For The Neighborhood.

All right. Well, if you guys are still grabbing coffee or water or drinks, or if you need restrooms down the hall, feel free to do that.

Just a few quick announcements before we dive in. If you are a student or know students that Chi Alpha will be starting up soon. We have some info at the welcome table as well. ChiAlphaMadison.com has all the info on that for Chi Alpha small groups. And then also we're going to have a Labor Day party happening on Labor Day from four to seven at Brittingham Park, just down the street. So bring something to share. We'll have some meat, grill out, hang out in the park. And then final announcement is that we have our team night for all of our contributors. Our church is made up of a ton of volunteers, and we call them contributors because we believe that you have value to add to this church and this campus and community.

And so if you are someone that contributes, make plans to be there at our team night. And if you would like to serve and get involved, whether it's worship team or greeting or our kids ministry, we would love to have you join the team. You can scan that QR code. Everything's on our website. We'd love to have you.

The vision and the neighborhood

All right. So we've not met yet. My name's Abbie. I'm the pastor here at New Culture, and I'm really excited today. There's going to be two empty seats here because I'm going to have some friends joining me in just a minute.

We're doing a little bit of a different setup. As I was thinking about prepping for this service, I was reminded how one of the ways that we have so many stories in Scripture in the Old Testament is because of stories that were passed down from generation to generation of what God was doing. We're going to tell some stories and get to hear about what God has been doing in the neighborhood of our church here and get inspired to see what does it look like for us to continue to create the culture of Christ, which is the vision of our church. The mission of our church is to create the culture of Christ.

We're excited today because about two years ago, I was starting this pastor's cohort here in Madison with other leaders in the city. We were at a season as a church where we were a new church plant. We had no space to meet, so we were meeting in homes. I was recording videos from my bedroom, having other people come record videos from my bedroom on a white wall, and we had no idea what the church was going to look like. But we really believed that God had given us this vision to be a church that would create the culture of Christ and be present in our community.

And so meanwhile, I met this man named Doug Hunt, and he had been serving right here in this neighborhood and this community alongside his wife Marianne for many years. And without knowing that our church was going to be here, I got to sit and I got to hear about what God was doing in this neighborhood. Months later, when we were looking all over the place to say okay, where are we going to call home, where are we going to have this church meet in person, the Lord opened the doors for this space. And it was just so clear how the Holy Spirit had gone before to make way for what God was going to do.

Right around that time, we had started this prayer campaign called Pray 297, which comes from Jeremiah 29:7, which says to pray for the peace and prosperity of the city or the land that you have been sent into exile. And we started to pray prophetically over the neighborhoods in our city and say, God, we want to see a Christ-centered community in every part of this city, every part of this neighborhood.

It's been incredible to see that before we even knew that this would be the neighborhood where God had placed us, God knew that he had people that were literally here before us that we would then come into friendship and relationship with. Doug and Marianne then joined our church family last year when we moved here to this space and have been incredible in leading us and guiding us to be good neighbors.

I wanted to share some highlights from our For the Neighborhood serve weekend that we had. If you were there yesterday, do you just want to raise your hand really quick if you're part of the serve projects. We also had a couple of Mondays ago we went down and we did a community meal. We had a lot of fun this past weekend serving our neighbors at Bayview and the Triangle community.

But we realize that we talk a lot about this neighborhood and a lot of people are like, what are you talking about. Bayview, the Triangle, what does that mean. Well today we're going to focus on talking about our neighborhood and how we feel God and the Spirit has inviting us to be good neighbors.

History of the Triangle neighborhood

I want to welcome Doug and Mary Ann Hunt. Thank you guys for joining me. We're so excited. Abbie shared a little bit of just how we met and truly just want to thank you guys and honor you for all the ways that you have gone before and invested in this community and then really pass that on to all of us and the heart that you carry. It's been so encouraging to see God open so many doors, even in these past few weeks and answer prayers of the Good Neighbor Gathering of this weekend.

