For two and a half years the big blue rental house next door sat quiet.

Back in 2008, when angry late-night yelling moved out, so did the family that had lived there long before our family moved onto the block.

As it turns out, we knew the yelling far better than the people. Grandma barely gave a look our direction. The teenage girls knocked on the door every few months to borrow our phone when they were locked out. And though we tried making small talk about the weather and their latest jobs before they walked back onto the front porch, it was clear they barely trusted us.

One girl seemed to have a baby that was sometimes with her, sometimes not.

The grandmother and granddaughters left the neighborhood, and the on-again, off-again boyfriends that looked menacingly, lit things on fire and hollered cuss words did too.

So did the sorrow voices that wailed at night.  

It was quiet.

It made me feel sad.

I am still learning what community on this street means.

A few summers ago, I heard that being a good neighbor is partly about just showing up. Paying attention. Refraining from creating an agenda or a get-to-know-everybody-plan. Searching for what God is up to and joining there.

It felt true.

Soon after hearing this, we joined some neighbors to host a block party because the woman across the street (a long-time resident) wanted one last hurrah with the people on our street before she moved to Spain. We shared food. Kids swapped sidewalk chalk and bubbles.

During the party, and for another year after, the rental house on the corner sat quiet.

And then this past spring, the big blue house again filled with sound.

Clamored with unfamiliar words that rose and fell like music, utensils banging against the insides of metal pans, babies crying, drums beating, praise songs echoing from the shower and through the open windows.

The women wore brightly-patterned clothes and smiled. The men nodded respectfully. A young boy came to our backyard and helped us water our growing vegetables, played with our girls on the swing set. They were recent immigrants from the Congo and, just before coming to the United States through the sponsorship of a Portland church, lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania.

We brought them muffins, and they brought us a shiny purple bag filled with giant grapes, fried bread, sparkling cider and a note saying how thankful they were that God had given us to them as neighbors.

A month ago, the matriarch of the family — a woman with a broad smile and strong hands — walked door to door, delivering to the neighbors invitations to her daughter’s wedding.

The family was still barbecuing meat over bricks borrowed from our backyard when we headed to the Pentecostal church across town that looked like a converted bank. White tulle and red roses covered pew ends. Children ran between rows while we all waited for the service to begin.

We waited an hour and a half.

My girls and I took pictures on my phone and played in the church nursery. We talked to young kids.

A handsome African boy introduced himself to my daughters, then turned to me. ”Many people do not realize that being late is a part of the African culture,” the 10-year-old paused dramatically, as if to make sure I understood that this waiting was entirely normal. ”I have a good explanation for why it is difficult for me to make it to school on time.”

At 3:30 in the afternoon, our neighbors and the entire wedding party pulled up to the church in a long white limousine. The mother of the bride wore a cream colored suit that appeared to be second-hand. The young men from next door sported black tuxes with burgundy ties.

Women wearing head wraps and African dresses gathered close together.

Soon, accompanied by modern pop, the bride walked down the aisle to her groom — another recent immigrant to the United States.

The pastor’s sermon was translated into Lingala by a man next to him who held his son close.

When the bride promised to be faithful, to have and to hold, until death do they part, a small bell rang joyfully. When the groom promised the same, another bell rang.

When the pastor spoke of love and commitment, of the joy of marriage, the sanctuary filled with shouts of “Aye Yae-Yae-Yae-Yae-Yae!!”

Pulling out of the church parking lot, we waved to the mother-of-the-bride and her sister. Then, realizing we had not given the young couple their card with money enclosed for their new life together in Georgia, I circled the car around and headed back to our neighbor, standing uncomfortably in high heels.

“Could you give us a ride back to the house?” she asked in broken English.

Our neighbor sat with me up front, and her sister in the back seat next to my three-year-old. I asked their thoughts about the wedding, heard about their love of God and their journey to the United States. Told them how much we’ve loved living next door to their joyful family.

At times it was quiet, but for the sounds of the radio playing low in the background.

I let the women out in front of the big blue house and pulled around the corner. And I said a prayer, thanking God for the opportunity to share space with them and listen.

Share space. Listen. That is beginning to sound and feel more like community to me.

