Bend toward justice

In his interview, former camp director Jason told me that the vision statement of Shiloh is the following (it is also right there on their new Website): Equipping New York at-risk youth and their families with tools that build hope.  Providing tools that build hope.  So educational tools, spiritual tools, emotional tools, relationships, networks, fun.  From my observation of its history, Shiloh has been very good at being involved in individual relationships and mentorship.  It has also been good at providing opportunities for kids to see the world differently.  It has been a fun place for kids to go and learn new things.  And it has always emphasized the spiritual dimensions of life.

I suggest that this is enough.  I also suggest that this is not enough.

I want to use this paragraph of blog space to ask my diversity of readers to continue to think on behalf of at-risk communities.  Have a courageous heart when it comes to working against entrenched systems that are bad for these community members.  Have a soft heart when it comes to people who are at risk.  Study hard about why things got to be the way they are, so that bad cycles can be broken and not repeated.  And keep remembering to do these things, don’t forget them, because the way our society is set up is not conducive to automatically supporting their human needs.  

I am saying I think it will take each of us to make better that which can be made better, and I am encouraging us to make it better, as we think about Shiloh.

Well.  I got back from another interview trip to New York this past week, and here are a few stories I heard there:

Here is a concrete example of Shiloh working to provide educational tools to kids.  Nicole [I don't have a picture of her] is the liaison between Shiloh and public schools. She provides after-school, curriculum-based (and fun) educational projects for children attending partnering schools.  For example, she has worked with kids on a project that set the after-school kids up as entrepreneurs.  These young entrepreneurs were making, selling, and giving away buttons.  They worked on the business plan together.  They had a product and a market and goals.  She taught them that entrepreneurs give back to the community.  She emphasized math and cooperation.  She also served and continues to serve as the school's liaison to Shiloh, telling these after-school kids about camp and other Shiloh programs, and she stands in a place where she can be a person of trust for parents, a known quantity for parents who might not know what Shiloh has to offer.  In talking to Nicole, I got a clear sense of her joy in making learning fun for kids.  So this to me sounds like it is a tool that provides hope.

I also interviewed Kenny.  Kenny's story was a poignant reminder of how education can function as a tool in someone's life, but, even though Shiloh had a tutoring component at the time, Kenny was involved long before there was a formal link to the schools.  As a little boy in the 1970s in East New York, he got involved with the year-round Shiloh program in his neighborhood.  So many kids in his two-block radius were also involved in Shiloh.  Three other boys in his Shiloh class--Teeter, Douglas, and Terrance--became his close friends.  Here they are together in front of the Shiloh bus, in a picture taken by his Shiloh teacher, Karyn.

Kenny says he hadn't been aware of things beyond his two-block radius in his neighborhood, except through the experiences he had with Shiloh.  In this photo, the boys are on a field trip together with their Shiloh teacher.  Maybe in this instance they're going to Arkansas (they all have Arkansas shirts on).  Kenny is on the left with the hat.  He says he remembers playing on these field trips, being on the bus, meeting new people, seeing sights that were brand new to him, and one time meeting Shirley Chisholm on a trip to Washington DC.  He was able to see what was possible in the world, and he said if he wanted to go back to those places that were out there, he knew he had to choose a specific path in life.  

In the picture below the boys are back in their neighborhood and are honoring their mothers together on Mother's Day. There was a Mother's Day meal that Karyn facilitated, and there was a rose for every mother.  Kenny is on the right in the Yankees jacket.  In Kenny's interview, he talked emotionally about the positive power he got from his mother, who believed in him no matter what.  He said he would do anything for her.  In the end it was she who convinced him to move away from their old neighborhood, for his job, for his benefit. 

Kenny also told me he played a board game once at Shiloh that was designed to teach the boys that sometimes the long way around the game board is a better way to win than the quick and easy way.  He never forgot that game and referred to it multiple times in our interview.  Growing up, he took that long way around.  He emphasized his schooling and let go of relationships that would lead him down a path to trouble.  He wasn't involved with Shiloh after his earlier experiences, so it was his own pull toward education as a tool that moved him to make the decisions he made.  Today Kenny has a college degree and works just outside of Washington DC and oversees the creation of quality affordable housing in those neighborhoods.  He has made sure he is close enough to come back and take care of his mother, who lives in New York.  

One tool that Shiloh seems to be so good at is providing a fun place where kids can go and feel loved.  Camp is a place that has been Shiloh's consistent touchtone throughout its history.  Like I myself have done here in this blog, like Kenny did, it sometimes seems useful for other interviewees, too, to bring a metaphor along in their interviews.  Metaphors capture experiences, religious feelings, relationships, even a relationship to one place.  Here's an image that the camp director Ryan has for camp.  It has its literal basis in solid earth:

Ryan, the current camp director who started as the head of maintenance and who has spent long hours crawling underneath every camp building, was working to construct the camp's chapel (the interior is above) when he discovered that the entire property is situated on a solid rock.  This image of building on the rock of God is the one that has been Ryan's metaphor as he framed the physical aspects of camp, had midnight conversations with troubled campers, and as he led raucous singing of camp songs.   They sing: "You ought've been there/ When He saved my soul/ You ought've been there/ When He put my name on the roll!"--with clapping, stomping, and full-body spin.  

So it's got a metaphor that both Ryan and I like.  But how can something like camp serve as a tool for building hope?  Well, Nicole told me that the Shiloh people she knew were in love with a place, and that place was camp. And one former camper described the atmosphere of camp as "pure love".  Ryan described to me a situation between two people at out camp who didn't like each other.  Both told him that the other one couldn't understand his particular situation, because that other person had not lived such a hard life.  Both were angry and hurt at the other's actions.  But it turned out that both of these people had come from eerily similar backgrounds, and both were hiding from and judging the other.  Ryan was able to facilitate their shift in relationship, in seeing each other for the first time.  The people who work out at camp strive for this kind of atmosphere of safety and reconciliation, and sometimes they have experienced it themselves.  

