You wouldn't see it because there is no towering steeple nor cavernous sanctuary, and yet this place is a sanctuary for the people who live in this part of town (both rich and poor), and for people like me who come to learn what is possible.
Interspersed through this neighborhood are ministries -- Columbia Road Health Services, Samaritan Inns, Christ House, Sitar Arts Center, Jubilee Jobs, Jubilee Housing and many more. These ministries were started by and are supported today by members of The Church of the Savior, a loose affiliation of eight churches that organizes itself in a system that is backwards from how churches usually function.
The churches I have known have dominant buildings, large memberships, and a small core of workers who get things done. Congregations of The Church of the Savior never number more than 50 members. One new congregation has only four, and yet the participants in that church number into the dozens. They have strict rules regarding racial diversity and struggle to preserve them. When you walk into a church service here you see the colors of a rainbow and class diversity that brings people from the streets and the penthouses together.
Founded in 1947, The Church of the Savior has grown under the leadership of Mary and Gordon Cosby. Members make a commitment to their inward journey, their community and their vocation. That means time committed daily to prayer and meditation, to a chosen community and to a life of compassion. The latter is where these incredible ministries are born. A church member is asked to hear God's call in her life, and to discern how to live that out. Over and over we hear stories of how a member saw a need or an opportunity and marshaled forces and resources to respond.
Yesterday we met Dr. Janelle Getches. I'd only known her from the video about this place, in which she tells the story of the devastation she felt when one of the homeless men she'd been treating died on the street from exposure. She found an empty building, recruited her community to pray for resources, and quite soon, by most standards, Christ House was born ... an inpatient facility for the homeless sick. The story of how they came by the funding is a miracle, but miracles become a little less surprising in this place.
And so this neighborhood is dotted with these ministries. Now that gentrification has moved in to Adams Morgan, these programs are holdouts that keep the poor from being forced out, and they invite the wealthy new neighbors to embrace the real wealth of the neighborhood.
The Church of the Savior recognized the poverty of the wealthy as well as the poverty of the poor. They minister to those who are anxious and isolated by their wealth, and they help us recognize that we are all addicted to something, be it to anxiety or busy-ness or to earning and acquiring. In these small churches rich and poor come together around visions of a better way of being in the world ... a way that is connected to God and to community, a way that enables what is true inside each of us to emerge. Founder Gordon Cosby, now 92, shows up most days, and is still discerning his own call. He joins other church members who meet in small circles to share their struggles and joys.
My job brings me here each year, but this has become a personal journey as I learn from these people who turned their vision into a reality that unites races and classes here on the streets of Washington, D.C. This is a pilgrimage into possibility -- of what waits back home in North Carolina.
Susan Gladin is a United Methodist minister and executive director of the Johnson Intern Program in Chapel Hill. She lives with her husband on a farm in Hillsborough, and their two grown daughters live nearby in Durham. Contact her at sglad1210@aol.com or c/o The Chapel Hill Herald, 2828 Pickett Road, Durham, NC 27705.
