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Event: speech delivered at the first annual fundraiser breakfast
Place: Mariott, Knoxville TN
Date: 8/18/03
Speaker: Andy Rittenhouse, executive director, Compassion Coalition
MY LIFE STORY REPRESENTS BOTH
THE MESSAGE AND METHOD OF CC
My name is Andy Rittenhouse and I
want to thank you for coming this morning so early and on a Monday! My
life is a living example of what the Compassion Coalition is all about. I
arrived in the Knoxville community 22 years ago. My parents had just
recently divorced and my mother was given the responsibility of raising 3
kids on her own. We arrived in Tennessee with no money, and old broken
down car, unemployed single mom with three kids, no family in the entire
state, and very little hope. Into that reality, stepped a compassionate
Christian school principal, his family, and a community that cared enough
about us to actually get involved. You can read my story in the
introduction to the Salt and Light Guidebook there at your table.
The point I’m making is that God intersected my life with caring
Christians – and it turned my life around so much that eventually after
six years, I left a fulfilling job in the engineering field to spend all
my waking hours focused on helping people invest in people in this
community.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In 1998, fresh out of seminary, I
was hired by a visionary group of men and women in our community called
the Knoxville Christian Community Foundation to study the social needs of
our community and report back to them. That research project eventually
found its way into the hands of outreach leaders from a few West Knoxville
churches who were taken aback by the needs they saw described in the
report. Gradually that group gathered enough momentum to invite other
churches to join them for a “Call to Action” meeting in April 2000. Since
that first official meeting, our Coalition has grown in size and vision.
We include lay people, compassion ministry leaders, pastors, business
people, non-profit and community service organizations. Our niche is to
come along side churches who desire to minister outside the four walls of
their church building to the broken, abandoned and suffering in our
community. We equip, mobilize and network churches who desire long-term
involvement with compassion and justice ministries.
Our
mission
statement has been recently amended to read: to mobilize
churches to transform lives and communities in the name of Christ. This
amendment occurred because we recently linked arms with a national
organization called Love INC (Love in the Name of Christ) and we didn’t
want two mission statements under the same banner.
Let me transition
now to our community here in Knoxville Tennessee.
We live in a
wonderful city filled with promise and potential. Over 550 churches dot
our community filled with people who worship the same God, Jesus Christ.
Yet our community
is also filled with its share of pain and suffering. For sake of time, I
will only mention a few examples. Your copy of the Salt and Light
Guidebook contains all this and much more. This research was completed
in August of 2002.
UNDERSTANDING THE MAGNITUDE OF
THE PAIN IN KNOXVILLE AND KNOX COUNTY
A look at the elderly, children
and families -
CHILDREN –
Almost
10,000 households in Knox County will go to bed tonight with no father in
the home. And just over 4000 of these households live in poverty.
For many
children, being fatherless has serious consequences: At 74%, Knox County
leads the state with percent children in state custody with little or no
relationship with their father.
About
12,000 children live below the poverty line and there are 150 homeless
children under the age 13 in any given month in Knox County?
In what
is becoming an epidemic: we discovered that just under 5000 children
are being raised by their grandparents in our community as more and
more parents are baling out.
500
kids need foster/adoptive homes right now.
What
about Knoxville’s forgotten children? Just under 2000 kids live in our
six main public housing developments. Each handcrafted by the Lord of
the Universe and loved by Him.
FAMILIES - And how stable are our families?
TN
divorce rate is 8th in nation with nearly 60% of our
marriages ending in divorce. Out of wedlock children comprise 1/3
of all TN children.
In Knox
County, 49 calls are made each day to report violence in the home!
The most
recent census revealed that Knox County saw a 27% increase in single
parent families in the last decade.
How
stable are our single moms? They aren’t faring too well: 43% of
single mothers with children in our community live below the poverty line.
ELDERLY - What
about our elderly?
6000
of them live below the poverty line. The poorest of the poor get a
Mobile Meal delivered to their home… and we have a waiting list with over
50 names on it.
What can be done? I haven’t even
mentioned the other areas of need such as mental illness, substance abuse,
and poverty. There are many more described in the Salt and Light
Guidebook.
What is the answer?
I believe the answer, apart from a
forceful invasion of the Spirit of God that literally sweeps our community
and radically changes everything, is a mobilized Body of Christ working
hard side by side with government agencies and other community service
non-profits in this community.