Sometimes a counselor might see camp as simply one reasonable service in the journey of life's ongoing opportunity for service to others.  Cue was a counselor at camp around the time Kenny and his older brothers and sisters were there.  Cue grew up in Brooklyn, too, not too far and a bit earlier than where Kenny did, and she, too, had supportive parental support.   She remembers her parents exposing her to the art, museums, and culture of the city around her.  Her stepfather gave her intellectual puzzles like building a working television set from a kit.  Like Kenny, Cue was an academic achiever.  Here's a picture of her as a counselor at camp.  She's on the right, with a little bunching of female counselors.

At the time she was at camp, Cue was exploring the intersections and divergences between the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement.  (Talk about intellectual puzzles!)  Shiloh was a comfortable place for her to put feet under these explorations, as there were other people buzzing about these issues there.  There were not many African-American staffers at the time, but she did not feel uncomfortable and shook off any attempts that fellow staffers may have made to bend over backwards for her.  She saw her work at camp as a reasonable service.  It was at camp she heard about Pepperdine College in California.  And at this next step Cue's spiritual identity deepened, and she moved forward with becoming a neonatal nurse. Although she had a clear sense of her purpose and sense of service from early on in her childhood, Shiloh had been a directional arc for part of her journey.  

Cue's extended metaphor toward the end of her interview was of a circle in which we are all connected.  We bend in toward each other in the circle by both giving and receiving and by paying attention to the other people in the circle.  This next story is about people who sort of loved and lost their Shiloh experience, and who moved away from that experience by staying exactly in the same place.  Craig and Lynn Ann loved their 1970s Shiloh experience in the year-round program in Red Bank, New Jersey, so much that they left vowing that they would return again soon.  But when they came back, the Shiloh program had closed in Red Bank with no plan that the program would return there.  So with very little funds, in trepidation and faith, they started their own program, based on the Shiloh model, and gave it the name Aslan after the mythical Narnian lion who represents Jesus.  With their guiding imagery in place, they began the program with all former Shiloh Red Bank kids, and simply went forward forging intentional relationships from there.  They never stopped.  Aslan is relationship driven, they say, just like Shiloh was.  Now they, as the Aslan program, still work to empower local kids with bicycles, tutoring, mission trips, and intentional relationships.  This has not been an easy journey for them and their family.  Craig and Lynn Ann told me that, even though over the years their lives have had profound difficulties, and they have been oftentimes lonely, they both have felt unable to do anything other than that which they felt called to do, a call they first heard at Shiloh.  Shiloh changed our DNA, they tell me.  They've never been the same.

I mentioned Jason in a paragraph above, a former director at camp.

Jason told me that his personality is someone who likes to fix things.  He seems to be a person who can see the way that existing systems can be improved.  When he was camp director, he wanted to make camp special for kids.  And his desire to fix a previously ailing camp program led him to throw a wild array of fun at the wall and see what stuck.  So he initiated things like chess classes, rocketry sessions, "wilderness night" (when the electricity wasn't working in certain cabins, those cabins were specially "selected" to participate), and a homemade slip and slide.  He wanted to provide opportunities, like Kenny's field trips, that would open windows of thought.  He worked at camp until he had his first son.  Then he realized he needed to have time with his family, and took a job at the Manhattan Church of Christ, which houses Shiloh offices.  Now Ryan is camp director, and brings more of a pastoral style to camp.  Jason continues to advise Shiloh staff with the touchstone phrase: be intentional about how Shiloh can live up to its purpose of equipping kids with tools that build hope.

Jane worked as chief girls' counselor at camp in the 1970s, and she, too, talks about how much she and the counselors worked to give kids fun, broadening experiences and personal relationships at camp and in the year-round programs.  Although the language of "tools that build hope" was not a part of Shiloh's stated lexicon at the time, it was part of the spirit of what they were trying to do.  Jane formed her identity as a "rabble rouser" in the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements, just as Cue did.  Her spiritual journey in college included a probing of the biblical text that led her to Shiloh, a place where the text seemed possible to live out.  At camp she was the chief girls' counselor.  She worked long hours to put together penny carnivals, pirate night, treasure hunts, luaus, and Christmas in July.  She worked in the year-round programs in Newark and in Brownsville in Brooklyn.  Jane ended up moving to New York City after Shiloh.  

Brother Maxwell's consistent support and service through hammer and nail have helped shape Camp Shiloh.  He has been a board member during times of change.  Brother Maxwell's conversion experience took him from a destructive path onto a constructive one.  After his conversion, he stopped his destructive lifestyle, began attending church, street preaching, and ultimately pastoring his church in a place where he felt he could be of the most service.  He says his experiences have led him to value the importance of honestly telling all parts of his story, even the bad ones.  They have also led him to believe in the importance of giving to others who are in vulnerable situations, a place where he, too, might have one day been.  

A minister of a Church of Christ in Long Island, Brother Maxwell was baptized in a predominately white church, and, although his congregation is African-American, he tries to keep conversation and teaching open between his church and white Churches of Christ.  But he mourns that the black church and white church have "divorced each other," a term he did not originate, but a concept he hopes is possible to overcome.  Which metaphor will trump the other in American church society: Cue's circle of mutual giving, or the divorce between the black and the white churches?  A quote from Martin Luther King seems to blend Kenny's image of the long way around the game board image and Cue's circle of connectedness.  He said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

So I have told a few stories today of people I have met, although there are a few more I did not include here.  Their stories are for another time.  But after I have told these stories, I continue to exhort us all, imperfect though we are, to remember, to bend toward justice.

