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Going Home Again for Inspire 2017

July 26, 2017

Next week, I’ll be heading home to Detroit to attend and help write CRC News stories on Inspire 2017.

Likely, a few of the almost 800 people traveling in from across North America for this binational gathering of ministry leaders and volunteers have been to Detroit before. Some may even have lived or been born there.

Even so, I want to tell Inspire participants a little bit about the city in which I lived for nearly 30 years.

While the main focus of Inspire will be gathering together to worship and to get a sense of where the Holy Spirit is leading the CRC and its members, the city of Detroit will provide a great backdrop.

I grew up in a gritty suburb on the edge of Detroit, but it was really the Motor City that defined me, just as it defined the whole area.

In its heyday, Detroit was a bustling industrial giant. Businesses and factories employed thousands. Great music was produced. And people flocked to the city for its hotels, restaurants, theaters, and parks.

In recent decades, however, social and economic forces tore the community apart. Detroit was battered, scarred and nearly turned into a ghost town with block after block and mile after mile of empty, gutted homes and businesses.

I’ve lived in West Michigan for the last 35 years. From afar, I have deeply grieved seeing my city broken by violence, drug addiction, political turmoil and an economy in which the auto industry that once powered Detroit was knocked to the mat.

Despite these challenges, I know those who come to Inspire will have a chance to see and experience God there, because I know that the Lord never left Detroit.

All along, people of faith have been deeply committed to helping Detroit remain a thriving, welcoming, and vital community. I know they, with many others, have helped turn Detroit around, rebuilding downtown, bringing jobs back, and working to restore neighborhoods. In fact, I know that having faith, a belief in the not yet seen, has never left Detroit.

I’ve had a few personal experiences that remind me of how important faith is to a community like Detroit.

For instance, years ago I marched down Woodward Ave. with hundreds of others to raise money to fight hunger.  The walk was led by Father Bill Cunningham, a priest who founded Focus: Hope in the years after what is being called these days the 1967 Detroit Rebellion.

Also years ago, I worked in a hotdog restaurant in downtown Detroit. In the early hours after the restaurant closed, my boss and I would drive around the city and talk endlessly about God and his Christian Science faith. As we drove, it felt like God rode along with us.

A good friend’s father was in the Salvation Army and established a large ministry for alcoholics living in the inner-city Cass Corridor back in the ‘60s.

More recently, for my job with the Christian Reformed Church, I’ve visited a CRC pastor who worked with Muslims living in Detroit and nearby Dearborn. I’ve also spoken with a Catholic cardinal who told me that, despite its problems, Detroit was still a town where God’s peace was at work in his people.

As I go back next week, I’m looking forward to seeing how Detroit is being transformed by people of faith and others who love this city.

In fact, I’m especially looking forward to hearing Harvey Carey,  the founder and senior pastor of the Citadel of Faith Covenant Church in Detroit, speak at one of the sessions at Inspire.

Carey’s church is located on the west side of Detroit in one of the lowest-income ZIP codes in the U.S. Every Sunday it draws people from a range of races, ethnic groups, and backgrounds as they meet for worship in a refurbished Catholic church.

In Detroit, Carey has partnered with several community organizations and nonprofits providing housing, social services and ministry to youth and children.

I hope to hear him talk about his church, his faith and how it has been the foundation from which he has worked in helping to transform Detroit.

As I get ready to go to Inspire, I keep thinking of those ways in which I encountered God in Detroit — first, in the Catholic church where my family attended Mass, and then especially at Sacred Heart Seminary, a high school preparing young men to be priests.

I wasn’t in the Catholic seminary very long before I realized the celibate life of a priest wasn’t for me — and now I’ve been happily married for many years and serve as a commissioned pastor at a Grand Rapids church.

But what I recall was the one day, in my first year at the seminary, when the school set aside time for a silent retreat. We attended services, but for the most part were left to wander the grounds to get in touch with God.

One morning, I stopped walking and sat on a step of one of the buildings. I read for awhile and then looked up and saw sunlight falling on the grass in a nearby courtyard.

Somehow that light caught my attention, seeming to carry a soft sense of grace — a sense that God was alive and with me and that everything was going to be OK in my first year of high school.

For a brief time, I felt that light start to fill me with a kind of warm comfort. I heard no words, nor saw any vision. But, even at that young age, I was sure God was at work, his presence fully alive in that place.

Returning home next week for Inspire, I’m pretty sure that same presence will be there, in the presentations, in the break-out sessions, in a prayer walk on Friday morning along the Detroit River Walk, where we’ll easily see the city of Windsor, Ontario. We’ll glimpse Canada, where many members of our denomination live and from which some will come to Inspire.

I’m betting, for those of us who pay attention, that same sense of God being at work — in the worship, in meeting with others, in the events — will be present to remind us that, despite all of our challenges and hardships, things truly will be fine. God has got us in hand.

The Lord will be in Detroit next week to welcome us, to refresh us, to fill us, and to bless us. We only need to be open to the sunlight falling — even through the clouds — and the grace that will be there for us to experience and to share.