Reclaiming a Pool Hall to Renew a Neighborhood

Beautiful story about what God is doing in Chicago. I love this guy and what he is doing. Truly inspirational. 

HT: By Faith

In a smoky pool hall in an undisclosed urban ghetto, Tom Cruise, playing a young billiards protégé in director Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film “The Color of Money,” bends over his cue and shoots impeccably, not only winning the admiration of his challengers but provoking their jealousy. Almost 20 years later, a young pastor takes a hammer to the walls of that same pool hall; blood, sweat, and prayers now at work transforming the once notorious pool hall at the corner of 64th and Cottage streets into a common ground — a haven for the downtrodden, the once-forgotten street kid, and the weary intellectual.

When Brad Beier Came to Town

On Sunday morning, July 15, 2012, the windows are flung open to let some breeze into a muggy library room at the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall. Ivy creeps along the building’s exterior and sneaks through the windows, as a roomful of congregants cluster for prayer during a church meeting. A group of young people — two African-American men, an African-American woman, and a Caucasian man — share prayer requests. One, an incoming chemistry graduate student, asks for prayer for her studies. Twenty-year-old Pierre Carr, wearing braids down his neck, tells the others he is going to school in the fall to become a chef, a future he couldn’t have imagined five years prior.

Growing up without a father in Woodlawn, one of South Side Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods, Carr didn’t have a lot of direction. His mother feared that her adolescent son was destined for a life of gang activity, jail, even premature death — paths that many of his friends would take in years to come.

Beginning in the 1950s, Woodlawn — like many urban American neighborhoods at the time — began to decline economically as the white middle class fled to the suburbs. With them went many businesses, although through the 1960s, Woodlawn’s 63rd Street was known for its jazz clubs, many just down the road from a certain well-frequented pool establishment. The deterioration continued through the ’70s,’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, with the average household income hovering at just over $23,000.

In 2003 Brad Beier, a skinny, young, white pastor from Louisiana, showed up in Woodlawn with a basketball and words that offered hope to a few floundering teenage boys.

“At first, I thought he was a cop,” admits Tee Nimely, one of Carr’s close friends. But something about Beier eventually secured the boys’ trust. Maybe it was because he called them throughout the week to see how they were doing. Or because he didn’t give up on them. Or because he was the father figure they didn’t know they needed.

Louisiana-born Beier attended Louisiana Tech with the intention of becoming a doctor. But early in his college experience, he began serving as a youth minister at his college church, and by the time he graduated he was headed to Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, Miss.) to prepare to go abroad as a missionary. His wife, Shannon, on the other hand, had a passion for working with the poor a bit closer to home.

“We put our heads together,” Brad recalled, “and eventually God gave us this unified desire to stay in a city in America and [to] make sure we were in a very big city where there was lots of diversity and lots of opportunities to reach unreached people.”

After an apprenticeship with an urban church in Baltimore, the Beiers moved to Bethel Christian Church (PCA), a multiethnic church in Chicago, with the mandate to plant a church among students at nearby University of Chicago. Not the type to plant a church by the book, Beier also began working part time as the chaplain at a county jail and facilitating an aftercare ministry to men being released from prison. While developing relationships with undergraduate and Ph.D. students in Hyde Park, Brad was also getting to know the families of the men he had met in county jail; many lived in Woodlawn, just five blocks south of the university.

In the world of academia, he found skeptics, atheists, and some genuine believers. Some of each began trickling into the Sunday morning worship at the new church — dubbed Living Hope Church — that met in a university library room. In the culture of gangs and poverty, he met fatherless children, confused young men, and single moms just trying to make it. Some of them came, too.

Crossing 61st Street

It took Carr and Nimely a year or two before they came to church, but in the meantime they were hearing the gospel as part of a basketball ministry — a team that Beier had put together as a way to meet youth in the neighborhood. Here was a white guy from a privileged background who willingly moved his wife and four young daughters to a majority African-American area that most middle-class folks had fled long ago.

