring Creation. He is also a member of the Covenant Network, More Light Presbyterians, Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, PHEWA, and the Presbyterian Historical Society. Ann has been on the Leadership Team and editor of the newsletter for the Presbyterian AIDS Network, and active in various roles for Presbyterian Women, including Presbytery and Synod Moderator and the Churchwide PW Search Team.

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PVJ's Facebook page

Mitch Trigger, PVJ's Secretary/Communicator, has created a Facebook page where Witherspoon members and others can gather to exchange news and views. Mitch and a few others have posted bits of news, both personal and organizational. But there’s room for more!

Voices of Sophia blog

Heather Reichgott, who has created this new blog for Voices of Sophia, introduces it:

John Harris’ Summit to Shore blogspot

John Shuck’s Shuck and Jive

Got more blogs to recommend?