(Originally published in Christianity Today Feb. 16, 2012 – Written by Cornelia Seigneur- Christianity Today- Richard Twiss story by Cornelia Seigneur

When I went to hear Richard Twiss speak at a “Race Talks” event at a popular pub in Northeast Portland, I was struck by how he spoke of his faith.

“I am a follower of Jesus, though I would not call myself a Christian,” Twiss said. On several occasions, Twiss asked the audience to consider their own spiritual journeys. It was remarkable how naturally he turned the conversation to spirituality at a city-sponsored event.

“Native American people are in a unique position to talk about spiritual things while many evangelicals are not,” Twiss explained. “In this context in particular, they would likely be viewed as narrow-minded, religiously intolerant, and self-righteous.”

Twiss, 57, is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. His mission, as co-founder and president of Wiconi International, is to foster understanding and reconciliation between Native American people and other sectors of Americans. After years of speaking to national and international audiences, Twiss is turning the focus of his passion for empowering those with diverse backgrounds to his hometown of Portland/Vancouver.

His journey from the Rosebud Reservation landed Twiss and his family in Silverton, Oregon, in 1962, when, in the third grade, he began learning to navigate between two worlds.

In 1972, Twiss returned to the reservation and participated in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office Building in Washington, D.C., with the American Indian Movement, who were protesting the government’s breaking of treaties. During this time, he told me, he started to hate white people and Christianity.

Later, as Twiss began searching spiritually, he dabbled in everything from Hinduism to Buddhism; and, in 1974, he was also presented with the Christian faith while living in Maui, Hawaii.

“I was a beach bum, did drugs, partied, slept on the beach, chased girls, lived off of food stamps, and started over the next day,” he explained.

One day while hitchhiking Twiss was picked up by two evangelicals who shared Christ with him.

“But I didn’t want anything to do with their ‘white man’s’ religion; I cussed them out and told them to let me out.”

Yet, in 1974, alone during a drug overdose in Hawaii, Twiss recalls the words of the Christians. “I yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘Jesus if you are real, would you forgive me, would you come into my life?’ I immediately felt the most peaceful that I have in my entire life.”

Since embracing Jesus, Twiss has been trying to figure out how to live out his faith as a Native American while inspiring others to do the same.

He moved to Alaska where he met his future wife, Katherine, and was ordained through his local church. After moving to Vancouver, Washington, in 1981, he pastored a community church there from 1982 to 1995.

In 1997 he and Katherine founded Wiconi International. With their message of reconciliation, community, and spirituality, Twiss has spoken internationally and nationally , including invitations from Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade for Christ and Promise Keepers. In addition, Twiss has offered diversity staff training for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and he’s spoken as part of auxiliary events at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.

“He has had an impact around the world,” said Randy Woodley, a Keetoowah Cherokee Indian and director of intercultural and indigenous studies at George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland. “Richard is known around indigenous people to challenge them to use their own culture to understand Christ and his kingdom.”

As Twiss has shifted his ministry locally in recent years, it is clear that it takes time to earn a place where one’s voice is heard.

For Twiss, it took significantly reducing his travel and speaking schedule to invest in Portland’s Native community, which he says numbers 38,000.

“Richard expressed a genuine desire to connect with the local Native American community and serve as a connector between individuals and organizations with interests in education, community development, service work, and all around wellness in our community,” said Donita S. Fry, Portland Youth and Elders Council Organizer within Portland’s Native American Youth and Family Center.

As part of his local work, Twiss is a board member of the NAYA Family Center and participates in the Portland Indian Leaders Roundtable, a group of executive directors or senior staff from the 28 Indian organizations located in Portland.

He’s presented an indigenous worldview framework for neighborhood planning for the mayoral staff of Portland, and regularly speaks at local higher education institutions both secular and Christian. He will also be speaking at the upcoming Justice Conference being held in Portland next week.

“The Portland-Vancouver area doesn’t realize what a rich gift this transition is for them,” said Woodley.

Twiss seeks to live out his Christian faith without compromising the protocols of his culture, and emboldens others to do the same.

“Along with many friends, we’re helping to inspire a cultural revitalization within a redemptive biblical framework,” says Twiss. “For the first time Native people could love themselves as Native people, whereas in the past the message was ‘God loves you, but He doesn’t like you. No more drumming music, no more powwows, no more ceremonial traditions of our culture.’”

