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More than brick and mortar, Project Holy Restoration is showing real inner city transformation occurring by utilizing the impact of the historic inner city church. The church is crucial to the success of safe homes, safe schools, and safe communities. This is a look at three projects FEED 3 has partnered with to achieve success.

Studies have shown that for inner-city kids to succeed, their churches play a critical and important role in childhood education success. “Church involvement is the most consistent predictor of academic success for inner-city kids,” says Steven Churchill, of the Center for Organizational Design, a consultant to major corporations on leadership potential.

Sadly, too often the school district prevents itself from tapping into the resources of black and Latino churches.

Conservatives and liberals agree: “There is no program and no policy that can substitute for a parent who is involved in their child’s education from day one.”

While, this is an indisputable truth, the role of the inner-city church of ethnicity has been missing from the federal, state, and local education reforms. Contributing to the mix, many inner city churches have few resources to help them succeed. Among the 120 churches in the impoverished zip code of West Dallas, 112 of those churches are smaller congregations with buildings in decline.

One pastor who has remained for fifty years in the inner city is Pastor Rayford Butler of Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.

Butler grew up in the community of West Dallas. “As I young man I began on this very street selling drugs,” says Butler, standing outside his church among homes built in the 1950’s. Now pastoring more than 30 years, Butler has seen the decline of the community due to the breakdown of the family, poor education, and the influence of crime. Butler, who is retired from teaching school for 22 years, is a major force in helping kids succeed. Along side pastoring, he works with ex-offenders helping them get their GED.

“The church instructs young people on how to handle the basics of life, its challenges, and the power of overcoming daily temptations in the inner city.” says Butler.

A series of studies in one of America’s oldest continuous academic journals by Howard University, focusing on black people, reported how church involvement increases education success in inner cities. In “Faith in the Inner City: The Urban Black Church and Students’ Educational Outcomes,” Dr. Brian Barrett, an education professor reported that for black inner-city youth who reported attending religious services often, the black/white achievement gap “was eliminated.”

Barrett reports that one of the most important advantages of inner-city churches is that they provide “a community where Black students are valued, both for their academic success and, more broadly, as human beings and members of society with promise, with talents to contribute, and from whom success is to be expected.”

Churches also affirm inner-city youth by celebrating academic success with affirmation, church-wide recognition, awards, and trips to colleges. These all override the low expectations communicated at school.

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One example of how students are rewarded who succeed is Mrs. Pat Stephens of the West Dallas Church of Christ.

Stephens who founded and runs the Westmoreland Heights Neighborhood Center has taken hundreds of students on annual trips to New York City, Washington D.C., Orlando, Atlanta, and Memphis to name a few. Students must make passing grades and raise funds for their trips. The trips include educational stops and history lessons along the way. “These trips are the students first time and only connection to the outside world, opening their minds to a world of possibilities,” says Mrs. Stephens.

Additionally, Dr. Barrett highlights the ways in which black churches, because they are equipped to deal with families, provide a pathway for parents to help educate their kids with mentoring programs, role models, and partnerships with fathers/businessmen helping single parent moms.

Dr. Barrett is not alone. In another JNE study of 4,273 black students titled, “How Religious, Social, and Cultural Capital Factors Influence Educational Aspirations of African American Adolescents,” Thomas Kersen, a sociology professor at Jackson State University, report that “family and religious social capital are the most potent predictors for positive student college aspirations.”

He explains: “students who attend church and believe religion is important may be more likely to interact with more adults who can help them with their school work and even provide guidance about their futures goals and plans.” The authors conclude that students with an “active religious life, involved parents, and active social life have greater opportunities and choices in the future.”

Tammy Skinner, who along with her husband, serve as a house church in West Dallas to their eighty neighbors and assisted teachers and PTA’s in struggling local public schools.

She works along Pastor Donald Coleman of Mt. Olive Baptist Church, whose 110 year-old-church is critical to the unchurched families in her community.

Skinner says: “While we feed and clothe families, meeting their physical needs on a daily basis, local pastors like Coleman, bring the Kingdom of Heaven to the darkest places of our community.” Pastor Coleman, an ex-infamous drug dealer, has sixty attendees from a diverse background who have found a home is the historic church.

“He’s in the homes of the drug dealers, families plagued with drugs and alcoholism, ministering freedom to them,” she says. “We couldn’t do it without him, he’s our ray of God’s sunshine.” Since W.E.B. DuBois wrote in the 1890s about the black church, dozens of studies confirm this truth: Low-income black kids will not achieve academic success without strong families and the church. Strengthening these institutions, however, is beyond the expertise of any government agency or education program or policy.

Both concerned educators and urban leaders agree that if parents need to be involved in a child’s education from day one, in the inner-city the church must be involved beginning on day two.

Without thriving and healthy inner-city churches, low-performing schools are simply cultivating the next generation of crime and welfare statistics. We owe it to children to place them in contexts that are sustainable and effective.

FEED 3 is currently helping in the following ways:

• Renovation of church structure and neighborhood centers
• Build-out of kitchens for feeding programs
• Development of co-operatives for supplemental groceries
• Character Training Programs in Local Schools
• Landscaping and Painting of Local Churches
• Annual provision of 100,000 meals and snacks in summer

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For more information about FEED 3 and partner Strategic Justice Initiatives Inc. summer feeding programs or one of its sites, please contact :

Randy Skinner
(214) 316-1356

Ashley Douglas
(214) 497-4430

Please feel free to contact us with any additional questions or concerns at any time! We will be happy to assist in any area, and would be delighted to have your organization as a participant within our program this year!

 

Your tax-deductible gifts can also be mailed to Strategic Justice Initiatives. P.O. Box 222026, Dallas, Texas 75222.

About Strategic Justice Initiatives Inc. - SJI in 2009 became involved in laying the groundwork for the citywide movement called the Greater Dallas Justice Revival.  SJI was the parent nonprofit for it till 2011 when its mission of starting 25 school church partnerships, and placement of 700 chronic homeless into housing were accomplished. SJI then launched www.homesforourneighbors.com as the faith partner for Dallas Housing Authority and Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance support of 2000 chronic homeless were placed into permanent supportive housing. www.feed3.org was launched to support the school-church partnerships and hunger projects throughout North Texas. Both efforts carry on the misson of Greater Dallas Justice Revival.
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