Artifacts found in Texas

I've just gotten back from a two-week interview trip all around Texas.  I stayed with a lot of Shiloh people and Shiloh friends, people that I didn't know yet, but people whom I would interview or ask to help me host History Parties.  It's a quick intimacy to sleep in someone's guest room and eat their food and then ask them to talk for a few hours about a place in their lives where they were involved in something that had a particular significance for them, perhaps tilted the compass of their lives one way or the other.  And perhaps I am staying in or looking at the results of the tilt.  Seeing the decades-long marriage of two people that met at camp, understanding the job choices that were made after the political or religious change that happened in the city, hearing the stories of pain or joy or missionary zeal and feeling the heat of those stories from the voices and eyes in front of me.  In many ways I have been gathering the artifacts from the lives I've intersected in this project, artifacts different from those I could carry out in my suitcase.  Recording them, studying the pictures they took, building memories for myself out of capturing their memories.  

Here are some hold-in-the-hand artifacts they've kept, artifacts I got to see and that now I present to you:

Artifacts of Shiloh and Eastside Church of Christ: This is a place that seems to have left fewer trails than others I've followed in this project.  But it does help me to understand Shiloh's theological bent at the time, as well its camper population.  There was an English-speaking congregation and a Spanish-speaking congregation, and I hear that because the Spanish-speaking residents of the East Side were at times more systematically invested in the church life, there were years when Camp Shiloh had a significant population of children whose parents were native Spanish-speakers.

Velma, Eddie Grindley's office secretary at Eastside, told me stories about trying to get Eddie organized--a task in itself--and she let me scan some of her old pictures, too.  I drove and drove to get to her house in the country, and I listened to her stories of Eastside, then drove back the next day with a portable scanner for her pictures.  Later at the end of the trip, at Bob and Myrt's house, Bob told me about working with some of the Shiloh kids at Eastside, and about being a very young Church of Christ preacher in the big non-Church of Christ city.

Velma's picture of
Eastside Church of Christ
building, where Eddie Grindley
was preacher,
and where some Shiloh
kids in the 1950s and 1960s attended.

Eastside Church of Christ
young people's group, ca. 1958.
Some were Shiloh campers.

Artifacts from doctrinal controversies of old:  There's a spiritual legacy of the Church of Christ in the life of Shiloh, both as a positive and in tension.  As it has always been driven by the specific religious engine of the Church of Christ, Shiloh has not been a stranger to certain kinds of doctrinal controversy as it tried to reconcile its work with the Church of Christ doctrine, especially in the conservative South.  In the 1960s and 1970s using a more "conversational" translation of the Bible that may or may not have made changes to certain theological ideals: I don't know whether or not using these Bibles at camp caused Shiloh itself to be questioned, but I do know that when Johnny and Polly showed the book to me, they had been talking about the changes in the national mood around the time they were at Shiloh in 1967.  They both had a twinkle in their eyes when they talked about how they were at times Christian rebels.

Leaders Mitchell and D.L. told me about their professional responses to charges that Shiloh was interested in the "social gospel" over baptism or that there were people on the premises who talked about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  They told me about directions they tried to take camp.  Barbara, whose husband Dwain had been a preacher, told me that in the first summer in 1951, she and the other counselors had been gathered together and given the option to go elsewhere because the landowner was a premillenialist.  Some counselors did leave, Barbara did not.

Johnny and Polly's Bible, in
the Good News for Modern Man translation,
used at camp.  They met at
camp in the summer of 1967.

Pizza and dishes--little details from two different camp neighborhoods:  Early on at the first campsite, local boys from Bernardsville, NJ, came to the campsite and asked to take the female counselors out for pizza pie.  Pizza at that time had not made it to the South, so the counselors thought, Piece of pie?  Barbara counselor tried it for the first time and remembers she did not like it.
Some neighbors in upscale Bernardsville complained of the children's noise, and there were times that campers had to go on in the back yard of the big house to ensure the wealthy neighborhood's residential feel.

Then a few decades later Shiloh bought a camp in New York that it could own outright, as D.L. explained to me at his dining table.  In the new camp the site was surrounded by an orthodox Jewish community.  In the 2000s, said April at a History Party, one rabbi who led a neighboring camp came over to apologize for his camper's prank calls, but the Shiloh staff were muddy and bloody from doing repairs, and were in no great shape to receive visitors.

Dishes Nina found in the basement of the camp's main
building, ca. 1980.  Likely left over
from when the camp was a Jewish hotel or camp. 

Saved artifacts with meaning:

Year-round worker Karyn saved the
key to her East New York
apartment on Williams Avenue.
She made lasting friendships living there,
including with some
of the boys in her Shiloh class.

A page from Linda's camp scrapbook.
She told me in her brief-but-deep interview that the time at Shiloh
in the early 1970s represented a "work of the heart" for her.

Amanda's artistic photo of kids in the camp pool, 2006.
They look like synchronized swimmers, but
getting the pool in working order for them to use has
been a labor of love at times for Shiloh,
as has been teaching swimming techniques.

Cassie photocopied a thank-you note from a camper ca. 2006,
 a note that was left pinned on a wall after camp one summer.
I've scrubbed out the camper's name, but the camper says
 he can make good decisions now using "fruit of the spirit words,"
and he will always remember God has a plan and a future for him.  It impressed Cassie.

The emotional artifacts of Shiloh: Mary, a female counselor from near-current days told me at a History Party of her friends that when she got back to her home after her fun and intense summer at camp, the time felt different, more stale, and she felt sadness.  For a while she would open her suitcase that had been full of her grubby clothes.  Her mother questioned what she was doing.  She laughed and told her mother that she was smelling the smell of camp.  Telling me this, she laughed again.  This group from the History Party loves to get together and talk about Shiloh.