Today, Twiss also chairs the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies, providing education for the next generation of believers.

Adam Mury, a White Mountain Apache and Ph.D. student at Portland State University, said, “The fact that Richard is a Native who has earned an audience with a diverse group of listeners makes it that much more likely that future audiences will lend an ear to Native voices.”

Christians outside the Native American community have been inspired by Twiss as well. Jane Leong of Portland heard Twiss speak at a missions conference where he appeared in his full Lakota powwow regalia and braids.

“He spoke about how he was taught that God thought his culture was evil. He challenged people to not look at Native Americans stereotypically as just ‘drunks’ or people who need help, but instead as coheirs, co-laborers in God’s kingdom.”

Twiss and his friends led conference attendees for worship to the Creator with powwow drumming, singing, and dancing in full regalia.

“It brought me to tears,” said Leong. “I could picture the Native believers leading us in worship to God in the eternal kingdom.”

After that, Leong said, she began exploring her own Christian practices.

“Minority believers generally take a backseat in the wider Christian community,” she says, “so when Richard was featured in his full ‘Indianess’ as a Christian, it gave me great comfort …. My Chinese culture was not an afterthought of God.”

Twiss’s most recent project is creating The Salmon Nation internship, which launches this August, designed to train future spiritual leaders, business leaders, educators, politicians, and husbands and wives. The Twisses are purchasing a house in Portland near the Native American Youth and Family Center, from which they will serve the Native American community through existing programs.

Interns will volunteer in after-school programs for tutoring and sports, attend powwows, and spend time with native elders, church, government and business leaders.

Twiss said the internship will draw applicants from across the country but the focus of the program is serving the youth, particularly Native American youth, in Portland.

“We are talking about advancing education, culture, family and spirituality; ultimately, we are helping youth navigate the challenges of life successfully.”

Somber statistics for Native American youth is one of the driving motivations for The Salmon Nation, Twiss said.

“The [high school] graduation rate for Native Americans is one of the lowest in the nation, and we have among the highest numbers of kids in the foster-care system in Portland. We have huge economic disparities in Portland,” he said.

One of the projects that interns will undertake is developing an economic plan for the house.

“They have to have the skills to succeed in that world rather than feel victimized by it, so they will work with business leaders in the community in actually developing a business plan,” explained Twiss, noting that the details will largely depend upon the students.

Interns will also minister to the elderly, such as providing transportation for medical services.

“We want to serve the entire community, from youth to the elders, because that is how the community works,” Twiss said. “We want to ask the question, ‘How can a Christ-follower engage in loving conversation with those who differ religiously, culturally and ideologically?”

Richard has been able to energize that conversation, from Portland Oregon to Portland Maine, no matter the venue.

“Richard can speak with integrity as a follower of Christ, [even] in a bar,” said Woodley of his friend. “That’s the magic.”

Christianity Today- Richard Twiss story by Cornelia Seigneur

Cornelia Seigneur Website

Bob Wall will speak  about his experiences working with gang prevention communities in Portland.

Please plan to join us for this informal coffee gathering.

Regular formal gatherings next month, on Sunday March 11.

This evening, we have gathered together to remember, celebrate and act upon the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have unfinished business to which we must attend.

God is not finished with Dr. King’s vision being lived out in our midst. We have his God-given vision to fulfill. It is one of the greatest honors of my life to be asked to give this address.

For one, Dr. King  is one of my heroes for reasons that I will soon share. Moreover, so too is Dr. Leroy Haynes, Jr., Senior Pastor of this historic sanctuary and faith community, Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Dr. Haynes has been a prophetic voice of constancy for justice in a culture ceaselessly consumed not by rights but by opinion polls, passing fancies, and profit margins. I wish to thank Dr. Haynes, Dr. T. Allen Bethel, Bishop Grace Osborne, Bishop-Elect Pastor William Turner, Reverend Clifford Chappell and other leaders here for their passionate commitment to the Lord Jesus and his kingdom values as modeled by his servant, Dr. King. To share in their struggle and all of you in the struggle for justice as African Americans is a gift from God to me. Tonight is one momentous moment and mile marker for me in that drum major march toward justice.

