When Charles was in eighth grade, he called my husband, Roger, and asked if he could live with us. He had previously stayed in our home while his mother tried a drug treatment program. She had become unstable again and his cry for help brought Roger to tears.
With four children of our own, we felt unable to take Charles full-time. We created a compromise when our Free Methodist boarding school in neighboring Kentucky accepted Charles as a student. We told him that as long as he stayed in school he could live with us during school breaks.
For the next five years, Charles managed to stay in school. Once he sabotaged his success and the school expelled him. He lived with his mother for a time, since he had negated our arrangement. Attending an urban school and living with his mom got his attention, and he soon petitioned the boarding school for re-admittance and was re-accepted.
What my children missed from the suburban megachurch, they’ve gained in cross-cultural savvy. My son Luke can speak Ebonics, which along with his basketball skills earns him respect with the home boys.
During this time, our children treated him like a brother. He was older than our kids, and our young sons Luke and Wesley enjoyed having a “big brother.” Charles had only one older brother of his own, so he enjoyed having two sisters as well. Nora and Junia enjoyed talking to him as they grew older. When we picked him up from boarding school, he would introduce us as “my family,” despite the obvious racial difference.
The summer before his senior year, we took Charles on our two-week family vacation. He had quite a time adjusting, having never experienced such an event. When we hit the streets walking in New York City, and Charles had only boots to wear, his attitude wore thin along with his shoe leather. But before the first week ended, he discovered a new outlook and was setting a good example for his “little brothers.” We all felt proud of his adjustment.
Roger and I could hardly believe he was finally a senior, and we might actually realize our goal of seeing him graduate. That seemed unlikely when we embarked on this plan. The months passed without major incident, and our family along with his mother and grandmother, a lady from our church, and my own father and stepmother formed a cheering section for his accomplishment.
After graduation, Charles returned home to our house and settled into his usual room. While I was traveling to a church meeting, Charles told Roger he didn’t want to live with us anymore. He didn’t want to come to our church either. Roger was broken hearted. Charles moved in with another family he knew a few streets away.
Despite Charles’s rebuffs, Nora and Junia maintained their relationship with him. They took him out for ice cream on his birthday when no one else, neither his birth mother nor the new family where he lived, created any form of celebration on that day.
That August we again traveled for two weeks. When we arrived home, our house had been broken into. Oddly the only thing we discovered disturbed were our children’s banks—all four had been hidden—with the bills missing. I commented that someone had to know us well to find Nora’s attic room, and to know where all four children had hidden their banks.
Pros at cons
Then Roger discovered his cell phone missing. When we received the bill, the truth that Charles had stolen the phone was evident, since the bill included calls to his girlfriend, mother, and the house where he lived. He denied the theft, saying he found the phone in a park. We could not prove his entry into the house, but it remained obvious to us that he had broken not only our window screen, but our trust.
We felt betrayed and heartbroken. I really struggled with his invasion of his adopted brothers and sisters. How could he treat them with such contempt, when they had only been kind?
More remarkable still was my daughters’ reaction. I watched both Nora and Junia approach Charles on the street to engage him in conversation. I wanted nothing to do with him. Somehow we had managed to raise children that had bigger souls than we did. They led the way as we reestablished a cordial relationship with Charles, and he returned to our youth service on Sunday evenings.
A year later, when my oldest daughter left for college, Charles stepped up to fill her spot working with the junior high boys on Sunday nights.
He’s now applying to a local Christian college. I doubt that bridge would have ever been crossed without my daughters in the lead.
Kids with a mission
I pastor a church I planted almost 20 years ago. From the very beginning, we chose diversity as a value, mirroring the population of our black-and-white neighborhood. At our first service, God confirmed that vision with the attendance of a couple who were raising their biracial granddaughter. They were touched by our acceptance of their family. That has remained our vision ever since.
At first our children’s ministries reached both races. But for some reason as the years have passed, our outreach to children draws only African-Americans. Our own children are the only white faces in a sea of browns.
Do they complain about this? No, they relish it. In fact, as my daughter Nora prepared to attend college, she sought a school with similar character to her diverse neighborhood, but found instead a mostly segregated college world. The college that accepted her did so partly because of the different perspective she would bring that could help change the climate of the campus.
