Seeds of hope for a new generation in Detroit 
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Signs of  hope and transformation
by Joshua Rock, Director for YouthWorks-Detroit 

Detroit was once known as the jewel of industrial America – one of the finest, wealthiest urban centers known to man. Yet after decades of misspent funds, greed, neglect, and devastation, the city as a whole appears like the carved out husk of one of its myriad abandoned buildings. From the outside, Detroit might appear no more alive than a decaying stump of a once majestic oak tree. “Who saw this house in its former glory? Does it not now seem like nothing?” (Haggai 2:3).

But as in the days of Haggai, God says to us, “Be strong. Be strong and work, people of the land” (Haggai 2:4). He is doing something new among us, and even these ruins will rejoice to the song of a God who brings life from the dead. So let us be strong and work, for God himself is with us. 

[Joshua Rock is the Executive Director of YouthWorks-Detroit. He is married to Yvette and is raising his family of four children in Detroit. He moved to Detroit in 2001 after doing a Detroit Summer Ooutreach (DSO) internship in 2000.]

In the past several months, the Lord had been speaking to me very clearly about what he wanted for me in the next step in my life. I had been volunteering with my church’s youth group, and at a youth minister’s retreat I heard Ed Conlin speak. When Ed talked about his life and ministry in Detroit, his testimony resonated with me. God made it clear that he wanted me to be a part of Detroit Summer Outreach. The Lord’s call was clear and direct. However, the sacrifice required in answering this call scared me. 

A big struggle throughout my life had been obedience. The idea of giving up control over my own life to some authority was terrifying – even if that authority was God himself. When I recognized this fear in myself, I prayed that the resistance to handing over my pride – my will versus God’s will – be dissolved. So, despite my fear, I agreed to join the DSO staff for the summer. 

The cultural adjustment in the first few weeks was extreme to say the least, but nothing compared to the spiritual transformation I have experienced since then. When I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, the internal conflict between my own will and my desire for the Lord vanished; the battle within me was won for me. When the Holy Spirit came upon me, my resistance fled way. 

I now see that this battle was never mine to win. I could not overcome my human fear and rebelliousness on my own. Only the grace of the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, could accomplish this conversion within me. This is true freedom. By allowing the Lord to overcome my delusion of what it meant to be free, I now better understand and experience the true freedom that Christ offers through life with him.

[Emily Ferstle is currently living in Detroit and is actively involved in Detroit community outreach. She served on staff with Detroit Summer Outreach in 2011.]

Living in Detroit this past summer and participating in Detroit Summer Outreach (DSO), was an awesome experience. Before coming to Detroit, I did a Gap-year in Monterrey and I was afraid that my experience would be too similar, but the contrary was true. It was a completely different experience and they have complemented one another perfectly. Outwardly, Detroit is perhaps not the nicest place in the States, but God is definitely at work here. When you walk down the streets and talk to the people, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that there is a God –  a God who, throughout all the misery, never abandons his children – a God who uses the poor and the outcasts of the society to show the rich what life really is about –  and a God that reveals the real pearl of great price. The Lord has also shown me that material wealth doesn’t bring you far in reality as a man or woman of God. It is rather an obstacle in the race for the Kingdom of God because poverty, combined with trust in God, is a powerful gift that can free you to serve without seeking reward.

I think that DSO is a powerful tool that God uses to educate his children. It is a huge blessing and perfect opportunity to become a radical disciple. In this short amount of time, I have experienced being transformed as a person and I am able to see a closer paradigm of Christ who became poor for my sake and who died to give me new life..

[Simon Luyts is originally from Jerusalem Commuinity in Belgium. This past summer he participated as an intern in the Detroit Summer Outreach program. He had served for a year in the Kairos Standing in the Gap Program in Monterrey, Mexico, before moving to Detroit in the summer of 2011.]