As individuals and as a community, your passion and commitment to the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. far outweigh my own. You live it daily. I share these reflections on the life and legacy of Dr. King given how much they challenge me personally and how much you have shaped me. I hope you find these meditations to be of some value and encouragement: your efforts in reaching out to me and the white Evangelical Christian community of which I am a member are making a difference. The irony is that we in the white Evangelical Christian community have only recently begun engaging in significant ways on matters of injustice that concern us all. And yet, we often think and operate as if we are the ones leading the charge. Please forgive us for our arrogance. Please keep modeling for us how to run this marathon race of justice and lead us forward to build the beloved community.

Dr. King was more than a Christian professional. He was a prophet. In fact, he sacrificed his profession for his prophetic call. Our society talks a great deal about making a profit, but not nearly enough about being prophetic. King, however, taught us how to be prophetic. King was a true prophet. He called people back to God’s Word and to our nation’s highest ideals, and he laid down his life to make it happen. Like Moses of old who led Israel to the Promised Land, King led his people at great sacrifice to himself. Just as Moses would die before the people entered the land, so King died before his people would enter the land.

Both Moses and King looked over the Promised Land and they overlooked themselves while caring for the people’s needs. King had more than a professional career. He had a prophetic calling. As in the case with all great leaders, the concern for the people far outweighed his own self-concern. How are we wired? What wins out in our lives? Self-concern to do more than make ends meet and to make it big, or concern to make things right for the people around us who are in distress?

 One of the most vivid examples of King putting his prophetic call and the people before his profession and his personal life is an event early on in the civil rights struggle. In 1956, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King came home late one night after a civil rights meeting. His family was asleep. The phone rang. King answered. The person on the other end of the line told him that he had better get out of town or he would be dead. After the person hung up, King recalls making himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen and sitting down at the table. He writes:

“I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward…And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak…With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory: ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right…Now, I am afraid…The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’”

At that instance, King recalls, “I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” King writes, “It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world’…Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson {New York: Warner Books, 1998}, pp. 77-78.)

A few days later his home was bombed. Providentially, no one was hurt. Still, King knew that the day would come when he would meet the assassin’s bullet for meeting the people’s needs. Still, he marched on: the concerns of the people far outweighed his own self-concern. What about us? What bears the greatest importance in our lives? What preoccupies our attention—concern for the people or our own self-concern as professors, pastors, politicians, and people of various other professions? Remember Dr. King’s life. Celebrate his calling. And act it out. We have his God-given mission to fulfill.

 I first read this account during my visit to the King Center in Atlanta several years ago. I was struck by the profound prophetic life of Dr. King and my own pettiness. How often have I cared for my profession over against my prophetic call to give myself to the orphans and widows in their distress? (James 1:27) How about you? I will ask the same kind of questions of us, after I discuss King’s legacy in terms of his ideals.

Dr. King was about rights, but he was also about more than rights. He was about building beloved community that would benefit all people across the ethnic and economic spectrum. Just as there are far too many people concerned with their careers, and not callings to care for others, so too there are far too many people in our society concerned for their special interest groups rather than the common good and greater good of all. King was not simply about rights for his own people. He was about reconciliation that entailed justice for all people. That is why he said that he had a dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”

King had a dream “that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.” (Taken from “I Have A Dream”; http://www.mlkonline.net/dream.html; accessed on 1/16/12).

 King’s love of rights for all people and the right to love all people were powerful and omnipresent ideals that energized King’s quest for building beloved community. As King said in a sermon at Christmas in 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, “To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.’” (http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv4-2.html; accessed on 1/16/12; italics added)

Such conviction, courage and compassion flowed from Jesus’ call to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). The late Evangelical Anglican statesman John R. W. Stott claimed that King was the greatest model of Jesus’ ethic disclosed in this text in the modern age (“The Message of the Sermon on the Mount {Matthew 5–7}: Christian Counter-Culture,” The Bible Speaks Today {Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1978}, 113).

Do we have these same ideals?

Do we love our enemies?

Do we so wear them down with our love that we don’t simply win freedom for ourselves, but also freedom for them and for those who do not belong to our socio-economic and ethnic groupings, winning a double victory in the process?

