The Village Church:A Different Approach Makes a Differenceby Ray Waddle Whenever the Rev. Andrew Stephens steps outside his Nashville church, he’s standing within a few feet of where 85 percent of his congregation lives. The reason: Stephens is minister at the Village Church, a parish located in a public housing community, the Cayce Homes, where about 1,800 people live. “It’s not your typical Presbyterian audience,” Stephens says. Sometimes it calls for unorthodox visiting hours: Every once in a while he pitches a tent outside and lives there for 10 days at a time, just to be available at all hours. “You’ve got to be in the mix, you got to feel it,” says Stephens, who otherwise lives a few minutes away with his wife and children. “So I set up a 24-hour vigil, just to be there. People got used to it. They’d bring me a TV dinner, or donuts. They talked, they shared. It’s a ministry of presence.” The Village Church is an unusual assignment for any minister: As far as anyone knows, it’s the only Presbyterian congregation in the nation that’s situated in a public housing project. It’s getting rave reviews. Even leaders from out-of-state presbyteries come to visit the lively Africa-influenced worship experience and observe Stephens’ leadership, looking for insight for starting a similar congregation back home. Stephens has been the Village Church minister from the start, when it was founded in 1997. It has grown to 300 members. That’s 300 new Presbyterians, predominantly African American who never had much connection to church before. It meets in the gym of the community center on the grounds of the Martha O’Bryan Center, an organization long supported by the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee. “We’re proud of being PC(USA) — it’s the best vehicle I know for sharing the message God has given me to share,” Stephens says. “We’re all learning that God is in the midst of people, calling people into the body of Christ.” The people of Cayce Homes had never had an on-site minister before. Church vans would come on Sundays and take people to churches miles away. This was different. When Stephens arrived, he got on a bike and rode through the entire housing grid, meeting residents. He soon defused tensions existing within the community. He emerged as a mediator between wayward teens and local police.
“People really look up to him,” says social worker Ruth Lewis. “He’s someone who will hear them, care for them, advocate for them. He’s showing people possibilities — and hope.” Stephens, 47, had not been a parish minister before. A Georgia native, he’d already had unusual multifaceted career experience, based in Atlanta — first as a jazz musician and writer, then as an airline customer service trainer/ developer. But he felt the tug of a ministerial calling, eventually enrolling at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. These days, he’s likely to make his daily walking rounds in a tshirt and fatigues, with cell phone at the ready. At every turn, someone shouts hello or hurries up to him in need of a little on-the-spot counseling. Everyday is a theological education. “There’s a lot of highly spiritual people here, more so than elsewhere,” he says. The ideology of materialism, and prejudice against lower-income citizens, puts artificial barriers between rich and poor, he says. It hides the fact that there are no spiritual differences between people, only different circumstances, he says. Rich and poor alike are miserable without God. “There’s no differences of intelligence or heart or love. It’s just that some life conditions have gone different for many of the people here.” He also makes house calls far off the housing campus. About 15 percent of the congregation lives in far-away suburbs, people (white or black, rich or poor) who want to connect with this newly energized center of local Presbyterian life. Such non-resident members of the Village Church have created new bonds with Cayce Homes residents, chipping away at Cayce’s isolation from the larger city. “ This community is just as capable of giving to Nashville as receiving from it,” Stephens says. The minister gives credit to his wife, Vicki, for the success of Village Church. “I’m the ambassador but she holds the thing together,” he says. “She has a real sensitive ear. When people have a problem, they often go see ‘Miss Vicki.’ ” Vicki Stephens keeps an office at Martha O’Bryan near her husband’s. “The first year we spent a lot of time with relationship-building and trust-building,” she says. “People just need to be heard.” The Stephens have two boys, age 13 and 21. Since starting Village Church, they now have legal custody of a 16-year-old girl. “It’s amazing how God ends up giving me a daughter,” Andrew Stephens says. Village Church’s worship service is a big part of the congregation’s identity — a joyful Africa-centered worship experience, shaped in part by a visit Stephens made to Ghana in the mid-1990s. The African element of the service is not an attempt to be racially exclusivist, he says, but to celebrate the ways God has touched other cultures, not just European culture. Africa, after all, has a claim on all humanity because Africa is where early humanity came from, he says. The service — 10 a.m. Sundays — includes drummers, dancing and rituals such as the recognition of ancestors. “That’s a time to pause and remember our ancestors, remember what they taught us and how they led us to Christ — and remember Christ as the great ancestor,” Stephens says. Executive Presbyter Phil Leftwich of Middle Tennessee Presbytery calls the Village Church an “amazing story,” a symbol of revitalization in a presbytery that had been suffering from internal conflict and sagging morale. Churches across the presbytery offer financial help to Village Church or find other ways to create relationships there. Church groups routinely visit, or receive visitors from Village Church. “Village Church has enriched the life of this presbytery in innumerable ways,” Leftwich says. “It has helped make us a more mission-driven presbytery. Village Church can take pride in that, and so can the presbytery.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Village Church recently received a special mission grant from the Synod of Living Waters of $4,000 for seminary interns.
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