It doesn't look like a church, and it doesn't act like any church Torey Reynolds has known. But New Song Community Church, a three-story building at Gilmor and Presstman streets in West Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, is central to her life.
Ms. Reynolds, 35, worships there. She became a community health worker through EDEN Jobs, a New Song program. She is buying a home through New Song's Habitat for Humanity affiliate. Her children get enrichment at New Song's Learning Center. Next year, her oldest daughter will attend New Song Academy, the church's fledgling middle school.
Only three years ago, Torey Reynolds was a crack addict and welfare recipient.
"People have seen a change in me. I was a drug user. I didn't know what I was going to do from day to day.
"Now they can use me as a role model. I've become a homeowner, a Christian person and employed," she said.
Stories like that of Torey Reynolds and New Song are at the heart of "Christian community development," a movement founded by the Rev. John M. Perkins that espouses black and white Christians working together to mend America's poorest urban neighborhoods.
Mr. Perkins, 64, is chairman of the Christian Community Development Association, which begins a four-day conference sponsored by New Song today at the Convention Center. The veteran community activist and publisher of Urban Family magazine taught a breakfast Bible study class at the Sandtown church yesterday.
The son of sharecroppers, the self-taught evangelist was nearly beaten to death a generation ago by white police officers in his native Mississippi. In recent years, his Pasadena, Calif., home has been firebombed twice, apparently by black drug dealers.
But Mr. Perkins has resisted embitterment. He says the cure to what ails devastated American families today is "the establishment of community and making people responsible for each other. The highest calling of God is to love your neighbor as you love yourself."
The Rev. Mark Gornik, pastor of New Song, calls Mr. Perkins a "prophetic voice" and the model for his church's efforts in Sandtown.
Mr. Gornik and two other white suburbanites, Allan and Susan Tibbels (and their two daughters), were guided by Mr. Perkins' vision of community development when they moved to Sandtown in 1986 and spent years slowly gaining residents' trust as they built New Song.
Sandtown residents were deeply suspicious. They couldn't imagine why white outsiders would want to live in an inner-city neighborhood with more than its share of poverty, drug abuse and violence.
"I thought they were cops," Ms. Reynolds said.
The suburbanites were guided by Mr. Perkins' three R's of Christian community development:
* Relocation: You must live in a needy community before you can serve it.
* Reconciliation: Blacks and whites must "bear the burdens created by each other's pasts" -- whites' guilt, blacks' bitterness, and often deep-seated notions of superiority and inferiority. The heart of the Gospel, Mr. Perkins says, is to "reconcile people to God and to each other."
* Redistribution: Sharing values, resources and skills to help needy communities educate their children, create businesses and develop leaders.
In Sandtown, Mr. Gornik says, "We're about the business of working ourselves out of jobs and empowering the community. We're here to serve as long as the Lord wants us."
It is the process by which LaVerne S. Cooper, born and raised in Sandtown, has become co-executive director with Mr. Tibbels of Sandtown Habitat and by which Orlando Mobuary has become assistant construction manager.
"I didn't have to stand on a corner [selling drugs] to get what I've got," said Mr. Mobuary, 23, who is a Habitat homeowner. "That's what makes me proud of it. The only way to take control of this community is to stick in our hands to help. If we keep on looking back, we'll never move forward."
The Christian Community Development Association has grown since its founding in 1989 from 37 organizations to nearly 300.
Mr. Perkins says the movement is neither liberal nor conservative, but "styled on the life of Jesus, who had the greatest concern for the weakest of people" and united by the belief that, in the name of justice, God calls blacks and whites to work together to rebuild communities.
He despises the liberal idea of midnight basketball leagues, complaining that it aims to control black inner-city youth, not to develop them. He equally despises the conservative idea that building more prisons will reduce crime. He respects the entrepreneur who creates jobs, but distrusts an economic system that breeds both billionaires and poverty.
"Christians should be above liberals and conservatives, calling those to accountability," Mr. Perkins said.
Standing before a roomful of men, black and white, at New Song yesterday, the evangelist spoke of broken families and communities and lamented what he believes is the failure of most churches today to promote racial reconciliation.
"I'm not waiting until I get to heaven," he said. "I'm doing what I can do here on earth.
"What I've got to do in my life I have to do in time. I'll be judged by what I do in time."