A lack of practical love so often shapes my life. An unwillingness to reach out and forgive and accept forgiveness and move toward reconciliation and commitment to all people for the cultivation of the beloved community.

If Dr. King could forgive his white oppressors for the horrific harm they did to him, his family and his community, I can certainly forgive those hostile toward me. Otherwise, I have no business being here this evening paying tribute to King. Each of us must ask ourselves if we are sons and daughters of the King of kings and Lord of lords and servants of the King of Dr. King, or sons and daughters of thunder, like John and James who wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan town that opposed Jesus and his message (Luke 9:51-56). Jesus rebuked James and John for it. And he so often rebukes me, too.

 While Dr. King demonstrated incredible social etiquette in his public personae, there was nothing charming about the racism and classism he gave himself so tirelessly to address. And while he was engaged in battle at every turn, he fought hate with love. King was about the power of love, not the love of power. He was about redemption, not retribution. We must continue this fight. We will never attain the beloved community in Portland and the surrounding region if we do not continue to keep in place Dr. King’s inspiring ideals, vision, and exemplary life.

 In Oregon and Washington, we don’t face racism in the same way as King did in the South. We approach it differently, but not necessarily more redemptively. What was said by black leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s still rings true today: “In the South, the white man doesn’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too high. In the North, he doesn’t care how high you get, as long as you don’t get too close.”

For all our tolerance in the Pacific Northwest, such tolerance does not translate all that well into love. Love is tenacious. It does not endure “the other.” It pursues life together with the other. As the Apostle Paul writes, ^“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).

 “I would rather be loved than tolerated,” I once heard someone say. I am so thankful that John 3:16 does not say, “For God so tolerated the world that he chose not to send his Son.” Rather, it says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” for us so that we might find eternal life through faith in him. God did all this, even though he knew the world would reject his love and hang his Son on the cross. Still, God’s love pursues us and breaks through our hate to transform our hearts and lives.

Will we respond to God’s love and love where there is hate? King did not simply tolerate people, including his enemies. He tenaciously loved them so that they would become his friends, and so that they could build the beloved community together.

 So, what does the beloved community look like, and what is the unfinished business to which we must attend in light of King’s life and legacy? The beloved community is a community of love and justice and peace and equality that breaks through the chains of racism and classism and abuses of various kinds. Beloved community requires that we connect the dots of those things that destroy beloved community and come together in solidarity to consume those dots and connections, just as King did. We learn a bit of how to connect the dots from Dr. King.

In King’s sermon on his opposition to the Vietnam War (delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U&feature=player_embedded; accessed on 1/16/12), King spoke of the slave triangle of “poverty, racism and militarism.” King maintained that this triangle was enslaving America. Today, we are fighting a war right here in Portland with gang activity and violence. How will we fight it? What is involved? King’s opposition to the Vietnam War (not an opposition to the men and women laying down their lives) was based on conviction, not opinion polls, and it lost him a great deal of support in certain quarters, even among people who had celebrated his leadership in the civil rights movement.

But King connected the dots and saw that the war taking away from the civil rights struggle, dramatically draining the fight against the war on poverty for blacks and whites, and sending the poor in far higher proportion than the rich to fight the war in Vietnam. Many people could not connect the dots that King did in speaking of the relation of poverty, racism, and militarism. But he was right to make such connections in his efforts to build solidarity and the beloved community.

 In our day, we must connect the dots of problems like unequal access to quality education and economic inequality to the problem of gang violence. We must also connect the dots of the negative forces of gentrification to gang violence. According to a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, for many African Americans in Portland, urban renewal is Negro removal. Such vulnerability and transiency, where people are uprooted from their communities, makes a damaging difference.

We must also connect the dots involving these problems to a prison system so often based on retribution, not reformation. How are people to be reintroduced to society and make a vital contribution to society if they are never prepared to become vital participants and welcomed back through networks of support? We must come together to right the wrongs of a prison system that enslaves black men (it has been argued that the percentage of black men in prison far outweighs their proportionate presence in society).

