COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM by MARVIN OLASKY

Author:MARVIN OLASKY
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Service
Publisher: FREE PRESS
Published: 2001-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Invisible Men in Kensington

Daniel and I traveled with urbanologist Terry Cooper to one of the prime candidates for a meltdown, the Kensington area. Once the locus of nineteenth-century industry, Kensington is now, in Cooper’s words, “the cesspool into which all of Philadelphia drains.” City Journal in 1999 noted that “nowhere are the limitations of [Philadelphia Mayor] Ed Rendell’s public-subsidy, deal-making approach to job creation clearer than in his agenda for impoverished North Philadelphia. Rendell had once described the area as a ‘tumble-down, emptied-out, garbage-strewn sprawl . where seven of ten adults are unemployed and where children by age 12 develop a total lack of hope.’ In truth, North Philadelphia’s ‘badlands’ are probably the worst American slums of the last half century, more like the shantytowns of Santo Domingo than anything we associate with the United States. With their collapsed houses, abandoned lots, and daytime drug zombies, areas like Kensington, ten minutes north of Center City, compare unfavorably to the South Bronx of the 1970s.”

Rendell, who became chairman of the Democratic National Committee as he finished out his second term in office at the end of 1999, was called “America’s mayor” by Al Gore and a “can-do” executive by the Washington Post in 1994. Gore and the Post need to come to Kensington. Terry Cooper knows the score. A thin and rumpled scholar, hunched over the wheel and driving slowly, he pointed out the visible and invisible, the junked cars, labor union problems, and spiritual malaise. “Everybody sees the neighborhood as a way station,” he noted. “People want to get out.” But then we came to Bethel Community Bible Church and the blocks around it, and met several staff members who had purposefully come to the same place from which so many were fleeing.

Ralph Rosario, a student at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, was our initial guide for a walking tour of the church’s efforts. Rosario’s heroin-using, HIV-positive father abandoned him, along with his mother and sister, years ago. They became crack addicts who found ways to get everything (including electricity and gas) illegally, but Rosario had the faith to stay clean, take classes, and with donated equipment build an audio-video office at the church. By the summer of 1999 eight groups had come to record, and Rosario hoped to build a church business.

We met another church member, Nimo Colon, a parapalegic weight lifter. While on drugs eighteen years ago, he accidentally shot himself through the spine. Bitter and unable to perform much manual labor, he sold drugs and saw no meaning to life until God grabbed him twelve years ago. He is now in charge of a small weight room that Bethel owns down the street. It’s used by forty men each week, with no payment or conditions for use except one: the men need to attend church, Bible study, or church counseling at least once per week.

These are moving histories that could make great feature stories, but Bethel has no publicist, and inquiring reporters have not shown up. The

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