We had several people, neighbors in the community, dropping off donations this afternoon. Doug sat there in his metal chair collecting donations, and it's been amazing. I just want to start by asking you to tell us a little bit of the history behind the Triangle neighborhood and how you came to be involved with it.

Thanks so much, Abbie. It's so good to see everyone. Good to see some new faces, people we remember from last school year. So great to be here with you. How did we get involved. Well, we've been worshiping in this part of the city for many years. We live actually on the west side, but we just felt called to this area, this very unique intersection of the city where the campus meets the neighborhoods like Greenbush, Vilas, and also this very unique neighborhood called the Triangle. We're going to talk a little bit about that today.

So the Triangle. This is the outline of the Triangle. Regent Street, West Washington Avenue, and South Park Street. This is what the area looked like probably around 1930 to 1940 when this part of Madison was first settled.

Before I get into a bit about the history of the Triangle, I think what Abbie and I learned during our time with this missional cohort is that it's really important for us to understand where we're at, where God has placed us as a worshiping community. We want to be relevant to the neighborhood. We want to also see what God's doing here. What's he up to in this place. And part of understanding that is understanding its history.

This land that we're on currently, like much of this part of Madison, was settled first by the Ho-Chunk people, the indigenous tribes of this area. And they would have been here generations before the first settlers. When the settlers came, much of that group was relocated to Nebraska. And over time, Madison, the city of Madison, including the Triangle, this area, was settled by mostly immigrants. The reason that immigrants were attracted to this part of the city was that it was the cheapest place to live.

And why was it the cheapest place to live. It was because it had the worst infrastructure. So this part of the city, and the Triangle in particular, was really known as a very rough area. It had a high percentage of immigrants. It was actually called Hell's Half Acre. That's how bad it was.

As we enter into this awareness of who we are as a church and where we're at in the city, it's important to remember what has happened before us. I think to some degree the land really cries out for the injustices that were perpetrated. As we usher in God's kingdom, it's important to remember that history.

And part of that history is an unfortunate thing called redlining. Has any of you ever heard of that phrase. Redlining is back in the 1930s and 1940s, after the Depression, the mortgage lending took on this very prejudicial view of people of color. They would actually draw red lines in the areas of the cities where they would not lend based on the composition of the population who lived there. You can see in this, probably a little hard to make out, that red triangle just to the left side of the screen surrounded by yellow. All the desirable areas to make loans and have people borrow money to improve their properties were in yellow, green, and blue. The red zones were redlined, and that's not where people were able to get loans.

So all of those immigrants, those people of color, were unable to get the financing that they would need to upgrade their housing. This led to a lot of disparity over time.

So what happened was in the 1970s, so about 50 years ago, the city leaders thought this part of town is really like, it can't be fixed. It can't be recovered. So they leveled it. Over 230 residential structures were demolished and 1,100 residents of the Triangle were forced to relocate. What they built in its place is what we still see today at the Triangle. It's a community of public housing. You can see the names of the public housing buildings: Gay Braxton, Brittingham, Caribous, and Parkside. And then to the north, in the upper right hand corner is the community of Bayview. And that's where we were serving yesterday.

So what do we have there today. Today the areas that are in our public housing, there are over 380 units that are owned by the city of Madison. And incredibly, a high percentage have disabilities. Over 80% of the residents of those public housing areas have either mental health challenges, physical disabilities, or developmental disabilities. Perhaps the reason why that developed is because most of those units are one bedrooms, and most of those people happen to be single. So over time, there's this very heavy concentration of people with disabilities.

A couple weeks ago we served in Monday Night Meals, which is a meal sponsored over in that housing development, and we got to meet some of those folks. One of the biggest issues in that area is isolation. These people typically don't have very supportive family structures, and they're living alone, and it can lead to a lot of despair.

Bayview is very diverse, very different kind of history. Over close to 300 people, 115 of those are kids from Hmong background, a high Latino and African American mix in that community. It's undergoing a major redevelopment. If you've noticed, there's a really big, beautiful orange apartment building on the corner of Regent and West Wash. That's their new housing development, and we'll be preparing some welcome baskets to help welcome those residents as they move in.

