by Chico Fajardo-Heflin, who along with his wife Tatiana, is a member of Reba Place Fellowship and lives in Ford Heights, Illinois, known as the poorest suburb in the United States.
They will be leading a workshop, “An Alliance of Front Stoops,” at the Revolutionary Peacemaking retreat
It’s hard to stay serious as a teacher when your student is just so stinkin’ cute. I’m trying to teach five year-old Jordan how to spell M-O-M and D-A-D and C-A-T with brightly-colored, palm-sized foam letters, but this little dude in his miniature gray and navy sweatsuit keeps popping out of his purple plastic chair and crashing full-speed into my leg with a hug. He tilts his head back, body still fastened around me like a velcro plush toy and asks in a voice buzzing with happy, “Is class over yet?” His big, brown, almond-shaped eyes are shining.
The truth is, though, while Tatiana and I absolutely loved introducing Jordan to the magnificent, wide world of letters and numbers, we’d be looking forward to 3 o’clock, too. That’s when class ended and we got to introduce Jordan to the magnificent, wide world that is Ford Heights.
When Christians Up Top—that strange, rare world of violin recitals, summer vacations, and online baby registries—think about communities Down Below—communities like Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; and Ford Heights, Illinois—they shudder.
And despite the protests of some justice-minded folks who like to pretend that all poor Black people are simply virtuous, hard-working citizens “just trying to put food on their plates,” these nightmarish scenes conjured up by folks Up Top aren’t inaccurate. They just fail to tell the full story.
Every day that Tatiana and I ventured out the front door with Jordan, there was some beautiful, unexpected adventure to be had.
We climbed into treehouses and had bonfires in backyards. We’d walk to the horse farm on the edge of town and stop and chat with Ms. Kym in the projects on the way back. We rode bikes, we picked berries, we had dinner with neighbors nearly every night. Caylynn was there, Caleb was there, Terrionna, Tyonna, and Tyrell, too. And many evenings the food we ate came from our neighbors’ hands: boxes of angel-hair spaghetti, packages of spicy sausage, a whole chicken. Sometimes they’d hand this manna to us as we walked past their crumbling houses, other times they’d leave it in a brown paper bag on the concrete slab in front of our house—a surprise gift when we opened the door.
Welcome to the Alliance of Front Stoops.
Soup kitchens. Job-training programs. Non-profits. This is the only way Christians from Up Top can conceive of engaging with those Down Below, by starting institutions that divide the messy human family into two neat, but artificial categories: those who need help and those who do the helping. This is why when folks from Up Top hear about life in Ford Heights—hanging out with neighbors on the block, laughing around the supper table, homeschooling our godson—they force the round-shaped rhythms of our life into the only square-shaped category they can imagine: this is Tatiana and Chico’s ministry.
What nonsense.
Though it is true that my neighbors struggle to pay bills, wrestle with addiction, and sometimes betray one another for the last box of cereal, they also care for one another in ways that send me rushing back into the mysterious pages of the Bible.
I’ve watched neighbors connect a string of industrial-length extension cords from one house to another to keep the lights on for a family when their electricity was cut.
I’ve watched families barely getting by welcome homeless mothers sleeping in vans into their already overcrowded homes.
This informal, circulatory network of mutual love and care Down Below—what Tatiana and I have started referring to as the “Alliance of Front Stoops”—has solved a scriptural riddle I’ve been pondering for years.
“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” (Matt. 25:31-46).
When Up Top Christians are inspired by Matthew 25 to feed and welcome those Down Below, they do so self-consciously, almost conspicuously. They found slick organizations that designate themselves as Helper and the other as Helped. That is, they go about Matthew 25 with the knowledge that they are feeding and welcoming Jesus. But the people Jesus commended in the story give themselves to others without this knowledge (“Lord, when did we see you…?”). They feed and clothe and visit and tend and welcome the outcast intuitively, naturally. If is not their “mission” or “calling,” but simply an uneventful part of their everyday lives. Their left hands have no idea what their right hands are doing.
“Who are these extraordinary people?” I’ve always wondered. These people without mission statements, board meetings, and formal titles artificially divvying up the messy human family into givers and receivers? Who feeds Jesus not because it’s their ministry but because it’s their family? Who opens their homes, visits the jails, and makes up a bed on their couch not because they were compelled by a sermon, but because they’ve never known any other way of life?
“We visit Slim in jail all the time,” Jordan yawns sleepily, cozy under his covers as we finished reading Matthew 25 to him from the children’s Bible on his nightstand. This passage is a typical Tuesday afternoon for him.
Though most of my neighbors have accepted Jesus into their hearts, very few have ever heard of Matthew 25. Though most of my neighbors have but a few loaves and fish, they break their small baskets for one another and multitudes are fed.
There is nothing that we “do” in Ford Heights that our neighbors don’t all do daily with one another. Our life is not a ministry, we’re simply one more ordinary household in this extraordinary Alliance of Front Stoops.