But this mobilized Body of Christ
must have the same eyes that Jesus has… seeing the potential, despite the
brokenness, just as He does.
One of the complicating factors,
though, to realizing our community’s potential through a mobilized church
community is that most churches feel extremely unprepared to engage the
community with any kind of transformational approach. Furthermore, while
serving as the outreach pastor of a local church, I discovered that most
of us responsible for outreach knew very little about three things:
mobilizing volunteers, our community, and each other.
You can imagine the dilemma: while
the Bible challenges Christians to transform our communities (Matthew 5:
13-16), we don’t even know the basics about how to effectively mobilize
volunteers; we haven’t really taken the time to understand the communities
in which we live, and maybe worst of all, we don’t hardly know each other!
It all adds up to very little capacity to transform our community – which
is the very thing that our Lord is striving to do here in our midst. He is
building His kingdom and calling us to do the same.
It was because of this dilemma,
that the Compassion Coalition was formed.
Over time, God has given us a
simple three-part strategy.
The first phase of our strategy is
to do research on our community. Realizing we don’t know much about our
community, we explore it. We ask questions, we take notes, we listen, and
we pray.
The second edition of the Salt
and Light Guidebook (our primary research document), culminates four
months of research, 23 focus groups, and hours and hours of interviews and
writing. We have investigated 22 different categories of potential
community involvement, and have interviewed a wide spectrum of people
ranging from police officers and educators to runaways and prostitutes. We
even did 400 surveys among public housing residents asking how churches
can truly engage as friends and allies. Read about it in your copy of the
Salt and Light Guidebook.
In addition to this city-wide
research, we help churches learn how to do research more pertinent to
their own neighborhoods and communities. This helps churches really begin
to see and understand what they can learn from and offer to a community.
The second phase of the strategy
involves equipping churches to respond effectively to the facts they learn
in the research phase.
Through basic training, we help
churches more effectively acquire the heart of God, a servant attitude,
the learning skills, and perseverance to become transformers in their
communities. This fall (Sep 03), we will begin our fourth semester of
training - this time focusing on developing Compassion Ministry Leadership
Teams led by team captains who we call “Compassion Directors.”
Our goal is that every church who
walks with us will appoint a Compassion Director responsible for
mobilizing his or her church into areas of service within the community.
This person will lead a Compassion Ministry Leadership team that acts not
as a doer of ministry, but rather as a catalyst that sparks a measurable
movement toward community service within their individual congregations.
The third phase of the strategy
involves connecting churches to each other and to the community as they
feel better prepared to engage… and to stay engaged.
Building friendships and trust
between churches makes it possible for churches to work together to
accomplish goals that are impossible for any one church or denomination.
Our primary methods involve (a)
monthly meetings which spotlight different community needs and resources,
(b) courses which allow Compassion Directors to learn and grow together in
a safe environment that encourages a “One Body of Christ” paradigm, (c) a
network of Compassion Directors with two peer coaches available on call,
(d) a website that has the potential to facilitate reliable communication
and a flow of resources between churches and the community, and (e) Love
INC – a local franchise of a national organization that has 25 years
experience connecting 7000 churches to the communities in which they live.
Let me transition now to a
discussion of what God has done so far through this Coalition.
As of Aug 03, over 120 churches
from over 15 denominations have attended our monthly meetings which
spotlight community needs and resources. Each month, through a simple mail
out - we invite every church in our county to attend. Here are some
examples of what God has done:
One of our meetings focused on
non-traditional and inner city schools: by God’s provision, now 18
of 23 of these schools have been adopted by local churches! Several
of the principals (like at Beaumont which was adopted by West Park
Baptist) are in shock at what churches can bring to the table. To be
honest, we are all in shock!
CAC’s Project LIVE keeps a
book of requests from the elderly for help with home repairs and
other care needs– Just 4 months after the book of needs was spotlighted in
a monthly meeting focused on the elderly (Jan 03), every need was met! Of
course, it fills up again fairly rapidly but that is why churches are
needed: no one can love and serve the forgotten elderly like people who
have God’s heart for them (i.e., Christians).
A meeting that spotlighted low
income Latinos in Knoxville, laid the foundation for an emerging
network of churches wanting to serve low-income Latinos;
In a meeting focused on foster
care and adoption - 10 families signed up for foster parents; Our
goal is homes for all 500 children on the list.