“In my life, he’s an example of what a man looks like — not just a man, a godly man who knows how to take care of his family,” says Nimely.

As the young men went through high school, some of their friends from the basketball team started falling off, joining gangs, using guns. One ended up in jail. Another ended up dead.

“When I lost one of my friends, that’s when my whole view changed,” Nimely reveals. “Everybody’s thinking that when you die you just go to heaven and everything’s OK.”

But Nimely wasn’t so sure. This uncertainty led him to accept Christ and to start hanging around the Living Hope community more often. At first, he was skeptical that he would have anything in common with Ph.D. students, but he soon got over that.

“You come to church with people who have degrees and resources. … [And you think] ‘OK, I don’t got that stuff; I don’t got that background. Will they think of me as just some street kid?’ But at Living Hope it don’t seem like that. You see people trying to build their relationship with Christ. You see their love for other people.”

Ph.D. biochemistry student Kathryn Scherpelz likes Nimely. She likes the hard questions he asks about faith. Before coming to Living Hope, the only place Scherpelz could have imagined meeting someone like him would have been at the hospital where she worked during medical school.

“In medical school, you come to regard Woodlawn as patients, like they’re an ‘other,’ and you treat them, and they get sick and get in gun fights,” she explains. Now they’ve become people and not just patients.

Both Kathryn and her husband, Peter, a graduate student in physics, have felt challenged and changed by the perspective they’ve discovered at Living Hope. Peter recently overheard someone at the university tell a newcomer never to go south of 61st Street — the line that separates Hyde Park from Woodlawn. He felt compelled to intervene. “I told [the man] it wasn’t that dangerous,” Scherpelz said. “There are a lot of worthwhile things and worthwhile people to get to know.”

And for that matter, the Scherpelzes have discovered there are just as many needs — albeit of a different sort — in the university culture. Spiritual apathy is primary among them. With dozens of traditional church buildings scattered across the historic campus, faith would appear to be booming. But, as Kathryn explains, many of these buildings house a smorgasbord of spiritual offerings — New Age religion and Christianity sprinkled together. “At its best [the university] is very open [to all spiritual things]. At its worst, it considers traditional Christianity as passé,” says Kathryn.

But every year a few atheists and agnostics join the Living Hope community, soon finding life truth and new life.

The Future of an Old Pool Hall

Several years ago, Beier began to feel the drain of not having a permanent building for the growing church. A tutoring and discipleship program Living Hope had built for children in Woodlawn was at the mercy of whatever local church would rent it space. A few times, they even got locked out of the library before church on Sunday mornings.

So Beier began poking around, looking for a place that Living Hope could call its own. He first noticed the empty storefront at 64th and Cottage in 2010. A big “Cash Loans” sign was painted along the side of the building, which had stood empty for several years. Beier didn’t know why the property was selling for $570,000. It seemed steep for a place that had once been “Chicago’s Finest Billiards,” a notorious local hangout that offered gambling on the first floor and prostitutes on the second. Maybe it was because “The Color of Money” had given it a reputation. Beier didn’t know. He just knew that it was the spot he wanted.

Through a providential turn of real estate fortune, the price plummeted, and in February 2011, Living Hope was able to purchase the property for just under $100,000.

During the past year, volunteers from churches and RUF campus ministries have poured in from across the country, donating time and effort to transform the pool hall into a church with a sanctuary, office space, plenty of room to run the children’s ministry, and four second-floor apartments that Living Hope plans to rent out for additional income.

Just nine years into Living Hope’s story, Beier is hopeful. He likes that when he looks out at his small congregation every Sunday, he sees black and white, young and old, seekers and growers. He sometimes grows weary of the transience that comes with college-student and low-income populations, but he’s seen a few folks stick around for the long haul and hopes more will follow suit.

Sometimes people advise him to find an easier calling in a safer neighborhood with a less transitory group. But for Beier, you don’t argue with a calling.

