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In similar fashion, Perkins and his wife, Vera Mae, bought a home last year across from one of the most notorious crack houses in northwest Pasadena, California. By praying, befriending neighbors who wanted the crack house closed, and collaborating with police, the illegal business was busted in a big raid.

RACIAL RECONCILIATION

The relocator movement also is having a dramatic impact on one of the church's most vexing problems: racial tension.

"We've tried to legislate racial reconciliation, and it has had effects up to a point," says Vance Green, the black assistant pastor at the Lawndale Community Church who returned to his childhood neighborhood after college graduation. "But one of the greatest impacts that the church can have is for people in the neighborhood to see that blacks and whites can respect each other while working, living, and worshiping together."

Blacks in the neighborhood are grateful for a white doctor's care at the church-based clinic. Green says neighborhood rebuilding can help prevent riots like those in Los Angeles two years ago.

Still, the strain of inner-city living is not for everyone. One of the early couples who moved into Pico-Union soon left because the new environment caused marital and personal conflict.

Zeal moved John Shorack to relocate, but it did not take long for his idealism to be shattered. In a two-year span, Shorack lost seven friends to murder, suicide, and AIDS. Others went to jail or simply disappeared. "I experienced a real darkness, and I withdrew emotionally."

"It was difficult to realize that even with all our education and zeal that there was a lot of stuff we can't do anything about," says Birgit Funck Shorack, who has a master of divinity degree. "What keeps us here is that we consistently see dramatic changes in people's lives as they encounter Jesus."

Copyright 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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September 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 10