Lives have been changed by the events at Shiloh.  Bob and Myrt met in 1952 at Shiloh, and, after he wrote a long-distance proposal by mail, they married and moved to the East Side together.  April and Dan married a few years after being friends at camp.  People have become teachers, ministers, social workers because of Shiloh.  I don't generally blog about some of the sad things that have happened to people, but there has been pain and confusion in people's lives: religious, physical.  Cindy, who had a painful experience in New York, took a night after talking about those difficult things to then compose a statement she read in the morning, a word to the friends she knew in from the year-round programs in East New York and Brownsville:

"I would just say to you my friends that you were brave comrades, a privilege to know and to walk with, in a good, perhaps great, cause.  God be with you."  --Cindy (1972-1974), when asked in her interview what she would say to Shiloh folks today.

Dorothy says Shiloh helped her to focus and become disciplined, but in addition to this it was a joy to see her reunite with her friend Tahna from the old days at a History Party, the same day as her interview.  Steve talks about how he put everything he had into Shiloh at a time when it was vulnerable, Jon told me a bit about the spirituality of manliness and basketball and firebuilding at camp.

Again there are others I leave out and things I haven't expressed here.  But I have your artifacts gathered up, little gifts you gave me of your truth from that time in that place.  They all mean something to this story, and you have my thanks.

Violence and God in the Drop-Dead City

In 1975 when the New York City mayor Abe Beame asked President Ford for money to bail out the bankrupt city, the president turned him down.  The New York Daily News summarized Ford's response with the now-famous headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead".  New Yorkers were experiencing economic woes, explosive racial anger, and persistent violence.  And East New York and Brownsville, where many 1970s Shiloh workers lived and many 1970s Shiloh kids grew up?  What chance did they have for help in the city the president told to drop dead?  Did the previous New York City mayor John Lindsay help them in his campaign for racial tolerance, hurt them by overspending and playing the politician, both, or neither?

Jonathan Kozol's 1995 book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation describes the South Bronx, where many current Shiloh kids now grew up or are growing up.  He describes the conditions there as painful stressors which no one should have to endure.  He cites unequal educational systems throughout the country as a significant factor in the persistence of the urban ghetto, and he implicates white America for not using its societal power to change the way that system continues.

It's hard for me to choose the right words as I write about these places, the homes of these kids I talked to.  I have spent very little time in East New York, Brownsville, the South Bronx, and other places like them.  I've done some reading and interviewing, but still I feel ignorant of the full realities and their causes.  I do know that many people I talked to witnessed or were victims of different kinds of violence.  I think it's safe to say that violence has affected just about everyone who has been in those neighborhoods in some way, no matter what their color or place of origin.  I know there are drugs and gangs and death there, and there are kids who just want to hurry home from school and lock their doors behind them to protect themselves from scary things.  And there are kids who want to go to school and succeed and not be urban statistics.  I know there was a lot of racism at the creation and subsequent isolation of these places, racism that is perhaps less overt now but has, I suppose, just been crystalized into our national fabric--you go one way, I'll go another, and never the opportunities shall meet you.

I'm not a psychologist, sociologist, nor a theologian--I read and then I listen to people tell their stories, hopefully with empathy and forethought.  Most of the people I have talked to in this project are joyful and interesting, no matter which side of the "Shiloh staffer/Shiloh kid" spectrum they fall on (these days it is more of a spectrum, not a strict divide, although the organization is aware that it is not a balanced line).  My questions are not probing on the topic, but still it's interesting in an interview to ask about who God is.  Among other things, I hear that Jesus is black, God has no color, God is like everything all at once.  Somehow I see those statements as good signs when I think about places like East New York, Brownsville, and the South Bronx.  I am glad there are places where God can show up and not look exactly like me and my God who does things in Tennessee, and I'm glad a Shiloh kid's God and a Shiloh staffer's God can be different and still be the same God.

In a few days I am heading off on a whirlwind trip to Texas to do about fifteen interviews of former Shiloh workers and friends from a variety of eras in Shiloh's history.  I know I'll ask questions about the story of what happened at Shiloh.  But I'm also interested in some measure to at least think about, What does God look like in Texas?  Does living in Texas now shape your memories of New York and New Jersey back then?  And how does being from Tennessee and being in my skin shape the very questions I ask?

I have a lot of things I wonder about--these and more--that I can't completely answer as I go through this project.   But as I hold the stories in my hands and think about them, considering the complexity is intentional.  If those of you reading this have Shiloh memories, what are the complexities associated with your memories?  Can more than one answer exist for the questions you have?

Both from The Gospel According to the Children at Shiloh, 1973.

"Shiloh Sexy"

I've just returned from a three-week trip to New York City, where I conducted about twenty interviews and one large History Party in Brownsville in Brooklyn.  I had Thanksgiving dinner with about twenty-four Shiloh folks.  Just a few days after I got back, I participated in another History Party in Nashville.

I have so many things I could talk about in this blog post, it seems like an embarrassment of riches (again my apologies to those whom I didn't get a chance to include!).

I'l start with the History Party that happened last but represented people who were at Shiloh the earliest in this post.  In the Nashville History Party that happened when I got back from my most recent New York trip, six former Shiloh staffers who had been involved in the program in the year 1970 (and some before and/or after that year) gathered to talk about things like Shiloh's intentional focus on staff group dynamics; the year-round program in Red Bank, New Jersey; and whether or not their parents supported their decision as twenty-year-olds to move and to work with inner-city kids.  They talked about driving last-leg vehicles across the country for fundraising trips or to move to the ghetto.  I asked them what it was like to talk about these memories.  It feels good, they said.  You tell someone you've been at a camp program, but they don't quite understand all it meant to you.  They told me Shiloh had a profound affect on each of their lives in turn and moved them into new spheres of life: a true believer in the Holy Spirit; a liberation theologian; a businesswoman with appropriate communication skills; a politically aware citizen. 