“We don’t disparage anybody who says they’d rather be a part of a more homogenous group, ’cause that’s fine. We do try to challenge people and say this is really the vision of God’s kingdom. … We’re all gonna be one family in heaven, so let’s get a taste of it!”

Live Forever

Admittedly, I am not the most aesthetically astute person out there. Nonetheless, I wanted to share this song on here because I believe it exudes beauty and captures the true essence of life, and, to go one step further, life in Christ. In particular, my favorite verse is the second one, which goes"

Some people say faith is a childish game

Play on, children, like it's Christmas day

Sing me a song, sing me a melody

Sing out loud, you're a symphony

I don't think these lyrics are especially profound or extraordinarily magnificent. Rather, they are pretty plain and simple in nature. But, it is the simplicity of these lyrics, along with the music wherein its beauty lies. So, how do these words capture what life in Christ is like.

I love the imagery of the children playing on Christmas day. I picture the pure joy a child has in waking up that morning; the excitement they have in running down the stairs. The exceeding elation they experience in opening up the presents given to them. There is a sense of newness. With the dawning of that new day, there is a new sense of life.

Moving onto the next couple lines, I think they also capture this sense of life. The whole 2 lines, "sing me a song, sing me a melody, sing out loud, you're a symphony' communicate to me that life is meant to be more than a methodical drum beat. Life is not meant to be lived alone, quiet, and without joy. It is meant to be lived out loud, with others, experiencing and enjoying all the intricacies that exist in creation.

And I think that is what true life is supposed to be like. It isn't meant to be lived in fear, but in freedom. It isn't meant to be dull, it is meant to be new, fresh, exciting, and full of joy. This is what Jesus came to give us. This song, and most specifically this 2nd verse, leaves me with the feeling that life is supposed to be vibrant. The gospel is the good news that Jesus has come to restore us to true life and to make our lives vidid and vibrant once again. Jesus brings us out of darkness and into the light. He turns our black and white pictures into a colorful masterpiece. He turns our lives from a banal drum beat into a symphony.

Some people say believing, following, and giving your life to a guy who died over 2,000 years ago is foolish. But, having experienced this joy, having been brought from darkness into the glorious vibrancy of life in Christ, I cannot help but play on like it's Christmas day.

Listen to the song. Think about life. Enjoy.

The Promises of Sin vs. The Promises of Christ part 2

Continuing yesterday's post, let's consider the promise of vanity. At the heart of vanity is the fight for true worth and beauty. We believe if we are attractive and beautiful, then we will have worth. However, as Jonathan Dodson points out, "Instead of relying on vanity for worth, consider the beauty of God."

"What we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears

we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." 1 John 3:2

In the case of vanity, turning from the promises of sin to the promises of Christ means turning to God's beauty and resting in the beauty you have in him. It is turning from cheap beauty to true beauty. In fact, as humans, the pinnacle of our beauty can only be found in Christ. He is the perfection of beauty. The gospel is good news, because Jesus Christ came and took our ugliness upon himself, so that through faith in him, we could be clothed in his never ending true beauty. 

Vanity says: "Perform beautifully and you will have worth."

The gospel says: "Jesus performed beautifully for you; therefore, in Jesus you have never-ending worth."

*Much of the above is taken from Jonathan Dodson's, "Gospel-Centered Discipleship"

The Satanic Ideology of Photoshop

A great article from the Gospel Coalition:

A cover photo for Intelligent Life magazine caused a small stir recently because it dared the unthinkable: show a celebrity's actual face. Cate Blanchett, 42, appears on the cover in little makeup, her smile lines and wrinkles un-retouched. She looks less like an Hollywood star and more like a dignified human being, like someone you might see drinking tea at a neighborhood Starbucks.

Compared to this photo, other images of Blanchett look plastic. The April cover ofHarper's Bazaar also features her, but it shows her with perfectly smooth porcelain skin and smoky eyes. Her neck looks carved out of stone, her appearance as timeless as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, an unnatural immortality brought about through the magic of Photoshop.

