Archive: Patchwork Central

By Michael Sigler

Patchwork Central is not a craft store or a coffee shop, as its name might suggest. It is a Christian community, located in an inner-city neighborhood of Evansville, Indiana, which has developed a “patchwork” of ministries to and with the poor of that area.

Three United Methodist couples and their four children began Patchwork seven years ago. John and Ruth Doyle were already living in Evansville, where John pastored a UM church. Their longtime friends Phil and Elaine Amerson were educators in Atlanta, Georgia. Also living in Atlanta were Calvin and Nelia Kimbrough, both ordained UM ministers, who became the third family involved in starting the community.

John and Phil had talked and dreamed, while they were students at Asbury College during the ’60s, of forming something like Patchwork Central. But before the dream could materialize they went their separate ways, and gained experience and training that one day would be of value to the Patchwork ministry. For example, Phil earned a Ph.D. and taught at two Christian institutions (Westmont College’s Urban Program and Candler School of Theology).

In 1979 the three families moved into houses within a block of each other in the Evansville neighborhood. They found jobs. (Still today only one person, an office worker, receives a salary from Patchwork Central). They had come, as Phil explained, “to live near each other and act out our faith together and in the larger community.”

Patchwork Central was born. The remarkable thing about it is that, unlike many other such experiments that grew out of the ’60s era, this community has survived and is moving forward in the ’80s.

If you were to visit Patchwork on a Sunday evening you would find a group of 30-40 adults and children meeting together for worship, celebrating the Lord’s Supper, and then sharing a meal together. But a Sunday visit would provide an incomplete picture of what the community is about. Its members share a commitment to social justice, a concern they express through day-to-day involvement with the people of the inner city and their needs.

So, for example, when Evansville decided to close the neighborhood’s elementary school, Patchwork members helped organize parents and friends to keep the school open. It was, and still is, the city’s only elementary school that is naturally integrated (without busing).

When Patchwork members discovered that most of the city’s federal community-development funds were being used in emerging middle-class neighborhoods instead of in the poorest parts of town, Patchwork developed a monitoring program. Its goal is to insure that federal block grants benefit the city’s disadvantaged.

In response to the growing number of inner-city children who were walking the streets unattended, Patchwork started an After School Children’s Program. It provides supervision, activities, and tutoring.

Though the Patchwork community is small in number it seems to attract gifted people. Not only are many talented professionals in Patchwork-Ph.Ds., professors, scientists, people in public service-it also receives support from other church and civic groups as well as from individuals. The United Methodist Church, for one, has contributed grants and special offerings. Drawing on these resources, Patchwork Central has developed an impressive list of ministries and programs, including:

• The Back Alley Bakery – a business which provides jobs for neighborhood people who would otherwise be without work.
• The Neighborhood Economic Development Center – helps inner-city people obtain loans and grants to start businesses in the neighborhood.
• The Personal Counseling Program – directed by one of Patchwork’s founding members, John Doyle.
• A Health Improvement Program for inner-city residents – provides checkups, dental care, and nutritional education.
• The Food Pantry – cooperates with the local Volunteer Action Council, the Council of Churches, and others to help feed over 500 people each month.
• Garden Plots – helps inner-city people, especially the elderly, develop backyard gardens for a supply of fresh vegetables.

Patchwork Central is about programs to help needy people, but it is also about a diverse group of individuals who make up the Patchwork community. Some, like the Amersons, the Doyles, and the Kimbroughs, have been with the group since its beginning. Others stay for a while, contributing their time, gifts, and talents, then move on.

Ed and Marion Ouellette, the oldest members of the community, have been with Patchwork since 1979. Ed is a retired minister of the United Church of Christ. “Having spent 40 years in a name-brand church,” he says, “I have seen how it can become so preoccupied with itself-with buildings and organization and committees—that its real mission gets the short end of the expenditure of time and money.