These recent NYC interviews and get-togethers have been in some ways about reconnecting members of the Shiloh family after long absences.  Because it was around the Thanksgiving holiday, former staffers came into the city for a get-together and a turkey dinner.  Then later there was a History Party.  The Brownsville (Brooklyn) History Party was a kind of reunion of late 1970s former staffers and now-grown kids, a few of whom had not seen each other for decades.  The group hugged each other all around, reminisced about how they used to ride the subways en masse for field trips to the UN building or the ferry, talked about what it was like to see each other after so many years (the now-grown kids said they still, oddly, felt like children when they were around their former counselors).  There was some singing of the old songs.  I felt glad that the History Party was in Brownsville itself, in a historical society that was trying to uplift the Brownsville community.  There were bittersweet moments  in our gathering when the group talked about Shiloh staffers leaving this neighborhood for good.  At one point the grown-up kids wanted the former staffers to know that they had made a difference.  I interviewed a few of them later, and they were insistent on this point.  But the longtime absence still seemed to me like it was a sadness.

Here's why it happened: when the Shiloh staffers had left East New York and Brownsville at that time, it was because the Shiloh board had reconfirmed its belief that the staff should only belong to the Church of Christ, a position they felt was crucial to the work.  The staff members in actuality or in sympathy, however, did not reflect this policy, and they unanimously requested the board to reconsider.  The results of the board's decisions surrounding this policy led to a significant shift in staff of the program.  Those who were committed to the work left or were asked to leave the program.

Some of these people, however, stayed in the city under their own auspices, to continue to address the needs of the people there, this time through the medium of sustainable housing.  And so during my trip to NYC I interviewed several of the people, former Shiloh staffers and friends, who helped to start a project named for the biblical prophet Nehemiah.  Nehemiah rebuilt the decrepit walls of Jerusalem so he would no longer feel ashamed before God as the city crumbled.  The former Shiloh workers, neighbors, and local church members and leaders quoted Nehemiah as they worked toward a large-scale building project to give East New York and Brownsville residents livable home-ownership in the neighborhood.  The former staffers told me they were unable to do this under the auspices of Shiloh in the late 1970s, but it was their involvement in Shiloh that had moved them into the place where they could see the need for such a project.  Though there had been dark times associated with their break with Shiloh, they said the housing movement proved to be one of the proudest achievements of their lives.  Here's a photograph of one of the neighborhood homeowners and early leaders of the project, Carmelia.  A Brownsville resident, she had befriended Shiloh workers soon before the project began, and together they participated in a reading group and potluck circle that formed the nucleus for their working relationship.  Thousands of houses have now been built, and she still continues her active involvement in the neighborhood's homeowner's association and in community improvement in Brownsville.

And Shiloh itself, financially diminished and understaffed after the board's decision, would continue but struggle during the 1980s and into the 1990s, and would operate as only a camp and not a year-round program during this time.  The camp forged ahead, but the city program died and stayed dead for many years.  When the building that housed the camp's kitchen burned down in the mid 1990s, the insurance money would go towards a re-expansion of Shiloh's vision back into the inner-city neighborhoods, this time in the South Bronx.  The board would change and then change again.  Shiloh hired a new executive director, and they would build or rebuild programs that reinvigorated their emphasis on outreach to underserved kids in at-risk neighborhoods.

Now the late 1970s Shiloh staffers' return visits to the old Brownsville neighborhood and to an enthusiastic support of the current Shiloh has been a healing process for them, I think.  Current Shiloh has reached out to its alumni as they realized what had happened in the program's past.  This oral history project has been one of the ways the alumni have responded to that outreach.  I think they have long wanted to reconnect with their Shiloh past.

For the first time in this project, I was able to spend a fair amount of time digging into stories from current Shiloh.  I've spent most of my time so far mainly thinking about the time through about 1977.  So now I'm able to present, from among the half dozen or so current Shiloh "kids" I interviewed, some more current stories.  First, a picture of two young women who are twins, Nakeisha and Nicole.  They have been involved in Shiloh since they were young girls running around at camp and then attending Shiloh's Friday after-school program.  They'd go home and write letters to their camp friends.  They continued to be involved in Shiloh activities all through their growing-up years, including as camp counselors themselves when they were old enough.  Now they're both in college and still connected to the program.  We all spent several hours together in Nicole's dorm room with a microphone and a recorder, and they told me funny stories and sad ones about their lives.  The way they both presented themselves struck me as thoughtful, open-hearted, and articulate.  They told me that their strong mother and Shiloh are the two most significant influences on their lives.  With those two things going for them, they said, how could they go wrong?

Nakeisha and Nicole's story is uniquely theirs, but I spoke to quite a few others whose lives were deeply influenced by their time and relationships at Shiloh.  In my interviewing I want to allow plenty of room for people to express either loving Shiloh or critiquing it as they need to, or both.  I have been a little unprepared for the amount of love that has poured forth from people in these interviews, not just a kid's love for camp, or a dependent kind of love that speaks what someone else might want to hear; but instead what appears to be a genuinely happy love of the Shiloh community and of the people they themselves are allowed to be in that place.  This goes for both kids and staff members.  

Nakeisha and Nicole (and others) told me about a term that people use at camp: "Shiloh sexy".  They said when you don't have a shoelace, you put a piece of yarn in your shoe, and that's Shiloh sexy.  If you don't have a toothbrush, you use a piece of cloth and some toothpaste, and that's Shiloh sexy.  If flushing toilet paper at camp will clog up the whole septic system, or if the food is terrible because the kitchen burned down a few years back and the camp had to bring in a food truck, it's still a wonderful camp and you can tough it out and bond with everyone around you about it, no matter who you all are.  Or, as my mom says about some of her experiences at Shiloh in the 1970s, "We did the best we could with what we had."  The emphasis is on the relationships.  A phrase graced the cover of the Shiloh publication, Reach Out, in October of 1973, "The depth of relationship we develop with the children is the measure of our success."  This is consistent with what I found at current Shiloh today, now encompassed in the phrase I heard a lot in my NYC interviews: "the Shiloh family".