We must also attend to the fatherlessness so rampant in our society. Do we honor the fathers and mothers in the home, the fathers and mothers in our churches, and the fathers and mothers in our society as a whole? We must make sure everyone is welcome at the table of beloved community and make sure that we bring honor not simply to Dr. King but to the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters who have marched in the band that King led as a drum major for justice. These marchers are here this evening. They include you. We must support one another in the ongoing efforts to build beloved community in our day.

 A political leader responsible for building vital connections between the faith community and civic leaders and activists in Portland asked me this past week: “Why don’t the white evangelical Christians and white Christians generally concern themselves with gang issues? Why is it simply an African American concern in so many quarters?

The white Evangelical Christian community is rightly concerned for addressing homelessness and the sex trade, but is not involved by and large in building the infrastructure that will bring an end to all the gang violence in our community,” this leader said. I responded by saying that it is because we in the white Christian community—especially white Evangelical Christian community of which I am part—does not connect the dots very well.

We do not see that all these forces have a bearing on one another. Nor do we think that the African American community’s concerns are our own. Nor do we sense that we ourselves—I myself—have been guilty in part of creating the vacuum and fragmentation that leads to gang activity and violence. For if I benefit from a system that keeps people underprivileged and do nothing to change the structures, I am causing that destructive system to become further entrenched and to expand. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. We must connect these various dots. Not only must we connect the various dots, but also we must become more connected to one another if we are to carry out Dr. King’s vision and build the beloved community. Each sphere is related to all the others, and so we must address them together, all of us together.

 We must continue to support the life and legacy not only of Dr. King but also of the late Rob Ingram, and his living contemporaries Robert Richardson, John Canda, Mark Strong, Clarence Larkin and the African American leaders in this sanctuary. We must continue to work with our political leaders and support them in their various efforts to bring an end to the violence and build the beloved community.

We must show gratitude to the often thankless labors of love of mothers who serve their families so sacrificially, fathering their children, holding down multiple jobs, teaching their children the value of hard work and how to stretch a dollar and stretch a hug to heal a family and a community. As someone once said, mothers are the cradle of our civilization. We must support them and learn from them and from the civil rights movement. In the civil rights movement, the people did not have much by way of financial resources. They had to stretch their resources, but they had one another. Look what they were able to accomplish as they stretched out their arms to heal their communities!

 What kind of leaders and community will we be and become? What kind of community will we build? Will we follow through on our prophetic calling to build beloved community and break through the divisions in our society together, divisions that are symbolized and further solidified by the gang violence tearing through our community? We must remember, celebrate, and act. We still have unfinished business to which we must attend. We have Dr. King’s Spirit-inspired vision to fulfill.

*This document is the final written version of the text that served as the basis for the keynote address.

The event is held at Allen Temple CME Church, which is located at 4236 NE 8^th in Portland.

Paul will be remembering Dr. King’s values and speaking to how we can carry those values forward.

The event is open to the public.

New Wineskins

Richard’s talk is titled, “The Experience of Native Americans in Oregon Today”

Doors open at 6 p.m. and the event starts at 7 p.m. It is free and open to all ages.

Kennedy School McMenamins is located at 5736 N.E. 33rd Avenue, Portland, 97211, and can be reached at 503- 249-3983

The  event is in lieu of this month’s John 17:23 Network.

For more information, visit the website:

McMenamins- Race Talks Info- Richard Twiss Jan 10

I love the first couple of quotes in the essay:

“Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth….”

Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.
—Genesis 4:14, 15

The essay starts then like this…

The human project, as it has been shaped by western literature, is a restless one, plagued with discontent and longing. It is also a lonely one. Despite our reliance on and need for others, the responsibility for the decisions and actions that constitute our human project is ours alone. Like Cain we are marked—as a curse and a blessing—to wander the landscape alone, which confronts us moment by moment as a challenge, as a choice. Our human project emerges, over time, in the accumulation of these choices and through these actions as we seek to understand ourselves and the world. Art participates in this restless human project. . . .

Read entire essay in Image Journal  at the following link. . .

Image Journal-Daniel Siedell

Rob Ingram, an inspiring African American leader in the City of Portland, a husband and father of 5, a tireless youth advocate, a fearless leader in the fight against gang violence, died of a heart attack at the tender age of 38.

I had just met Rob Ingram while working on a story for Christianity Today on John Canda, another African American leader in the gang issue of Portland. . . .