On a Sunday in late September after a tremendous thunderstorm, as my wife and I drove towards home, we witnessed the brightest rainbow arching over the city of Detroit.  As we came off the highway exit onto Trumbull St., we looked towards downtown, and we could see the Renaissance Center and other downtown buildings literally through the end of the rainbow.  For 30 minutes we watched, and the rainbow neither faded nor dulled in intensity. While our country and even our city suffers from various and sometimes tragic setbacks, we cannot deny that this is a time of special grace for Detroit, and that God’s promises are resting upon our city. And, like the rainbow, maybe you have to be here to see it.  - Joshua Rock  [photo by Yvette Rock ©2011]

“The Lord gives strength to his people; the Lord blesses his people with peace.” – Psalm 29:11

Mission work in Detroit is intense, to say the least. You see the enormous poverty, and feel the crushing burden to help in some way. I have had many times, like today, where I’ve reached my “boiling over” point. Before I came here, I never could’ve imagined that, “my cup runneth over” (Psalm 23:5) was sometimes similar to reheating soup too long in the microwave. Sometimes you are quite literally suffocated by the Lord’s “blessing.” You give and serve and help faithfully until you explode, and then, miraculously, you get up again and do it another day. “It be like that sometimes,” as some of our young people say here.

As I’m learning now, being the Lord’s servant is not a full time job. A full time job is 40 hours a week. No, serving the Lord is like a lifelong Tour of Duty in the military. You serve all day at your job/ministry/vocation (i.e. moms), and then you come home and serve some more (or, as our moms know, you never leave!)  It’s not like you can say to the world, “I put in 8 hours of sanctification, now it’s time to rest (or backslide) for 4 hours before I go to bed.”  If only vice made you feel rested after a hard day of holiness….

Many of my friends have given up the Christian life because they astutely recognized it requires EVERYthing. When God is done working in and through you, there is none of the old you left!

Lest you despair after reading this, let me leave you with some hope (because I’m obviously still living to tell about “it”!) What my lapsed Christian friends have failed to realize is that once they have run out of themselves, they can ask God to fill them, and they start giving Jesus; and he is in infinite supply. Rather than a mug of overheated soup, this transformation can be compared to yesterday’s stale coffee being rinsed out with fresh water. You fill it and fill it until it’s replaced the old dregs and is now usable again.

Once I learned to give up the fight (or, rather, am learn-ING), I could see the glorious joy of having my own self-centered life sucked out of me. Since I’ve already explained everything with quirky metaphors, I’ll leave you with one more: our very valuable color printer/scanner/fax/copier broke this week. We turned it off and turned it on again, and when that didn’t work, we had to hang in the towel and despair for the lack of a printer. But lo and behold! We discovered we were part of the “Canon Loyalty Program” and they replaced our dead and lifeless printer with a sparkling new, up-to-date model for the mere price of the ink to fill it.

Sometimes we have to surrender ourselves in order to be transformed into our most glorious and beautiful selves. Yet, we find that the cost is never as much as the value. So I will say to my Lord, “Fill ‘er up till it runneth over!”

[Ellen Karagoulis is originally from the Work of Christ community in Lansing, Michigan. She is currently living in Detroit and serving as a Women's Mission Leader for YouthWorks-Detroit. She and her fiance, Erik Sellstrom from Word of Life community in Ann Arbor, plan to marry this coming May.] 

Noel teaching at Cornerstone school in Detroit

This past October, we took our youth group kids to a concert event called Man Up Detroit. It was organized by a group of Christian Gospel rappers including Lecrae, Trip Lee, Tedashii and a few others, who together are called 116 Clique, and were part of a tour that is hitting the major cities of the USA. The theme of the event was to inspire within the young men of the city a sense of what it means to be a man of God. There are a lot of not-so-good male role models in today’s society, and more so in the hip hop culture, and it was a great event that showed how different being a “modern man” and being a man of GOD really is.

Although it was an inspiring event for our young people, it also really got me thinking about myself and my life. How do I live as a man of God? Do I even? It was time to face the facts! And the fact is that I’m not anywhere near perfect in any aspects of Godly manhood. In fact, in some areas I’m actually quite bad. And this has really struck me, because I hadn’t thought of it like this before now. It’s really opened my eyes to the work I have ahead of me, and I thank God I have a GAP year to allow me to focus my attention on these issues without any distractions.

[Noel Bradley-Johnston is Irish (he has the passport to prove it). He grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He first applied to the Kairos Standing in the Gap program at the age of 16. When he turned 18 he was accepted to the program and is now serving as a year-long Standing in the Gap volunteer staff worker in Detroit for 2011-2012.]