We recently focused on juvenile
delinquency in an attempt to jump start an initiative with the
District Attorney’s office called Restorative Justice. This initiative
places non-violent youth offenders back in the neighborhoods where they
committed their crimes to perform community service. So far, 85 youth
have been supervised by caring Christians networked to this initiative by
the work of CC’s New Initiatives Coordinator – Veta Sprinkle. There are
over 2,000 more youth who need this service today.
This month (Aug 03), we turn our
attention to poverty and hunger where we will be focused on the
working poor – hearing directly from them as well as from two churches
(one suburban, one urban) that are on the cutting edge in trying to
give a “hand up” rather than a hand out. Our goal? For churches to
holistically engage in the lives of the individuals and families
who come to them for help.
YOU ARE WARMLY INVITED TO JOIN US.
Please check out our website for details.
In addition to our monthly
meetings, 33 churches have been given basic training on how to
connect their people to the community and approximately 20 are steadily
(some dramatically) improving their impact.
Almost every Saturday morning in
Knoxville, church members from a multi-denominational network of over
17 churches gather to pray and go out to deliver furniture to people
struggling with all types of life situations. One church provided the
warehouse, another provided the director, and others provide the
volunteers. These Christians go all over the community getting inside
apartments and homes delivering furniture. Each group prays with the
recipients if given permission.
7 mega-churches in our
community are now networked together through the Compassion Coalition and
working together on community issues (this includes Cedar Springs
Presbyterian, Grace Baptist, First Baptist Concord, Fellowship Church,
Cokesbury United Methodist, Sevier Heights Baptist, Central Baptist
Bearden).
Many churches with fewer members
have discovered that they can make an enormous impact if they take on one
issue and stick to it (e.g., Team Mission’s work with CAC’s Project
L.I.V.E – an elderly initiative).
OTHER SPIN OFFS - Once they
get networked and a little cheerleading, churches do far more without our
help or initiative! (Of course, that’s our goal!).
Some new multi-church
initiatives include:
5
churches have partnered together to create a car-care network
that changes oil, washes cars, and even performs minor maintenance work
for individuals who need that kind of practical love (like single moms).
5
churches have formed a car donation ministry that works with
local car dealerships to obtain reliable used cars for people striving to
move out of poverty, who must have transportation to get to work.
Volunteers from 5 churches working together in Austin Homes
public housing development – this is an onsite outreach led and funded by
Bridgewater Baptist church that is open six days a week bringing healing
and hope to the 255 single parent households (including 236 kids) living
there.
There are
other initiatives in the “pre-launch” phase that are coming together even
now such as a multi-denominational initiative to staff a home for
single moms with babies that have aged out of foster care. This is an
enormous need in Knoxville due to the enforcement of recent foster care
law changes.
In addition to the collective
impact, the stories associated with individual churches which have been
encouraged by their association with the Compassion Coalition are just as
exciting.
Bridgewater Baptist Church – consisting of 300 members – by end of 03,
will have donated 2820 volunteer hours to the community and will have,
conservatively speaking, given another $100,000 in direct community
ministries. (That’s over 50 volunteer hours and $1900 dollars per week
given to the community). This is from a church that had almost zero
community outreach just a few short years ago. The total contributions for
the year (volunteer time valued at $10/hr) is just over $124,000 going
toward direct “hands-on” community transformation. (NOTE THIS: If
100 churches in Knoxville did even half of that – it would equate
approximately 6.2 million dollars of impact per year in our community
including 141,000 hours of people’s time! This is a staggering figure… and
it feels so doable. Keep in mind the size of Bridgewater Baptist Church.)
A staff
member from Knoxville’s Community Action Committee writes about a church
which has committed to lead the charge in meeting the needs of the
elderly: “Team Mission’s volunteers wash windows inside
and out, clean and vacuum, tackle overgrown yards, cut hedges and trees
and clean gutters. They have laid walkways where none existed to afford a
steady step for an elderly neighbor. They build handrails, reseat
commodes, repair leaks and sometimes just replace a bulb to light a dark
space. Most significantly, Pastor Mason has committed to mentor two other
churches to serve as Team Missions does. In his vision, those churches
will reach out and mentor two other churches with the cycle repeating
yearly.
