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Three doors down, he sold another four-unit apartment building to a group of young, hardcore Christians that includes two nurses, a teacher, a carpenter and an environmentalist. That commune-like home (where, poetically, the walls separating the units were knocked down) is known and respected as “the Quad” on both sides of the Binghamton/Binghampton tracks.

“I moved them into a house black people wouldn’t live in,” Soup says. “I wanted to see if they were serious about community transformation.” The crew of the Quad has definitely passed muster.

Next door, a young single woman lives with her seven children. One of them, a young boy, is in the yard, crying.

“Hey, boy!” Soup barks. “Cut that crying out! We’re not having that today.” The boy’s mouth snaps shut.

“I do more counseling than Dr. Phil from this porch right here,” Soup says.

He nods at the boy and offers up one of his adages that explains how kids nursed on despair and dysfunction can be transformed by this love-thy-neighbor mission:

“They can’t be what they can’t see.”

Little goes a long way
Soup has seen how just mowing his neighbors’ lawns for free or giving the kids on the street a few dollars to move the trash cans from the curb can change the mood.

“There’s an aroma coming out of this community.” He takes a whiff of the air. “It’s discipling.”

He’s right. You can almost smell the change happening here in this blue-collar district filled largely with shotgun shacks and bungalows once owned by workers in four lumber mills, a chemical plant and a boxcar factory.

Most of those mills and plants are gone. Now 9,000 people live in the one-square-mile neighborhood where 60 percent of the homes are rented and 10 percent are vacant.

For those in Memphis’ more upscale neighborhoods, there is no right side of the tracks here.

“You may as well be going into a different country,” says a Service Over Self (SOS) group leader.

“You’re not just going into a different neighborhood, you’re going into a different culture,” he tells a fresh group of young recruits as they prepare to rebuild and refresh rundown homes in the neighborhood. SOS is one of the transforming ministries in the twin Bings.

Training ground for overseas
It’s not Somalia or Afghanistan — but the doctors, nurses and teachers who have been stretched and seasoned here often head overseas thanks to a relationship with the IMB (International Mission Board). Some have already been to some of the world’s most dangerous mission fields.

As it turns out, Binghampton/Binghamton is the perfect proving ground for those considering cross-cultural missions in other parts of the world.

There are language and cultural barriers, danger and distrust, along with tremendous need and the ageless issue of how to help without fostering dependence — how to get the indigenous population to lead their own renaissance.

“It’s an ideal model,” says “Emily” as she gets ready to take a pregnant, 21-year-old Somali refugee with three children to the Shelby County Health Department to sort out paperwork for the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Program. “People who didn’t think they could live in the inner city are doing it and are branching out from there.”

“We’re also realizing the world is coming to us,” adds Emily’s husband, “Mark.” “People are getting a world vision … international training by working in their own cities.”

They’ve been missionaries in Africa and they’re going back.

Bureaucratic jungle
Emily loads her two children in her Ford sedan and heads to the apartment complex where the pregnant Somali refugee awaits.

It’s a dismal place that houses a large number of refugees brought to Memphis by Catholic Charities. There’s a high, prison-like fence and a motorized security gate that leaves one wondering if the plan is to keep people out — or keep them in.

“Zahra Hassan’s” smile could be an orthodontist’s advertisement. Its brightness and warmth leap out from her dark skin and black burqa.

Maybe that’s why she’s one of the lucky refugees with a fairly decent job. She makes $9 an hour as a janitor at Memphis International Airport. That’s $720 every two weeks. Rent is $550 a month.

Her husband is Mr. Mom. While Zahra works, he stays at home with the children in their cockroach-infested apartment.

The Shelby County WIC office is packed. The long warehouse-like building near the mighty Mississippi houses the federal supplemental nutrition program.

Both Zahra and Emily patiently wade through the process and paperwork. Their combined children take up most of a row.

“We left Somalia in 1990 when the civil war started,” Zahra explains while she waits. Her father is an electrician and fisherman with eight children. There weren’t any jobs where they resettled in Kenya. “We don’t have a good life there,” she says, but there the people at least helped each other.

“Here, they’re against you, laughing at you. They’re behind you, talking … ‘Why is she here?’”

She wonders if it’s just because she’s Muslim or whether Africans are looked down upon by African Americans.

That disconnect between refugees and the indigenous population is one of the many ingredients of the stew that seasons the missions workers in Binghampton.

For many of them, it’s far easier to reach the refugees.

Church in the ‘hood
It’s Sunday morning at Dr. Rick Donlon’s house on Hale Avenue in Binghamton. The sun-drenched neighborhood is alive with young people walking to their home churches, Bibles and food in hand.