She isn't the first to go enhancement-free in a photo. I remember Jamie Lee Curtis doing something similar a few years back with a bit more fanfare, featuring a photo spread that showed every step of enhancement along the way in a normal shoot. The makers of Dove beauty products have been pushing the "Campaign for Real Beauty," a series of promotions celebrating beauty that doesn't fit the stereotypical mold for cover models. But these efforts, like the Intelligent Life cover, are significant only for their rarity. Photoshop is the norm, whether you're shooting family photos, senior portraits, or billboards.

It's become so normal that we hardly even notice it anymore, and that's what makes it all the more insidious. Behind the wrinkle-removing, curve-enhancing, waist slimming work is a satanic ideology of youth and beauty.

Assault on Contentment

When Satan came to Eve in the garden, his assault (amongst other things) was an attack on her contentment. "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1) To paraphrase: "Has God held out on you? Has he given you less than you need, less than you deserve?" The temptations of Jesus in Luke 4 are likewise assaults upon contentment. For Jesus to turn stones to bread would have been to deny the sufficiency of God's provision. To worship Satan in exchange for the kingdoms of the earth would have been to deny the sufficiency of Jesus' inheritance to come. In these cases, Satan's message was the same: God is holding out on you. You're lacking what you really need. You don't have what will really make you happy.

It's an appeal to inner narcissism---one that worked with Eve. Once convinced the fruit would make her wise and "like God," she ate. Similar appeals to our narcissism work just as well.

Which is why the covers of newsstand magazines are covered with plasticine starlets and starving models. These are the icons of a youth-worshiping consumeristic religion, and like the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, they are windows into a version of heaven. They promise a world where aging---and thus death itself---is suspended, where the secret knowledge of success, beauty, happiness, love, and sex is revealed.

Unreasonable

Of course, we can read over-the-top hyperbole on the covers of Vogue or Cosmo and reason that they're absurd. We can look at images like Blanchett's on Harper's Bazaar and know, rationally, that this isn't the real world. But it isn't reason that these magazines are after. As James K. A. Smith argues in Desiring the Kingdom, we aren't fundamentally rational creatures; we're desiring creatures, and though the promises of Hollywood and consumerism may be irrational, their picture of the ideal human life has captured our hearts. As Smith says:

It's not so much that we're intellectually convinced and then muster the willpower to pursue what we ought; rather, at a precognitive level, we are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons. It is not primarily our minds that are captivated by rather our imaginations that are captured, and when the imagination is hooked, we're hooked.

That's why, in spite of the nakedly obvious lies that fill magazine covers, they continue to sell. Consumers aren't rationally convinced that they'll learn to flatten their bellies in four weeks, preserve their youth, and discover a satisfying sex life. But they are compelled by this hope for the good life and an image that seems to hold it forth at the low, low price of $5.99.

To the flesh-and-blood human being, whose body ages and whose face wrinkles, these ageless icons whisper, "You're not good enough. You too fat, too old, too thin, too flat, to curved, too poor, too pale, too tan. Your Maker has held out on you. You're a fading, dying thing that doesn't measure up . . . but you won't surely die. Follow me, and you can be young, beautiful, and successful forever."

They hold forth an impossible standard of beauty, and consumers religiously pursue that standard---this dress, that makeup, this Botox, that surgical enhancement, this lipo, that diet, this tuck, that lift---on and on it goes like a sacred pilgrimage where ageless beauty can be yours for a pound of flesh. It rebuts the Creator who made us fearfully and wonderfully, numbering our hairs and our days, and called grey hair our glory because it signifies a life wisely lived (Proverbs 16:31).

It's sad to me that in recent discussion about plastic surgery among some believers, there has been little attention to what creational theology has to say about it. We worry about lawfulness---is it forbidden?---but ignore what it says about who we are, who God is, and how he's made us.