The Bayview is a private foundation-run part of the community, whereas the other is public. Though what I've shared is only part of the story, and I think I want to be sure that I highlight that these people who live there, their identity is not as victims. They also, of course, have dignity. They are worthy of respect. They desire places to contribute. They desire to build relationships. They have a lot to offer.

But because of the history and the nature of the community, often they've been overlooked and neglected. So as a church we're so close, we have the opportunity to speak into that.

Why this matters

One of the reasons why we sit through a history lesson on this neighborhood on a Sunday is realizing that every single person that is in that community right next door to us is someone created in the image of God that we want to love well as their neighbors. For us to learn this is so crucial in our journey of making disciples and being like Jesus and loving well.

The next question is what God has been teaching you during this season of serving in the neighborhood.

Mary Ann's story of faith

Okay. 2017, Doug and I had finished volunteering in a marriage ministry program, and I was saying, okay, Lord, what's next. What do you want me to do. And I had this desire to grow in my faith and to not rest on past experiences of faith. I really wanted to grow fresh. I wanted a fresh experience of God meeting me where I was.

And so a friend of mine introduced me to a few ladies that were leading an art class over at the Triangle. And they wanted to know whether I'd be willing to volunteer with them. As I thought about it, I was like, oh my gosh, this is really a cool opportunity because I love art, and my educational background was occupational therapy, which comes alongside people, meets them where they're at, and helps them to go forward. I didn't want to look at this community as what they could not do, but what they could do. That got me really excited.

And so I started volunteering, and lo and behold, a month after I started, the head staff person that had a vision for this outreach resigned. So then I was like, oh, no. They had one volunteer. Her name was Chris. And Chris and I looked at each other and we said, okay, let's pick this up and run with it. So we met every week. Between the lesson plans and the teaching and the organizing of supplies and people, we had our hands full.

And not only that, we found out, like on the spot, that one of the residents had written a proposal for a five thousand dollar grant for the art program, and it was accepted. I just thought what a great opportunity and what a huge burden because I had never navigated the meeting all the standards for a grant and the expectations that was being put upon the community. And one of the expectations was that the community needed to have a community project.

I was like, how are we going to do this. We don't even have enough volunteers to help us each week for the art program.

I knew God had invited me into this. There's a truth. There's a principle that he was teaching me at the time, and that was when God calls, God provides. During this time of service, I had started a Bible study called Believing God by Beth Moore. If anybody wants a really good, meaty Bible study, go and look for Beth Moore. Now was the time for me to believe God and God's provision. And that's what I clung to.

I saw God's provision and his hand to co-volunteer with Chris. We prayed together, we planned together, and we made the challenge of leading the class more manageable together. God provided the volunteers from our church at the time. And Doug also offered a book study with residents to explore how to develop community together. The church also helped out with Monday Night Meals, and with chapel services with Chaplain Bob, because they have a chaplain at the Triangle. In every instance, God provided.

We decided to use the Monday Night mealtime to make the community project. So everybody had a hand in it and got excited about it. Residents each made a personalized square from the quilt, put their name on it. And the night that we did it, it was so cool because there was such excitement in the air. Working together, they were all working together, and I hadn't seen anything like that in the time that I had been there. I could see how the grant had strengthened the community and given purpose to the residents as a whole.

This came together in late 2019. Toward the end of 2019, my co-leader, Chris, needed to stop volunteering, and she needed to be available to our family full time. So she passed the baton to me to continue leading the program. But little did I know what was coming in 2020. Nobody knew what was coming in 2020. All gatherings at the Triangle, including the art classes and Monday Night Meals, stopped immediately.

But then we saw the need for sewing cloth face masks. So even though things came to a halt in the area I thought I was supposed to be serving in, there's always more to be done. We organized friends from church and some of the neighbors in this district. Many masks, well over 300, were made. That met the need for the face masks, because nobody had them.

