Baltimore Blogs
By Clark Carter
Blog entries from Clark Carter, campus minister at Charleston Southern University:
3/9/09: Well, we made it back to Baltimore. This is our second year of partnering with Embrace Baltimore, a church planting and Kingdom building strategy of the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. We will be working with the same church that we served with last year, the Church on Warren Avenue. This is an incredible church!
Several decades ago, this church was a thriving and growing church family. The church was then known as Lee Street Memorial Baptist Church. But through the years, the area surrounding the church began to decline and as one might expect, so did the church. The city of Baltimore decided to try and revitalize this part of the city, the Federal Hill Community and the Inner Harbor. The area did rebound and became a very beautiful, much sought out location to live. Many young families moved into this area and lived within walking distance of the church. However, tragically the church was still stuck in the old days and continued to decline. The average age of the parishioners was over 70 years old. The worship was traditional. The building was old. The church considered closing its doors.
Pastor Lyn O’Berry became the pastor and made a bold move. He asked the church to pray for 40 days to seek God’s will for the church. They had two options: sell the church for up to 8 million dollars and walk away, or stay and let this church BE the inner city church that Baltimore desperately needed. Against all odds, they decided to stay and pour their lives into this once thriving church…believing that it could thrive again!
So that is our task this week. Our prayer is that God will use Charleston Southern University to help the Church on Warren Avenue to be the church that will reach the city of Baltimore with the Gospel! Pray for us this week as we offer up our lives in service. We’ll keep you posted on the progress!
3/10/09: Well, tonight marks the end of our first full day in Baltimore. It’s 10:34 p.m. and I’m sipping on a Coke, just ate an ice cream Drumstick, and now I’m getting ready to chew some gum. Thank God for sugar!
I remember having a conversation with one of our women basketball players a couple of year ago about eating a piece of cake after lunch. She informed me that she had been instructed NOT to eat foods with high doses of sugar because it would lead to a sudden “crash” (lack of energy) once the sugar burns off in the body. I just laughed and said that the key to avoiding this “crash” is to CONSTANTLY keep sugar in the body and there will not be a problem! I grabbed the piece of cake, and she walked away empty handed and shaking her head.
Oh well, we had a busy and fruitful day. We served in the oldest African-American neighborhood in Baltimore, Sharp Leadenhall. We did some surveying for the community center and we also invited people to the church. Later, we split up and some went to share the gospel at Federal Hill, some went to the Recreation Center to work with the children, and the last group stayed at the church and did maintenance work. A handful, primarily Tam Odom, prepared food for us most of the day at the church.
We had a great time of sharing tonight at our nightly worship service just for our group. It is amazing to see how God is using so few students, 26 of us total, to minister to thousands. It is a humbling experience. But that is what we are called to do. Simply put, we are called to serve. One of our students reminded us tonight that Jesus came to serve (Matthew 20:26). Out of the mouths of babes…
You would be so proud of our students. I hear so much negative information about this generation of students, but I can tell you from personal experience that we have some GREAT students at Charleston Southern University. Baltimore knows this to be true!
Well, the sugar is wearing off. I have 2 more pieces of gum to chew, then I have to brush my teeth and off to bed before midnight. Goodnight family. See you in the morning Baltimore.
3/11/09: So much has happened in our time here, I’m not sure where to start. I’m not going to bore you with a minute by minute reporting of our day, but let me share a word about what we did tonight. We had the privilege of joining a group of students at the Peabody Conservatory here in Baltimore for a time of worship. This gathering is called The River and is led by students who have a passion for God and a love for people. These students represent some of the very brightest music students in the country. It was so encouraging to see college students who love the arts AND who love Christ and are who not ashamed of Him.
The Peabody Institute is part of Johns Hopkins University and was the first music academy established in the United States, founded in 1857. When you walk through the hallways of the conservatory, you can feel history surrounding you. The students here come from all over the country. The first two students that I spoke with were from California and Texas. There really is an interesting vibe to the campus.
I shared with some of the students at Peabody that they were doing what Bob Briner had dreamed of in his book Roaring Lambs. He asked the church to engage the culture, especially the arts, and to do so with excellence. We NEED to be salt and light in ALL the world…including the arts, literature, and film industry. Attending tonight’s college worship service was a reminder that God is still at work in some dark places. The remnant still exists. The River still flows.
3/12/09: Nothing breaks down walls like giving. You know what I mean. You’ve done this before. We did it today. We gave away baby gift baskets to young mothers who lived in city housing…and they gratefully opened their doors to us. We showed a movie and gave away drinks and popcorn to neighborhood kids from low income housing…and the lined up to get into our little movie house. We gave away hot dogs, chips, and brownies in front of the church today at our sidewalk cafe’…and financially wealthy people and poor people could not resist the power of tube steak! We gave away our time and energy to some senior saints at the church…and they loved us for it. We gave a man looking for some work $20 to clean some windows
Giving. There is something about it that brings us together. There is a mystery about it that blesses the giver and the receiver. There is the very nature of God at work in the midst of it. And we are so much like our God when we give. Wasn’t Jesus’ earthly ministry about giving? He gave food to the masses (feeding the 4000 and 5000). He gave healing to many who were sick (lepers and cripples). He gave life to some who were dead (Lazarus and the widow’s son). He gave words of life to the confused and lost (Sermon on the Mount). HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR US - “For God so loved the world that He GAVE His one and only son…” (John 3:16).
Give…….Give……..Give…………
3/17/09: We made it back from Baltimore and our Spring Break Mission Trip. I was hoping to write this last blog entry while I was still in Baltimore, but at 2 a.m. on Friday morning before we were to head home, I decided that it would be wiser to sleep than to type. So here I am at my computer at home three days later trying to wrap my sleep-deprived mind around an incredible trip.
Our last night in Baltimore was amazing. We participated in The Vine service at the Church on Warren Avenue. This was a service led by young college students. Some of our students joined in and helped with the music. At the end of that service, as was our nightly custom, the group from CSU had our own worship service. Stories shared with eyes filled with tears were the norm for the evening. We decided to cap the evening off with a very special baptism service. Let me explain.
The night before, one of our students, Kayla Sexton, came to me and asked about being baptized. She shared that she accepted Christ a little over five years earlier, but had never been baptized and she thought that this was a great time and place to make that commitment public. We spoke with the pastor of the church and he said it would not be a problem. But it was because we did not begin filling the baptistery up with water until 5 p.m. We needed to have the baptistery filled before The Vine service began at 7:30 p.m. Well, after 1 hour of running water into the baptistery, we only had about 8 inches of H2O to show for it. So I knew I had to do something. So, I began to fill stock pots from the kitchen with water from the kitchen sink, and carried them up about 30 steps to the baptistery. After making about 10 trips, Kayla, the student that we were going to be baptizing, said she wanted to help. So she began filling pots in the shower downstairs and running them up to the baptistery. As our other students came in from working at the recreation center, they asked to help as well! So right before The Vine service started, we had the baptistery full! What a great picture of the family of Christ working together to help a fellow Believer receive Believer’s Baptism. It was cool (pardon my 70’s language).
After I baptized Kayla, I asked if anyone else wanted to be baptized. One of our students who was baptized as an infant said that he wanted to partake in Believer’s Baptism, so I dunked him as well! Several more of our students said that they wanted to be baptized again as a symbol of their fresh commitment to follow the Lord. When the night was through, we had baptized a total of nine people…and I looked like a prune! It was a fitting end to an incredible time in Baltimore…but I don’t think that it was the end. I really think that it was the beginning of a beautiful new chapter in the lives of our students.
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