Now,  Rob is gone.  .  . It is hard to understand but God is a good God. One thousand people turned out for Rob’s funeral at The International Fellowship Family. And they heard the story of a life lived for Christ. Rob lived life completely and fully and in humble submission to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He made that clear in an NPR radio interview.

This Sunday, The John 17:23 Network will honor a life well lived. From 7 to 8:30 p.m., Sunday, December 11 at  Daniels Memorial Church Of God In Christ, which is located at 1234 NE Killingsworth Street  in Portland, all are invited to remember and reflect on Rob’s life as well as participate in prayer for ministries working in the midst of gang violence and related issues in the Portland area.

Dr. Metzger notes, “This is such a huge and intense issue. We’re seeking to bring churches together to engage on these issues in the trenches. We really believe this is bringing about unity.”

Check out the Consuming Jesus website Consuming Jesus

for more info or contact Beyth at bgreenetz@multnomah.edu with questions.

The John 17:23 Network exists to encourage, exhort, and equip the multi-ethnic Body of Christ in the greater Portland area to fulfill Jesus’ prayer that we might all be one. These events, sponsored by The John 17:23 Network in partnership with The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins, are a sustained effort to become more aware of and engage issues of gang violence.

Rob died of a massive heart attack a week after I interviewed him and I dedicated my story to the memory of John. More than 1000 people showed up to his funeral last Friday.

Here is my story found at  Christianity Today Link- to John Canda story

If John Canda had to credit one person for his faith and wide-reaching impact in Portland, Oregon, he would point to Grace Collins, a German Christian woman who ran Grace Collins Memorial Center, the daycare Canda attended while growing up in the 1960s on the city’s northeast side.

“Ms. Collins and her sisters would read us Scriptures,” Canda, 46, recalls. “I remember sitting in Sunday school, and as the pastor shared Bible passages, I’d join in and recite with him, and people would look at me. It was all because of Ms. Collins.”

Long after needing day care, after spending days swimming at Dishman Community Center, Canda and his friends would visit Ms. Collins.

“She’d have this 11½-minute Bible study for us, and her pantry was always full—chips, cookies, soda. We’d go there every summer; she’d fill the room. She was planting seeds,” Canda said.

Those seeds—namely, Scripture and community—have become vital to Canda’s mission in Portland for the past 22 years: to curb gang violence in the city where he grew up, and to inspire others to do the same. In that spirit, this year he formed the group Connected, a grassroots movement that practices a “Ministry of Place,” meeting Friday evenings at Holladay Park near the Lloyd Center shopping district, known for gang violence.

Canda found his calling in 1989, six years after graduating from Portland’s Jefferson High School. He had attended business college, then joined the Air Force, serving as a security policeman in Idaho. When he returned to Portland in 1989 with his wife, Darla Nelson Probasco-Canda—whom he has been married to for 25 years, raising 4 children together—the community he knew so well had changed. Gangs had begun to run rampant, and gentrification was hurting low-income families.

“Growing up, we didn’t have to worry about gangs. Gangs were bike groups and the Hells’ Angels,” Canda said.

Concerned, Canda became involved in outreach to street gangs in volunteer and paid positions. He chaired the Youth Gang and Gang Violence Task Force, was the first director of the city’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention in the Mayor’s Office from 2006 to 2007, and served as program coordinator for Brother’s and Sister’s Keepers, Inc. He is currently the Oregon Youth Authority’s metro region youth reentry coordinator for several Portland-area counties, is an active member of First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and continues as a community organizer on this issue.

Rob Ingram, once director of the Office of Youth Violence Prevention, who died Sunday of a heart attack at age 38, said, “This is an all-out war. This isn’t a place for humming hymns and picking lilies.”

Canda hasn’t been picking lilies, but he did do some picketing. He thinks the key to keeping vulnerable kids out of gangs is to ask concerned adults—especially men—to simply show up. In 2009, after a rise in gang-related activities and gun violence, Canda put out a call by holding up a sign that read “Where are the Fathers?” for two weeks on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Killingsworth in NE Portland.

“That took guts,” said Ingram. “John did something really aggressive. People criticized him for that.”