“Jesus talked about His job description that day in Nazareth when he said, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord’ (Luke 4:18). I think what we saw in this group of people was an awareness of Jesus’ own job description, of why He came into the world. ”

Being involved with the younger members of Patchwork Central, Ed explains, “gives me a feeling of having a handle. on the future—and it is good. ”

Paula Swank, 32, teaches high-school journalism in Evansville. A United Methodist, she and her son, Sean, have been members of the Patchwork community for two-and-a-half years. They live in the inner-city neighborhood where approximately half of Patchwork’s members make their homes. Paula has served as Food Pantry coordinator, helped with the Back Alley Bakery, organized a voter registration drive, as well as working with other Patchwork programs.

She says two factors drew her to the group. “One was a sense of community—people who cared about one another, ate together, were friends together, were a support group, and related to each other warmly and closely. The other factor was that I had a need to do more in my life than get up every morning and go to work, come home, fix supper, and go to bed. … I began to read the New Testament and take to heart that there was work to be done and people to be served. ”

Both Ed and Paula speak of Biblical roots, and yet the community is somewhat of a patchwork, theologically. Members include Baptists, Quakers, and Mennonites, as well as United Methodists; theological liberals as well as the more evangelical types.

“There are folks here,” explains Paula, “who don’t know much about how it [Patchwork Central] got started. But the people who began Patchwork were certainly rooted in a Biblical tradition. If I have learned anything from Patchwork it has been to root my social action in the Biblical tradition. But this is new for me. I didn’t grow up in that tradition. … I’m still learning about it, and it is one of the reasons I’m in Patchwork.

“I could do social justice work a lot of places in Evansville. But I could not do what I’m doing with a Biblical and Christian rooting in very many place.”

The work goes on, and so does the community life of the group called Patchwork Central. Presently, much of the group’s energies are directed toward rebuilding “the Meetinghouse,” a former Jewish synagogue which Patchwork had used for several years for worship and office space. Fire gutted the building in December ’83. The loss hurt Patchwork-some of it ministries had to be cut back.

Yet, somehow the struggle to adjust and keep going seems to typify the durability and commitment of this group. The average lifespan of such communities is only about one year, yet the Patchwork people have survived there in the poor part of Evansville for nearly eight years.

Some time ago founding member Phil Amerson, reporting to Patchwork Central’s board of directors, spoke of the struggles and joys of the Patchwork ministry. He used as a metaphor the account of his grandmother’s “double messages”: “Watching family members devour her goodies in gluttonous delight was for her a joy,” and yet she always told her grandson, “Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach!”

“I guess it is because of Grandma,” said Amerson, “that I recognize double messages in my life and work today. … I grew up hearing about the richness of the Gospel and how the Christian call is that we give ourselves for others. I heard that those of us in the Church are to give (yes, even to sacrifice) so that we can share with the poor and the weak and the oppressed. I heard that Jesus’ message … to the least of these … is to be our message.

“And then today as I reach for a plateful of my opportunity as a disciple of Jesus, voices are heard which seem to contradict all those sermons over all those years. They say: ‘You expect too much.’ ‘It is not the ’60s any longer.’ ‘The denomination will not make such a commitment to urban settings.’ ‘Why do you keep working in a place like that?’ ‘For your own future and for your family’s sake get out while you can.’ ‘We have other priorities.’ And so they surge over me, these double messages. … And often I quietly sob as I see my sisters and brothers spend more on pew cushions or toilet paper for their congregations than on food or jobs for the poor.

“Amid all this, for many years I have had the joy of watching special people give magnificent gifts shaped in their scarcity. I have watched people who live at subsistence levels so that Patchwork and similar ministries across the country could operate food pantries, provide crises housing, create job opportunities, work with poor children, and on and on. They have given themselves in fashioning a great banquet of ministries.

“Oh yes, they get tired. And yes, these people hear the double messages perhaps more loudly than most. For they hear voices which suggest that they are not doing enough, or not doing it in the right way. And they also hear the voices saying, ‘The price is too great. …’ Yet they work on, and there is joy … exquisite joy.”