We had one man. He had taken a coffee filter with paper clips and rigged a mask for himself. And when we came to his door and said would you like a mask, he was like, thank you, thank you so much, because he just didn't have the means. First of all, he couldn't get out, and he couldn't buy one. He just didn't really have the extra money.

What we thought might be a short-term suspension of the class turned into months and months, and it was clear that the members of the art club were struggling with the abruptness of ending the class and the increased isolation that came with COVID precautions. How could we still do the class. I thought the Community Development Authority, who owns the public housing, was very strict on anybody coming into the building. So how could I do a class if I can't go in the building.

So I decided to hold it out on the patio. I brought my own tables, I had to bring my own water, and there was no access to bathrooms. But we did the class. We did it outside and we made it work. We also had to pack up all of the materials into individual bags so that we wouldn't spread germs. It was a challenge, but we just made it work.

By November it was too cold to continue the class outside. But I was desperate to find ways to continue connecting with the participants. I knew that very few had positive support systems, and they had very little to do each day. So art was really a lifeline for them.

Right on time, God gave me an idea, which I called Art Club in a Bag. I put together small bags of supplies to make craft projects, and they could do that in their own apartments to take up some of their time, and they really liked it.

Through all of this, I say that God's purpose was to build faith in me. He showed me that in spite of all the obstacles, he would be faithful to provide. If I'm going to be faithful to say yes, then he's going to be faithful to provide. Towards the end of the summer of 2021, we received permission to open up the art club gatherings again. But despite our many efforts, the program could not be sustained. It became clear that the season for the art class had come to an end. That was hard to let go. But I could clearly see that's what I had to do.

We responded to the express needs of the community and the open avenues to serve for the period of time that was given to us.

The principles I got through this Bible study were things God was trying to grow my faith, and I think he knew I couldn't do that on my own. So these principles were there. We were challenged to read those principles and then every week find ways to apply them. When God calls, God provides. God's promise, and God's promise comes with a purpose, which is to help us remember that I am who God says I am. So really focusing on my identity in Christ. I can do all things through Christ who gives strength to me. God's word is alive and active in me.

Those were the principles that got me through this. It's pretty cool to see that when you genuinely ask God to grow you or to have an encounter with him, he will do that.

I love, Mary Ann, just with your stories too, of seeing how God is so intentional with the gifts and the skills that he has given us, whether it is your background in occupational therapy and those principles you've applied, or it is even those passions and those hobbies of art and your creativity that he's gifted you with. I hope that's an encouragement for all of us to always think, God, how do you want to use these things. It's not by mistake that we have the passions that we have. It's not by mistake that we have the skills that we have or the desires that God has put in our heart. So how can we listen and say, God, what are you doing with this. And how can we use that. What's in our hands.

Why it's important to be good neighbors

Why is it important for us to do all this, to be good neighbors. There are many reasons why, but I'm going to focus on this passage of scripture, Matthew 22, verses 34 through 40.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question. Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law. And Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.

Matthew 22:34-40

Clearly the mandate that we have as believers and as the body of Christ is to love our neighbors well. I'll just briefly say two things about that. During some time to read and reflect, there's one author who describes loving as intentional presence, authentic presence with people. He describes it in two ways. When we are with and within the community.

That means being with the people who live around us. Now that includes the Triangle. For some of you, it may mean the students you're going to encounter on campus. Others, it's the professionals you work with at your jobs. And for some of us, it might be encountering others in the neighborhood of the Triangle and helping them deal with some of the challenges they face, like isolation and low income, limited resources, and these disabilities that create challenges.

And then the second thing that this author talked about was being in and with others in the community. That means we get, we have the privilege of collaborating and being united with other bodies of believers to do good and seek the flourishing of our neighborhood. An example of that was yesterday. We had 17 people at the Bayview Project. There were 12 from New Culture, five from another church called Geneva Campus Church. That's an example and a witness to the staff at Bayview and the residents there, that believers can come together.