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Hanging New Ornaments
A small gray church sits on a corner lot on Brown Street in my hometown. This small church is a sturdy building of gray bricks, black-paned windows, and two small entrance doors. It sits surrounded by deep luscious green grass, a place where we played many touch-tag games and ran marathons as children. To the east of the church once lay a gravel parking lot where families would get out of cars three to four times a week to participate in worship services and many kinds of rehearsals. As a child, I would often stand on the porch of the church and look out into the neighborhood. Town residents called this neighborhood the “east side,” which was the code phrase for the black community in Springfield, Illinois. But not just any black community: the ghetto. This phrase evoked the side of town that was rough, uncultured, and poor. It was a place middle-class people avoided if they could, an area of town where few white people congregated or fellowshiped. But this was our home, our spiritual mecca, the place where we came to experience a different kind of wealth, the wealth of love and joy cultivated within the deep bonds of community. We were joyful and lived inside of this joy. Our little gray church was where God was found and where we found God in each other. This modest building reflected the people that it held. We were a congregation of sixty to one hundred people who en9
