Jim and Debbie Strietelmeier, a middle-class Christian couple, move with their three young children into the grittiest, most crime-riddled neighborhood in Indianapolis. They call this suffering on purpose. The goal is to bring hope and a haven to people in a place where nice folks don't go. Then, a curious thing happens: "Nice" folks start going there. The wealthy suburbanites dine side by side with people who don't even own a coat. They stumble in their efforts to connect, but people from both cultures get back up and try again. Leslie Collins' eyewitness account brings to life the people of Indianapolis' inner city, and with painful honesty chronicles their strengths, weaknesses and astonishing will to succeed. The story centers around Neighborhood Academy, a two-room school with a student population of broken children. First- through 12th-graders bring to the school their foibles, their infirmities, their hopelessly fetid home lives. There, they find a goldmine of love, acceptance and hope. All of this whild studying upstairs in a building where street prostitutes and their johns steal inside to do business in a cloak room. The story replays of the author's experiences after more than four years of interacting with the people in the neighborhood of Tenth and Rural streets. It is generouslly highlighted with the poignant and humorous anecdotes of Jim Strietelmeier, a gifted storyteller and devoted champion of the poor.

The Neighborhood

Tiptoeing into Poverty and Finding HopeBy Leslie Alig Collins

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Leslie Alig Collins
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-6719-3

Contents

Foreword........................................................viiMeet Neighborhood Academy.......................................1Suffering on Purpose............................................11The Neighborhood, Then and Now..................................25Sticks..........................................................33The Others......................................................45Visits to the School............................................57The Bus Ride....................................................71The Rules Rule..................................................77The Wealth of Having Nothing....................................85Hardly the End..................................................97Appendix The Ten Commandments of the Street.....................111

Chapter One

Meet Neighborhood Academy

As I step into the century-old church building, grit crunches under my Birkenstocks. I should have worn socks. I look down at the floor and feel sadness at the oldness of the cracked, black and gray diamond shapes that used to be decent linoleum. In their day, they were probably black and white. I trudge up the staircase holding the sticky wood banister while making a mental note to stop at the drug store for some hand sanitizer on the way home. The pharmacist will know the strongest brand. I tell myself that the railing was probably once polished to a high sheen. The first thing I remember thinking when I step into the lone classroom at Neighborhood Academy is: "Boy, they're going to need some bigger desks in here. Could somebody please give these people a leg up?"

* * *

Jim Streitelmeier, a pastor on the younger end of middle age, sits folded into a child-size chair. He and a teenager are hashing out the answer to a math story problem, seated at a table more suited to second-grader. Never mind. It's learning that's important in this Neighborhood Academy classroom.

Neighborhood. Sounds like a sunny cul-de-sac where happy kids play ball and ride bikes.

Academy. The word seems fitting for a private school in the suburbs where it's not uncommon for homes to have entire nightclubs in their basements and vast upper-floor suites for the seclusion and comfort of harried parents.

Neighborhood Academy is none of the above. It's smack dab in the middle of an area riddled with every known form of twenty-first-century urban pestilence.

When I started visiting Neighborhood Academy regularly in 2004, the entire school was one room on the second floor of a century-old church building that bore the scars of neglect. To get to the school room, I made my way down a cavernous hallway and past rooms scattered randomly with institutional tables, metal folding chairs and unmatched shelving. Here and there were sagging couches people had donated with the good intention of upgrading the church and school.

The academy status of this place comes from the heart of the school, not from a measure of its furnishings. Its students are salted away from the destruction and failure of inner-city public schools—not by distance, but by philosophy.

Going there wasn't easy in the beginning. I live a relatively comfortable life in the suburbs. People like me go to college, take our kids to Little League and soccer and are room mothers at school. We don't generally gravitate toward problematic situations if we don't have to. And so, making trips to the forlorn precinct of Neighborhood Fellowship Church and its tiny academy started out as a dismal task, especially on rainy days. I'm usually sad to begin with on rainy days. Driving south of the polite areas of town, I'd go from sad to depressed. Feeling shallow, I confessed this one day to Jim, who laughed out loud and said, "I don't blame you. I get depressed about it all the time. But Jesus Himself was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief."

The trips downtown were to become the highlight of my week, and its children a source of great joy and marvelous revelation. I just didn't know it yet.

On the face of it, the neighborhood just east of Tenth and Rural streets on Indianapolis' near east side is a place where gloom is etched on the faces of unkempt men who wear linty woolen caps even in the summertime and who roam the streets aimlessly as though they've stayed too long—like grimy roadside snow that has long since worn out its welcome. The inhabitants of the place have largely become as run down as the buildings whose heyday splendor came and went in the first half of the twentieth century.

For the children who live in this landscape, Neighborhood Academy is a gift. There is no tuition and no exam to exclude anyone. For most, it provides eight hours a day of relief from relentless trouble. After all, how much trouble can a story problem be to a kid whose parents are likely at home smoking crack?

Neighborhood Academy operates from the premise that there is promise in every household, street and block.

Jim and Debbie Strietelmeier and their three children could have stayed in the suburbs back in the mid-1990s, when Jim worked at a gas station in the upper-crust suburb of Zionsville, Indiana, cheerfully pumping gas and otherwise serving the people he knew from his church. The same people would later serve with him in the inner city—sometimes humbly and sometimes not.

While he held the gas station job, Jim was an intern for Zionsville Fellowship, a church with roots in the 1970s bolt from conventional religiosity to the simplicity of the early church. Those involved in this movement called it a revival or a renewal. His internship, combined with their childhood experience, graduation from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and missionary service in Africa, were the training grounds that prepared the Strietelmeiers to work in the trenches of trouble. They long to return to Africa, but their dark continent, for now, is urban Indianapolis.

The Bible was the source of their decision to take their children and move south to the city. They take seriously the passages that predict suffering for committed Christians. Jim points to one verse in particular: "For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him ..." (Philippians 1:29)

The Strietelmeiers couldn't just talk about suffering for the cause of Christ. Talk's cheap. They chose to live out the words. For them, that meant not waiting around for distress to come their way, but to seek it out. To choose suffering. Their deliberate walk into the storm landed them on east Tenth Street, where nothing much grows in the dirt that surrounds buildings and weedy parking lots. In their new neighborhood, they found one out of every five existing homes vacant, boarded up, or in major disrepair.

From this rude setting sprang Neighborhood Academy. Now, more than a decade later, love blooms there, packaged in an old building's worn walls. The Strietelmeiers and the band of fellow laborers have nurtured and grown a hub of kindness, warmth, and spiritual guidance in the midst of desolation.

Over the years, it became easier to go there, even on those down-in-the-dumps rainy days. I no longer trudge down there, feeling like an impostor because I drummed up a cheerful face while feeling a certain sadness over the sheer weight of poverty and trouble. After...