Most of the young adults I talked to, like Nakeisha and Nicole, were attracted to program as little kids through camp, and then got involved in other ways as they grew up: like taking advantage of the resume writing programs; working with a mentor through a Stamford, Connecticut church; attending Wednesday night teen programs; becoming camp counselors; getting some financial assistance for college.  Young adults like

Raquel, who raises her family, goes to school, and
works in the Shiloh administrative offices;

Sam, an EMT who has developed a close familial
relationship with Shiloh staff;

Jennifer, whose determination rise above
 being a neighborhood statistic drives
her to excellence in school;

Cynthia, a working college graduate
who surrounds herself with a community
 wherever she goes;

and Sade, a likable, friendly college student
who has sacrificed for her family.

Angela, whose competence and watchfulness have
served her well as director of the camp kitchen;

I enjoyed liking these people as I interviewed them.  Not everyone who has been to camp continues to invest their time in the program, but these folks did, although in some cases it was not always easy to do that.  For one thing, the Shiloh offices are now in the Manhattan Church of Christ's building, in the heart of gleaming, hyper-wealthy Manhattan, a part of the city that is so worldly sometimes that it seems otherworldly.  The building that houses Shiloh is not in the neighborhood of the South Bronx, where most of the kids it serves are from, so to get to the Wednesday night teen program, for example, they have to make a physical journey in order to get there.  And there have been other challenges (and sometimes chaos) in their respective lives that I've never had to face, sometimes in their neighborhoods and sometimes in their own homes.  But these folks have worked.  And Shiloh, by making a significant investment in each relationship, has been Shiloh sexy enough for folks to feel loved and supported there, a place where they can just be themselves with no mask to wear. 

For your viewing pleasure. . .

I've attached three short slideshow/videos to this post, each one jam-packed with many of the Shiloh pictures that people have been giving me to scan for this project.  I'm calling these slideshows, as a group: Shiloh Voices, Beautiful Faces.  Please enjoy!  

Song: Dancer to the Drum, by Beth Nielsen Chapman

Song: Ella's Song, by Sweet Honey in the Rock

Song: Forever Young, by Bob Dylan

The final one of these videos has captions, the others do not.  

In these videos I tried to represent many different eras in what I've shown, and to represent the pictures that most people have given me.  But beyond the timeframes and the donors represented, I wanted to awaken a sense of joyfulness and compassion towards the faces that you see and those you may have seen before.    For myself, I end up spending a lot of time looking at these faces and hearing the voices of these people in the work that I do--it is sort of a removed, private experience for me but also a very intimate one.  I have the daily experience of studying a look, then a tone, then a thought expressed, for meaning and how that meaning weaves in and out of all the other details.  For the Shiloh people out there, please feel free to let me know if any of the threads I'm compiling ring true or false to you, and thank you again for opening up your stories. 

Year-Round Program

The year-round program in the late 1960s and 1970s is a fascinating piece of history.  I keep coming back to read about what New York City was like at the time.  Malcolm X in Harlem, the Black Panthers, strikes and riots, violence, blackouts, runaways in the Village, graffiti, and the creation of all kinds of new music.  Hip Hop with all of its deadly swagger was literally born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and that's also where our intrepid Shiloh staffers were making up skits about the Good Samaritan with children in their crummy apartments or playing basketball with Brooklyn boys who were better players than they were.  There was all this white idealism in the air where those workers came from, thanks to the Civil Rights movement and Bob Dylan and Vietnam protests, a questioning of establishment policies.  We want to change the world! (or at least do SOMETHING!)  A questioning of some religious values, too, although I think most Shiloh people longed to find and hold onto the essence of what Jesus was really about--God's love, they said, and they tried to teach it to the kids through the skits and the basketball and other things.  

I can't imagine all the swirling images and competing voices in the minds of these young kids: the burning buildings all around them (they would have to move on, or their best friends would have to move on).  There were many, many other children in the streets everywhere but no playgrounds; there were heroin addicts and pushers on the stoops and corners; free breakfasts given by the Panthers; endless trash; angry teachers on strike; white politicians touring the ghettos; and the resignation of a president (some of them watched it on TV at camp).  Shiloh workers were taking them on field trips on the Staten Island Ferry where they ran around inside the boat and leaned out to see the statue that promised to take care of the poor, the huddled masses.  Perhaps they heard about the group in Queens and Brooklyn called SPONGE--Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.  Perhaps they wondered about black being beautiful.

Some of the donors to Shiloh were saying they didn't think the workers should be helping these folks but instead should be converting.  Where are the baptisms?  What is this social gospel you all are practicing?  Shiloh was almost completely unique as an urban outreach within the Churches of Christ, and so there was not much of a preexisting model for how to be in this place from the standpoint of the church as a whole.  There are complex relationships that some of these former Shiloh staffers from this time period have with the Churches of Christ, and some of it is painful.

One of things that I've been privileged to ask people about is their journeys of faith and what in direction this Shiloh experience moved them.  Some people had very scary experiences in the city that steamrolled the idealism out of them for a while or for good, or at least it might have convinced them to go back closer to home and help people there by becoming a teacher or a social worker.  Some absolutely came out of their shy shells when they got to Shiloh--so young, and there was no one else to start this food co-op, so I just did it myself!  It was an intense experience for everyone, changing things inside of them.  I think that though now most of the people I interview from this period are white and middle class, living in the suburbs and perhaps in empty nests, they each had an experience that my recent interviewee calls "radicalizing," meaning, he says, creating an empathy with the poor and oppressed.  I find that is an experience, an identity, that can still be called forward even in the warm kitchens of suburbia.  And in those kitchens they recall for me (sometimes with the longing of a lost little love) some of the kids they worked with, and they wonder about them and how they are doing, and whether anything the worker said made any kind of difference.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to completely answer that question with all its implications in this project, although I'm doing my best to do right by all their youthful idealism and their Jesus-hippie love for those kids (who are, by the way, older than I am).  And I'll try to do right by those kids, who were at the time on the edge of so many new worlds and ideas but stuck right in the ghetto heart of the old racist universe.  Perhaps I idealize, too, but it seems to me there's a lot of innocence in the relationship between those young groups.  That's one of the things I'm recording in the project, and that's what I'm hoping that you who read this will not lose.