Ingram, an African American believer who left behind a wife and five children, had been involved in driving out Portland’s gang violence since the early ’90s. He said the issue “will mold you, shape you, and shake you.”

Canda views the gang issue as an African American issue in the community, one rooted in the absence of men in children’s lives. In other words, it’s about men not showing up.

“About 90 percent of these young boys and girls have no dads. They did not have men around them to model or teach them behaviors,” Canda notes.

In April 2011, after another gang-related shooting near Lloyd Center, Canda organized a meeting for concerned community leaders. From that meeting emerged Connected.

“My original goal was to find 100 men to engage young people who are robbing and stealing. I was looking for people connected with their church bodies,” Canda explained, noting that they have 30 to 40 regular Connected members, including women. “The main goal is to take our faith that has been developed wherever we worship out into the community to have a presence that is more than physical.”

Canda’s Ministry of Place. Or presence.

Tom Peavey has worked for 31 years as a Portland police officer before becoming policy manager in the Office of Youth Violence Prevention. “The important questions we need to be asking, John’s been asking for a long time,” he said. “He’s been asking questions about the need for involvement and the repairing of lives caused by gangs. John’s been asking the faith-based communities and businesses and the public sphere.”

That message of involvement has resonated with members of Connected, as they’ve convened Fridays at 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. Peavey said that just their presence connecting with people has impacted the area.

“The mayor’s office, we love it, the businesses love it. The collaboration that John and others have helped foster between the faith community, the city police, and the schools is amazing.”

At a recent Gang Violence Task Force meeting led by Ingram, Canda’s insight was repeatedly sought after; I heard, “John, what do you think about that?” more than once. Alongside Portland Mayor Sam Adams, Canda spoke to local media this September after a major gang shooting that injured six men ages 13 to 16.

J. W. Matt Hennessee, pastor of Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church, where Canda grew up attending, heard Canda speak at the April gathering on gang violence.

“I saw the photos of the memorial service folders of the dead kids, and I heard John speak on how we men have to own the parks,” Hennessee said. “The message I heard was that African American men need to show up and let kids know we care.

“People talk about needing another program, but John said we need to go now, move,” said Hennessee.

Connected did move. That very Friday, members showed up at Holladay Park, and they have continued each week. They wear sweatshirts and T-shirts that say, “Connected we care” on one side, “Walk with us, talk with us” on the other. Connected is also talking to Portland Public Schools to offer presence at basketball games, where many vulnerable youth gather.

Gary Marschke, vice chair of the North/Northeast Business Association, said at a recent Connected gathering, “These people are here because of John. He has such a good reputation. By coming here, we are practicing a ministry of place. We’ve changed the community by being here, [by] our mere presence.”

“The way police have seen our presence, they allow us to try to disseminate the problem before they [the police] are needed,” noted Hennessee.

Canda recalls a life-saving turn through an interaction with a young woman at Holladay Park.

“There was a group of teenage young ladies who had obviously been drinking and were speaking provocatively with one another. I approached one and asked if I could talk to her,” Canda said. “I told her what we were doing, keeping people safe. I talked to her about respect, and that there were men in this area who might take advantage of her, and that I have daughters, that I am a father, and that she has to be really careful. She started to cry.

“Later, her group of friends was leaving and she tried to follow after them, and the MAX train was coming, and I was able to keep her from getting hit.”

That girl knew Canda cared. Sometimes just being there shows that.

Canda shows up: He presents on gang awareness at schools and churches, reaches out gang-related populations, and responds to crises involving gangs. He shows up when there is a gang shooting at 3 a.m. He shows up for memorial services of gang members lost—he has collected 200 to 300 brochures from funeral services he’s attended over the years. And with Connected, he hopes and prays to help avoid another one.

“Wherever a group of God-fearing believers goes, it turns into a ministry of place; we apply the principles of Christ in a particular area. This area for us is in Holladay Park on Friday nights,” Canda says.

He reflects back on his parents being around and the God-fearing Ms. Collins from his formative years.

“I wouldn’t have had the abilities to do what I do without that foundation of Ms. Collins. When you mention Ms. Collins to people in this community who are age 30 or older, they know instantly who that is … they remember her presence.”

Cornelia Seigneur Website