2 of 6

Next entered Henry Carlson, president of the Chicago chapter of Full Gospel Business Men's Association and elder of Faith Tabernacle in Chicago. He offered to let the group stay for a couple of weeks in the basement of his church (a former restaurant and wrestling ring). But two weeks slipped into two years, and the group increasingly realized, as elder Dawn Herrin recalls, "that God's call was not only to do evangelism on the road, but to reach out to the needy right around us."

"We didn't want to come to Chicago at first," remembers Victor Williams, an elder and early member, now with a salt-and-pepper beard and job as financial manager overseeing the community's extensive properties and businesses. "But we found that you could stand on a street corner and in one day witness to thousands of people. … We realized this was a great opportunity; if God wanted us here, we'd better take it seriously."

Long-time members of JPUSA tell story after story about changes in their community's life as they responded to new challenges. Cameron himself, now in his forties, with trimmed hair and a bit of middle-aged sag around his waist, has gone back to law school, enabling him to take care of the community's far-flung businesses, ministries, and properties as general counsel, symbolic of the group's movement away from earlier impatience with "establishment" values. And JPUSA's local responses to the needs of their neighborhood are as diverse as the community they have adopted as home.

Members head up and staff a crisis-pregnancy center and homeless shelter, a "dinner guest program" that feeds up to 250 hungry people a day, a free food pantry and clothes closet, informal mentoring of countless hurting or burned out young people, and an impressive resident-care program for the 63 seniors that inhabit the top three floors of Friendly Towers (until recently, a dilapidated senior-citizens home). Over half-a-dozen businesses provide jobs for JPUSA's breadwinners and income for the community's common purse. The companies, with names like Jesus People Electrical, JP Painters, and Lakefront Roofing Supply, also give unnumbered witnessing opportunities for workers who crisscross the greater Chicago area for service jobs.

Intimate and honest
To remain healthy, faith communities must safeguard themselves from potential abuse and become oases of intimacy and honesty.

It is here that JPUSA is both most intriguing and most controversial. For while few fault the group's works of evangelism and compassion, eyebrows occasionally rise at JPUSA's communal arrangements at Friendly Towers, the converted ten-story hotel they call home in urban Uptown, Chicago. Concerns about excessive conformity or the loss of personal freedom make some parents of members nervous. And even veteran residents admit the communal life is sometimes "intense."

"No one in the community holds an outside job individually," notes 38-year-old elder Neil Taylor. In this arrangement, JPUSA is much like the Anabaptist Hutterite communities in the U.S. and Canada. And guidelines, while generally enforced only by the honor system, require surrender of certain freedoms. "When we leave the building," Taylor says, for example, "we go off in twos," in a rather strict application of the buddy principle. Meals are always community affairs, with several dozen other members of extended "family" groupings.

next page... |  2 of 6

share this page

April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45