There are, of course, good medical reasons for many of these surgeries. There is a place for healthy diet and exercise (and many Christians should consider these more seriously as they prepare their body a tool for service and mission)---but, of course, this is the exception and not the rule. The rule---the force that drives the market for diets and cosmetic surgery---is not health and healing but enhancing and improving.

I think about this every day as I watch my daughters grow up. My Dorothy, who is four with flax-colored ringlets envied by everyone who sees them, already laments that she doesn't have straight hair like Cinderella or brown hair like Belle. My wife and I feel like soldiers at these little ones' gates, attempting to safeguard them from an onslaught of discontentment-breeding lies. How can we affirm that their Maker knew just what he was doing when he knitted them together, while a whole world tells them he got it wrong? We can bar the door and wall them in . . . but they'll have to go to a grocery store eventually. Every trip through the checkout will be another salvo.

Bigger Hope and a Better Promise

Our only hope for them---and for ourselves---is to catch a vision and hunger for something greater, for our imaginations to be captured by a bigger hope and a better promise. Rather than hoping for agelessness and resisting the marks of time on our faces and bodies, we can hope for resurrection and trust in one who raises the dead. Rather than conforming to the fickle standards of beauty, we can worship the God who knew us before we were born, made us fearfully and wonderfully, and called us "good." Then, when we see the Photoshopped and retouched icons around us, we can respond with a resounding, "Get thee behind me."

Tim DeLisle, editor of Intelligent Life, commented on the un-edited photo of Cate Blanchett, saying:

When other magazines photograph actresses, they routinely end up running heavily Photoshopped images, with every last wrinkle expunged. Their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn't just do a shoot with their waxwork.

Rather than celebrate these creations as they are, as their Maker made them, we want to transform them into something else. Something made flawless with human hands or something ageless and unaffected by the Fall. Something that, this side of Eden and apart from the Resurrection, will never be.

What is the Kingdom of God?

"The kingdom is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are brought back under Christ's rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom."
Tim Keller

Perfection of Beauty

Shai Linne's new CD entitled The Attributes of God just dropped a few days ago. I think it's his best work yet and highly recommend it. I am amazed at how Shai is able to portray God's magnificence and exalt his glory. I am thankful for how God has gifted certain people in the arts, in order that we may more clearly see Jesus and behold His Beauty. I'll probably be posting a few songs here in the next couple days. Here's the opening track of the CD, Perfection of Beauty. It is written and performed by his wife Blair Linne. Hope you enjoy.

Perfection of Beauty
Written by Blair Linne



Beauty is sold in exchange for a "dime"
Nothing to attract us to You, yet we worship Your creation as fine
Captivated by its forbidden fruit
Pleasing our senses, so we suppress the truth
And eat the lie
Media's fig leaf deadening our soul and mind
Sin blinding us to You
The only objective Beauty that's truly absolute
Hidden in the symmetry of Your goodness, glory and truth
Each attribute working harmoniously
Justice with patience, wrath with graciousness
Omnipotence with humility, long-suffering with faithfulness
Each a note to a sweet melody
The ultimate hymn entitled "God's Beauty"
Immutable, no change
Because "dimes" get lost daydreaming in dark gutters
Unable to hear the call to wake up
They, the noose, dripping honeysuckle
Lips pasted on with Mac makeup
If they truly beheld Your beauty
You'd make magazines and Mattell go bankrupt
You sent Your Beloved to be lifted up
On a beautiful, seemingly ugly cross
The visible image of Your hiddenness
Only You are beautiful and yet invisible
True beauty is spiritual

Therefore, sanctify our worldly minds
Your complexion is unappealing to lustful eyes
Besides, apart from new birth in Christ
Sinners beholding Your Holy beauty would die
Therefore, beauty residing in the eye of the beholder is a lie
It is found in the Beautiful One- The Most High

What Do You Rejoice In?

"What you rejoice in is the thing that is your central sweetness and consolation in life. To rejoice is to treasure a thing, to assess its value to you, to reflect on its beauty and importance until your heart rests in it and tastes the sweetness of it."