Stories from Illinois and Indiana

I just returned from a trip to Illinois and Indiana.  Thanks to everyone there who gave of their time and their memories for this project.  In writing this blog, I am conscious that there is no way I can present to you all of the information I gathered in any one trip or interview, and I know I'm leaving some people's stories out as I go along.  But nevertheless I hope that I can pull out some strong details that continue to deepen the story.  In Illinois and Indiana I learned more about some year-round efforts and some connections beyond Shiloh.

In Indiana I did some research at Christian Theological Seminary on Clinton Davidson, the man who bought the first Shiloh campground and whose New Jersey estate bordered the camp property.  There are a lot of fascinating details about Davidson, including his autobiography:

Davidson had become quite wealthy by selling life insurance to millionaire businessmen, ultimately in the grandest of all sales venues, New York City.  He had coined the phrase "estate planning" and had helped his important clients avoid paying taxes, for which they rewarded him handsomely.  In his book he writes that he learned about hard work, good service, and salesmanship by reading Bible stories.  For example, stories like Jesus's (who told vivid stories to get his point across), the prophets (who did not sugar coat what would happen if their hearers didn't act now), and Paul (who endured obstacles but never gave up).  Those attributes are important in business, he says.  I read the book; it is an interesting take on the Bible.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Davidson was one who helped usher the Church of Christ into middle-class Americanism.  And yet some of his ideas--he was a premillenialist, at one point he attended an instrumental church, and he was strongly in favor of racial reconciliation--did not go over well with all of the people who were the Church of Christ's heavy hitters of his day.  He was tired of the constant name-calling and denunciation he found in church publications, and so he bought his own journal, the Christian Leader, to promote positive Christian reporting.  In his autobiography he says of Shiloh, "One of my deepest satisfactions is the summer camp on my New Jersey estate.  There each summer five hundred children of all classes, races, creeds, and colors discover real American living and the love of God."  I don't know yet what he meant by his words "real American living," although there's an indication in something I've read that at one point the kids were taught about the founding fathers of America along with their camp Bible study.

Whatever "real American living" meant to Davidson, in New York it was a concept that couldn't be so easily pinned down.  The fact that in the first two decades Camp Shiloh reached out to kids in Manhattan is culturally significant because of the persistent diversity there.  New York City had always been a place of ethnic neighborhoods and widely diverse populations.  There were kids at Shiloh from many different backgrounds, and the stories don't all look alike, and they aren't always simple.  There were immigrant kids, church kids, kids of different colors, kids from all kinds of backgrounds and even different religions.  The Church of Christ professed that it represented pure New Testament Christianity, so that was what kids learned at camp.  One of the things Eddie Grindley was doing was trying to convince Catholic or Jewish kids to come to camp and expose them to what the Church of Christ believed of the Bible.  There were quite a few baptisms, carefully chronicled each year.  I wonder about some of those kids who were baptized at camp--I know I can't find and interview even a small fraction of them.  I wonder if changing religious viewpoints was complicated for them as they returned to their homes.  Was it wonderful?  Difficult?  A combination?

Ray and his sister were young Jewish kids from Yorkville in Manhattan.  Ray says he loved the city and his Hebrew faith.  They lived in the area where Eddie Grindley preached at nearby Eastside church, and so, just like Eddie always did, he came along and invited all the neighborhood kids to camp.  Ray's mom sent both of her children.  It was a strange experience for Ray and his sister to attend a Christian camp, but he says even as faithful Jewish kids they liked it enough to keep coming back.  But then everything changed. When the two children suddenly found one summer that their single mother had passed away, the only thing for them to do was to stay at camp the whole summer and wait to see what would happen to them.  Eddie arranged an adoptive home for them, people from another Church of Christ congregation not too far away.  Quite obviously Ray's life changed completely.  It was hard for him to adjust to new foods, new family, and, he says, new religious and cultural identity.  But he believed in the importance of adaptation.  And although it was hard for him to give up the faith of his biological parents, he was baptized as a teenager.  He grew deeper in his new faith, married a Christian woman, and now serves on Shiloh's board.  He says he feels his choices honor both his biological and adoptive parents.

The framed words say in Hebrew and in English
"Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Your God Is One God"

It's a good story.  I wonder how many more are out there and what they sound like.

Eddie Grindley was the public face of Shiloh in its young days, although he had lots of people who worked with him.  In an interview with Frances, I learned more about Eddie's desire to reach out to Manhattanites year-round, when camp was not in session.  I have read that he truly desired to create a support system for kids who had been baptized at camp.  But I'm also gathering that this was harder to do than he'd hoped, because fundraising needs kept pulling him away and because the community he was trying to build was in flux a lot of the time.  He tried to get Shiloh counselors to stay in the city to help.  In his unique way of convincing people to do things, Eddie asked camp counselors and art teachers and canteen directors, people like Frances, to stay in the city after camp was over.  They would move to the New York City area.  The women who said yes lived in a rented house together and went to help Eddie with his church, Eastside Church of Christ.  Eastside church was in the heart of bustling, immigrant-settled Yorkville in Manhattan, the same place that Ray was from.  Frances would work as a teacher during the week and help out with the church on weekends:

She doesn't have strong memories of Shiloh kids at Eastside, but it was through her work at that church that Frances did have a significant life-changing encounter.  At Eastside she met her husband, Ernie.  Ernie had responded to the church's evangelistic tract that he found stuffed in his pocket after a rough night.  He found that tract and began to think about it.  The next day he cleaned himself up and came to Eastside.  He became a regular member, and it was there he met and married Frances.  Eddie got him a job as a groundskeeper at Camp Shiloh, and Ernie often went with Eddie to encourage people who needed it.  They'd say, "Let's go jack up So-and-So," meaning go and lift that person's spirits.  Years later Ernie and Frances's son would meet the man who stuffed that tract into Ernie's pocket, and the two would have a tearful reunion.