It could be Pleasantville instead of a place to fear.

Rick, a physician and leader in Christ Community Church, opens the service with a
simple prayer:

“Pray Holy Spirit, that You would be among us … a time to draw nearer to You and to each other.”

Then the 30 adults and children are singing “Pharaoh, Pharaoh” to the tune of
“Louie, Louie.”

The group sings an African song … “Tunaimba na Kutukza Yesu … Wewe ni bwana.”

“What can make me whole again, nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

They switch back and forth between English and Swahili.

Why hang out with Christians?
Jeremiah Ochanda, a student from Nairobi, Kenya, serves as the translator for the service. His father died the previous week.

Jeremiah says his friends used to ask him why he hangs with these Christ Community Church people. At the memorial service for his father, he says in English, then Swahili, “… almost everyone from the church showed up. I was overwhelmed by the love.”

So were his African friends. “I don’t have to explain any more why I love this church,” he told the home church group. “Thank you all.”

Rick’s sermon focuses on the children — who make up half of the 30 people present — and the parable of the talents.

The children will help make a decision about how to spend $5,000 to help others. All of the Christ Community Church home churches are going through this exercise.

He projects a nice PowerPoint-animated pie chart on the wall: The average church in the United States spends 30 percent on buildings, 30 percent on salaries, 25 percent on programs, 15 percent on missions.

He changes the PowerPoint visual. “Let’s look at how our church has been spending
its money.”

The pie chart shows 95 percent on missions and the needy; 5 percent on celebrations and “parties.”

“Each of our five home churches is being given $5,000,” Rick says. “Two or three talents. And we have to decide how to spend it.”

A different kind of doctor
Attending this Sunday’s home-church service at the Donlons’ are two first-year medical students from Oklahoma.

Rick Donlon, like Soup Campbell of Eikon, inspires people to follow in his footsteps, partly by personal magnetism, but also by offering a program that has tangible impact.

He has “challenged us to think differently” from a traditional medical school trajectory, says Oklahoma State medical student Ryan Lynch, who is volunteering in one of the free clinics this week. “It’s so hard to bridge the gap between medical and spiritual healing.”

“Many think it’s a sacrifice he’s making to do God’s work,” adds fellow medical student Tyler Whitaker. “He seems genuinely happy.”

Happy, yes.

Since Rick, his wife and children moved from their beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood — the life Laurie Donlon thought was their deserved destination — he clearly has enjoyed watching the clinics and home churches grow.

But he’s a man whose mind constantly probes for ways to make the mission reach a little further.

After he and several other doctors opened their first free clinic in South Memphis, it didn’t take long to figure out that the physical problems were often tied to the dysfunction in the communities.

Casting for direction
How to change that? Move doctors, nurses and teachers into the community.

“It takes the same stuff to move into a community as to go on a mission (overseas),” Rick says from his front porch after the Sunday service. “Courage, risk-taking, the cross-cultural nature of it. Limited resources, pressure from families (not to do it).”

A meeting with Charles Fielding from the IMB helped lead to the home churches and subsequent overseas missions trips. Charles, a physician, wrote Preach and Heal: A Biblical Model for Missions.

But Rick agonizes over not being able to reach the African Americans indigenous to the twin Bings.

“They have been a lot more resistant to joining our churches,” he says. “There’s a notion in the African-American community about what church looks like, and it’s not Dr. Rick’s living room.”

He shakes his head. “I’ve had my heart broken again and again. It’s like you’re climbing — climbing this ladder,” he says, his hands grabbing at imaginary rungs, “and I’m wondering if it’s leaning on the wrong building.”

Bridge between cultures
Christ Community Church nurse practitioner and midwife “Beth Hershey” says missions work — God’s work — takes generations.

“It’s so encouraging to know (the life that) your people know. How can you make one body out of two groups? We’re going to keep trying to spread like a virus.”

It’s an appropriate analogy. If you look at a map of the twin Bings and highlight the homes of those who are a part of Christ Community Church, of Eikon or of Binghampton Development Corporation, it looks like a viral infection.

One of those homes, on Yale Avenue, is filled with refugees from Burundi. They’ve been in Memphis for more than a year.

One of the fathers has a job washing dishes at the Peabody Hotel, famed for its 11 a.m. march of the ducks each day.

Many of these families are attending the Refugee Empowerment Program.

Justine Rehema, 17, says she loves the school houses in Memphis, the running water inside.