Cokesbury United Methodist is developing a cutting edge outreach to
food pantry families by forming a focus group of the clients to listen to
them and utilize their ideas to develop a strategy for truly empowering
them versus enabling ongoing dependency.
Farragut Church of Christ: is leading the charge on developing a
ministry to single moms with young kids in a house donated by Lutherans.
The
Mission’s director at West Lake Baptist Church reports: Our
church has adopted an inner-city school and is currently conducting weekly
tutoring of students, periodic fun activities for the students and teacher
support (providing hard to get materials, a teacher appreciation luncheon,
etc). We are also providing "Meals on Wheels", feeding the homeless
through a local shelter, delivering furniture to those in need, and
preparing to provide support to the local runaway shelter. This may not
seem like much, but our church was not aware of and therefore not
providing any services one year ago.
Cedar Springs Presbyterian, arguably the backbone of the helping
churches in West Knoxville, is now mentoring and partnering with entire
network of churches for community transformation.
Fellowship Evangelical Free just birthed an fascinating multi-church
car donation program that gives good used cars to single moms and others
in need.
An
elementary school teacher writes about West Park Baptist, “The
residents of both homeless shelters and the largest housing development in
Knoxville are zoned for our school. This creates a disproportionably high
need within our school population… (West Park Baptist) has
…begun mentoring the children and families in our shelters, visiting them
weekly at the facility as well as having lunch with them at the school to
enhance their sense of comfort and support. These same volunteers have
also agreed to maintain these relationships over the summer, providing
tutoring and activities for our children so they will be able to maintain
a sense of community and consistency.
Cornerstone Christian church has begun to walk door to door in their
Lonsdale neighborhood to explore ways to actively love and serve
the residents that live in close proximity to their church building. The
senior pastor, who attended the CC training, is leading the neighborhood
walks!
Grace Baptist discovered a retirement village close by where 37 of the
40 residents were widows. Now they have an active outreach attempting to
partner a Sunday School class with each resident.
And I could honestly go on and on
because there are so many more stories to tell.
And these are just churches that
are walking with us. The Salt and Light Guidebook has many more
stories of churches throughout the community who are doing great things
not even associated with the Compassion Coalition! It seems like churches
can have a tremendous impact on our community.
Now that I’ve given you a taste of
what can happen when churches begin to seek God’s heart for community
transformation, I want to briefly mention our main goal for 2004.
By the end of our fiscal year (Jul
04), we are praying to see 50 churches working closely together for
community transformation through various channels such as the Love INC
network, the Compassion Directors Network, through the CC monthly
meetings, and through their own initiatives outside CC’s efforts.
I’d like to report back to you
next year that we now have over 50 churches that share a common vision for
loving and serving our community. I want to report on their combined and
individual impact. I want to read you the quotes that will come forth from
the community. And I want to rejoice with you that the Kingdom of our Lord
is becoming a reality before our very eyes.
I ask you and challenge you:
Business professionals: Do
you want a community ripe for good business? Than began to piece it back
together again. Get involved with the healing process. Invest in helping
churches become externally-focused change agents in this community!
And to all of you I ask:
Do you want a community where
every child who needs adopted is adopted?
Do you want a community where
every child who needs a tutor and a friend gets one?
Do you want a community where the
elderly are visited and cared for; where the fatherless gain a
father-figure; and where the single moms living in poverty are brought
into a small group from a local church that has been trained to engage her
in an empowering and affirming manner?
Do you want to live in a community
where the people with a mental illness feel included, where former
offenders begin to contribute again to society, where refugees are sought
out and respected, where people dying with AIDS are visited, and where
racism is not tolerated because Christians have crossed the racial divide
to laugh and love and celebrate friendship with each other?
What kind of community do you want
to live and die in?
I believe the destiny of our city
lies largely in the hands of Christians. I also believe that this
community has enough resources, perseverance and passion - to not only
reshape the social landscape in this community, but to act as a
springboard for transformation across the entire east Tennessee region.
My challenge to you is to catch a
God-size vision for our city and to think about using your resources (both
time and money) to help local churches learn how to follow Christ into a
very beat up and broken down world.
2004 GOAL: To help 50 churches
walk together for community transformation.
The Compassion Coalition budget
for fiscal year July 2003-2004 is $255,000. Following is a visual
illustration of how the budget relates to our three-fold strategy and the
anticipated sources of funds:
Note: Administration does not include in-kind
donation for office facilities.
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