Frances loved her time at Camp Shiloh and Eastside, and loved living in part of the big mansion that Davidson had purchased, while Ernie took care of the camp's grounds.

Eastside Church of Christ was sometimes billed as a follow-up program for kids from Shiloh, but it also was a place for a very diverse local community to gather on Manhattan's East Side.  One person who came to the church and encountered this community was Sam.  Sam discovered Eddie and Eastside while working in the city as an architect.  He soon found that watching Eddie constantly helping other people was affecting him, and later, too, his young wife, Flo.  They helped Eddie as he cleaned apartments, fed people, and provided basic services to local people in need, whether that person belonged to Eastside or not.  With Eddie's grinning approval, Sam had been adopted by a group of young gang members in the neighborhood who liked to meet in Sam's apartment.  Sam says to think of West Side Story when you think of those boys.  When Flo, newly wed and new to the city, came into the picture and took those young men to an art museum, she wore white gloves as she had been taught to do, but those boys roamed all around the museum and touched everything they were not supposed to touch.  Sam later tried to help one of the boys when he got into legal trouble.  He doesn't now know what happened to them.

City life was hard for Flo, who was from the country, and she missed the trees she had known before.  On the other hand, I've heard that lots of kids from the city, including Ray, were uncomfortable when they left the noise and the lights of New York City for the wide open spaces of camp.

Frances, Flo, and Sam all eventually left the area, but for a good while Camp Shiloh continued to draw its camper population from the connections that Eddie had made in the poorer east neighborhoods of Manhattan.

In the 1960s Eddie and Clinton Davidon both died.  In that same decade there was another Church of Christ born in the area, this one on Long Island.  It, too, would have a supportive relationship with Shiloh.  The West Islip Church of Christ had been created in 1964 when preacher named Dwayne Evans and a group of Church of Christ Texans decided to move to the Northeast where there was very little Church of Christ presence (they didn't realize there was already a West Islip Church of Christ there, but it was an instrumental church and they were not).  The new congregation of the West Islip Church of Christ were intent upon outreach and conversion of the local community.  But soon they began to realize the needs of the people in the area were deeper.  They sent a small group of people to live in East New York, Brooklyn, in one of New York's deepest ghettos.  

I talked to Don about this.  Don was among that group, and they rented East New York apartments to live like the people in the East New York community did.  In that place, Don would soon become profoundly aware of addressing the concerns of the East New York community he saw all around him, concerns including housing, jobs, and education, which had all suffered from external neglect and abuse for decades.  Men in suits would come into the area and proclaim that they could help the residents, but would often bring little more than words.  Trying to live like the community members did, Don and his schoolteacher wife Betty would not hesitate to vocalize their support of the people they worked with in the neighborhood, even in dangerous and deeply divisive moments like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike.  This strike pitted the local community against the teachers' union in an increasingly racial divide:

Schoolteacher Betty's button supporting
community control of the local schools.

Don's firsthand photo of the contentious school strike, 1968.

Don's group in East New York would be the precursor to Shiloh's year-round program, and Don would later serve as a consultant to that Shiloh program.  When new year-round staffers came to Shiloh's orientation program, it was Don that stood up and told them difficult things to hear about what it meant to serve in the neighborhood.  He said that kids in the community didn't need their love.  Their mamas already loved them.  He said what they needed was something else: education, skills, real and practical help.

Don and Betty were in East New York when the first Shiloh workers came to the area.  When the Shiloh program moved people into East NewYork on the street near where Don lived, Jo and her husband Bryan were among the earliest to move in.  Jo says she was naive when she first moved to East New York.  Their apartment was robbed almost immediately, and later even her baby clothes for her soon-to-come baby were stolen, too.  Still, she loved being there.  Her role was to care for her children, work with teenaged girls in the building, and do lots and lots of cooking.  She also had to scrub their apartment and then contend with some of the same frustrations as the East New York residents: roaches, rats, poor sanitation services, and other problems.  Jo says she was assigned the duty of smelling for smoke in the very real eventuality that the building caught on fire, a regular occurrence in those buildings.

While Jo was in the East New York apartment with her young family, and before he entered into a leadership position at Shiloh, Bryan coached a Shiloh basketball team of young men in the community.  That team became very important to Bryan and to the players as well.  When Bryan travelled, the team members looked in on Jo and her baby daily.  Sometimes the team went on the road together.  Here's the Shiloh team in Nashville college getting ready to play the freshmen at David Lipscomb College:

Nashville Banner article about the Shiloh team, the Renegades,
playing David Lipscomb College's freshman team, the Bison.
By the way, the Shiloh basketball team had
some of their things stolen while they were on campus.

Jo said her experience at Shiloh was a significant part of her life, and one that impacted her in many ways, including as a foundational part of her spiritual journey.

In these interviews and in this research, I've tried to explore moments of change in people's lives.  I've found Shiloh often is a point of change for people: of religious impulse, of identification with one group or another, or a dramatic change of location and circumstance.  And in all of those changes, the city itself has been changing, Shiloh's mission has changed over time, the Church of Christ has evolved, and Shiloh's financial circumstances have been variable at times over its history.  So it continues to be a story with multiple viewpoints and many tellers.  Each of the people I've interviewed has had a meaningful contribution to Shiloh's story, just as Shiloh has had a meaningful contribution to their own lives.


I'll tell you as I find out more. . .