During her elementary school years, Nora took piano lessons from a teacher in a quiet suburban area. She commented on the teacher’s peaceful street, and how she’d like to live someplace like that. I felt a twinge of guilt that my children couldn’t run freely through their neighborhood as I did growing up.
But now in college, Nora cannot relate to those feelings of her early childhood. While reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, this quote jumped out at me at full force, spoken by a missionary’s daughter Leah, transplanted from Georgia to Africa: “For the first time in my life I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia.”
I had not done such a thing to my children. They were not growing up in an insulated world. They are not transplants; my children are natives in their environment.
Bananas and Sister Fire
In fact, when given a school assignment to describe their community, my younger daughter, Junia, then a junior in high school, described herself as from the world of black top, the gap between “urban poverty and suburban one-sidedness.”
Our backyard adjacent to the church facilities sports a basketball hoop, rarely idle, and when the local white Baptist school used it one day for gym, I remarked I’d never seen so many white kids on the court at once.
Through the years I’ve heard a lot of lay people struggling with where to attend church because of their children. My children missed out on the superb programming of a suburban megachurch. But what they’ve missed in programming, they’ve gained in people skills and cross-cultural savvy. My 14-year-old son Luke can speak Ebonics, which along with his court skills earns him respect with the home boys.
As a small church, we’ve missed the more formal rotation of Bible stories ensured by a well-organized Christian education department. Every Sunday night we study the Bible with our Youth Church. Tables of children and youth are led by “youth elders” (excuse the oxymoron). Each group reads a passage, and then presents it to the whole group as a skit, rap, song, or explanation. We designate signs to remember the main points of the book we are studying.
My children may not be able to recite the books of the Old Testament in order. (I remember a class at my seminary trying this with little success.) But they know about Ananias and Sapphira, more comfortably renamed Bananas and Sister Fire, who messed with the Lord and as we shortened it, “You Lie, You Die.”
Junia hopes to serve as a missionary some day. In the summer of 2004 she traveled to Hungary on a short-term trip. She found her cultural adjustment greater in dealing with the small town lay participants coming from Ohio, than relating to the gypsy children of Hungary. Growing up in cross-cultural ministry has prepared her for a continuing life of missionary service.
As our children have grown up, they have helped shoulder the responsibilities of our ministry. While Nora practices with our worship team, Junia often helps pick up children for worship. Yet they do feel the burden of their roles.
They feel the weight of being held to a higher standard, having to be a role model instead of just themselves. Before including them in sermons I always ask permission, and my examples are positive, yet they still chafe at being focused on in this way. Luke, our strong introvert, typically ducks under the pew when he hears his name coming, so no one can turn and stare at him.
Nora’s senior class voted on superlatives for each student, and someone suggested she be “the most likely to get into heaven.” She protested, not wanting to be portrayed in the yearbook as a perfect angel for all posterity.
Wesley, our consummate extrovert, feels the restriction of not being able to roam the neighborhood freely. He has trouble relating to the other kids his age at church, and finds his friends at school or down the street. But he has learned to shake off insults and not fight back. Luke comments that his urban school has taught him to take insults as well, a skill he has noticed lacking in his home-schooled friends.
After elementary school Luke and his Jewish friend Jesse joined a baseball team where the rest of the players are African-American. This team has taken our cross-cultural experience to a new level. At times the other white family and I have commented on some of the prejudice against our team we have sensed when playing the typically white suburban teams. Our sons have learned something about racism by aligning themselves with this team.
Third baseman of the Trinity
Last summer Luke missed a tournament game because he and his brother and father were riding their bikes from Cincinnati to Niagara Falls on a trip with my husband’s parachurch ministry. I stopped in to see how the team was faring.
One of the dads complained that I had taken away the Holy Ghost glove. He said that Luke had the Holy Ghost in his glove, making most of the plays that came to him at third base. When the substitute third baseman made a good play, I pointed that out to the dad.
He replied, “No, it’s not the same, you’ve got to have the Holy Ghost inside, you’ve got to live it. Luke’s got the Holy Ghost inside.”
On the one hand it seemed ludicrous to think of the Holy Spirit playing baseball. But then I marveled that somehow God shone through in my quiet son, even on the baseball diamond. I couldn’t ask for more as a parent, that my children exude the Holy Spirit, on the baseball diamond, the basketball court, or the school lunchroom.
As happens in God’s economy, the blessings of our ministry have far outweighed the risks.
Kathy Callahan-Howell pastors Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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