Noshimirimana Sedekia, 13, says “in Africa, if you want to watch TV, you have to pay money. Teachers hit you in school.”

Children with hope for the future
Nearly all the children have their professions picked out. “To be a doctor to help like they’ve helped us,” Noshimirimana says.

“We have to study hard,” says 13-year-old Nirikiza Vailete.

So do the parents.

“I pray to God for me to learn good English,” says Sedekia Imanairakiza, cradling an inexpensive guitar that speaks a universal language, even if his chord progressions and tuning are distinctive to his land.

He says his African-American neighbors “like it when we sing in our language.”

Would that be … a bridge between cultures?

Those very words — “a bridge between cultures” — were used by Emily as she explained why she and her children would wait with an African woman and her children in a room filled with African Americans in a city that is, and had been, predominantly black.

“That’s the way Jesus lived His life.”

It takes a village
Jamin is the lone African American living at “the Quad” — the four-unit apartment building housing hard-core Christians. They’ve got a busy, outdoor basketball court, a monster vegetable garden and chickens, right there in the ’hood.

Jamin is an art teacher at a nearby school. He plans to build a studio and shop so he can homeschool some of the kids in the neighborhood.

“There’re a lot of things you can do” to reach the indigenous population, he says. A starting place is realizing local blacks would have to “put down one more aspect of their identity to assimilate into white mainstream culture. It’s like we’re saying, ‘you don’t know how to do anything right. Now we’re going to tell you how to church.’”

Moving into the ’hood is “a step. One step,” he says. “It starts with trying … suspend your judgment. Just sit and listen and think — I can learn something of value from someone less advantaged than I am.”

He looks out the window at his next-door neighbor’s kids. The mom, K.K., has seven children and no job. Her family has become a large part of the mission at the Quad.

“The babies are growing up,” Jamin says. “You’ve heard it takes a village to raise a child? It’s definitely going to take a village to raise K.K.’s children.”

The next stop
On the street, the air conditioning in Nathan Cook’s aging Honda feels like a hair dryer.

But he’s another lean one, so a little heat doesn’t bother him as he drives around Memphis. During a tour of Christ Community Church’s free clinics, he’s talking about the mission to Binghamton/Binghampton.

He’s the spiritual leader of Christ Community Church, complementing Rick Donlon’s role of physician.

“The general idea is for Christians to move into poor communities and love your neighbor. The problems of the neighborhood become your problems. People interacting who ordinarily wouldn’t interact.”

He talked about Rick’s frustration, one shared by many in the live-in mission. “One of my mission professors in seminary said you first reach people most like yourself. The next wave of people you have success with are outsiders to the community … refugees.

“The last thing that happens is making breakthroughs in the indigenous community.”

Nathan is a man of quiet confidence, a man certain that God is in control.

The medical piece is doing well, he says. Coming alongside of the IMB also was a big step, he adds, talking about Binghamton/Binghampton-fueled forays into difficult areas of Central Asia, Africa and South Asia.

Back where it all started
The tour stops at Christ Community Church’s free medical clinic in South Memphis, the one that started it all back in 1995.

It’s centered in a long strip mall that also houses the local Department of Social Services food stamp outlet and a state probation and parole office.

The needs of many here are many.

Not far from this strip mall of heavy reality, on the way back to center city, Cook pulls off the main drag into a rough-and-tumble neighborhood that also has two names: Riverside/Riverview.

There are boarded-up apartment complexes. A large, failed church sits empty at the end of one block, as if to say “Jesus wouldn’t live here.”

A vast, burned-out apartment complex that took up a block has just been bulldozed.

Nathan talks about the meeting he’s already had with one of the pastors here and the way that bulldozed field begs for development.

It looks like a place that could be called “The Hole”; a neighborhood that now makes the twin Bings look healthy and alive.

It looks like the next stop.

Names in quotation marks have been changed.

Engage

• Contact the writer at mholmberg@wtvr.com.
• Contact the photographer Joanne Bradberry at joannbrad@gmail.com.
• Go to peoplegroups.info to find people groups in your community your church might minister to.
• Read Charles Fielding’s book Preach and Heal, a book that explores the question: Which is more important: relieving suffering and meeting physical needs or proclaiming the life-transforming message of the Gospel? For more information, visit preachandheal.org.
• Learn how volunteer healthcare professionals can partner with IMB medical missionaries through the Global Medical Alliance to go to “the ends of the earth” to minister to the sick and dying, to teach health promotion and to show God’s love for all peoples. The GMA sponsors a medical missions mobilization summit annually in July. To learn more e-mail Rebekah Naylor.

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