Tim Keller

What do you rejoice in? The Bible says we are to 'rejoice' and 'delight' in God. Sometimes I wonder why it often so hard for me to do this. It is far easier for me to get excited, and treasure watching my favorites athlete (Derrick Rose) take over a game in the 4th quarter and lead his team to victory. I have no problem delighting in earning good grades, or having a good time with friends. This sunday, I will be quick to rejoice when the Bears score. But why is it so hard for me to delight in God? Why is reading the Bible more like pulling teeth than it is a joyful delight. Why am I more drawn and enamored with stuff instead of God and His Word. Why do I often times delight in trivial 'things' more than God.

At a fundamental level, it is because I do not fully believe the Gospel. I think Tim Keller's quote hits the nail on the head. We delight in something because it is valuable to us, because we have assessed it's beauty and treasure it. If this is true, the reason I don't delight in God is that I have failed to properly assess God's value and the true treasure that He is. I have failed to see the beauty of the Gospel. In my few moments of Gospel sanity, when for a moment, I taste the overwhelming goodness of the Father expressed through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on my behalf, in those moments, I am apt to delight in God. During those glimpses of grace (shout out Erik Most), I experience the fullness of joy that is in Christ.

However, in order to do this, we must properly assess the value of the Gospel. Tim Keller defines the Gospel as the fact that we are far worse, and far more hopeless than we could ever imagine, yet, in Christ, we are more loved and accepted than we could ever hope. In order to assess the value of the Gospel, we must understand both sides. If we don't see ourselves as utterly sinful, naked, blind, poor, lost, miserable souls, who if it weren't for the sheer grace of God, would be justly consumed by His wrath, the Gospel will never be valuable to us. It will never be good news. There is a reason Jesus said, "He who is forgiven little, loves little. But he who is forgiven much, loves much". Grace won't be amazing to us unless we realize what we've been saved from. A shackled slave who is redeemed rejoices. A beggar who has been adopted by the King and made into a Son rejoices. Someone who thinks they are a generally good person and deserves salvation on their merit does not rejoice.

More so, we will only be able to rightly rejoice in God when we realize God's absolute benevolence towards His children. If you are in Christ, you are beloved. You are more loved than you can imagine. Christians should rejoice in God because they have been saved from their utter state of sin and brought into the glorious light. We were unlovely, but we have been loved by the most lovely. Love to the loveless shown, that we might lovely be. When I dwell on this, I treasure God above all else. Knowing both ends, that we are utterly sinful and hopeless, yet completely loved and secure in Christ's finished work, will cause us to rightly assess the Gospel's value, to rightly treasure it, and to see its pure beauty. And when this happens, we will rejoice and delight in God.

I pray God will continue to illuminate my heart to the true treasure that Christ is, and the absolute beauty of the Gospel; that God saves messed up sinners.

How Far was He willing to Go?

Just finished reading Tim Keller's 'Generous Justice'. Here is some pure 24k gold from the last chapter. And by the way, the k stands for Keller :)

"Many people say, 'I can't believe in God when I see all the injustice in the world.' But here is Jesus, the Son of God, who knows what it's like to be the victim of injustice, to stand up to power, to face a corrupt system and be killed for it. He knows what it is like to be lynched. I'm not sure how you believe in a God remote from injustice and oppression, but Christianity doesn't ask you to believe in that. That is why the Christian write John Stott is able to say, 'I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?'

And what does this mean....

There (on the cross) we see how far God was willing to go to identify with the oppressed of the world. And he was doing it all for us! There Jesus, who deserved acquittal and freedom, got condemnation, so that we who deserve condemnation for our sins can receive acquittal. This was the ultimate instance of God's identification with the poor. He not only became one of the actually poor and marginalized, he stood in the place of all those of us in spiritual poverty and bankruptcy and paid our debt.

Now that is a thing of beauty. To take that into the center of your life and heart will make you one of the just."