Sustainable Alamance
Restoring Lives, Restoring Community
Each Wednesday at 1pm in a basement conference room at Beverly Hills Community Church off North Church Street in Burlington, a group of people gather to talk. Around the table, you may find pastors and parolees, practicing attorneys and recovering addicts, college students and retirees, former business managers and former gang members. This is the Kingdom of God in all of its diversity, and in these Wednesday meetings, church often breaks out. As one local pastor said:
“Sustainable Alamance is the best church I go to each week. And that’s saying a lot, since I’m the leader of a church.”
The numbers can fluctuate but each week with amazing regularity, 10 to 15 people sit at the table together sharing stories, struggles, insights, and wisdom gained during the course of life. Topics can vary, but usually they center around the challenges and joys of living both within and outside of community. Our purpose is to grow together, bridging the cultural chasm marked by division, alienation, loneliness, shame, and judgment—restoring lives and restoring community.
The challenges of being restored into the community after serving jail or prison time are foreign to most people reading this: needing a job to support your family, but not being able to find gainful employment because of your past, or desperately desiring to break free of old habits and “friends” while the only neighborhood you can afford to live in is a hotbed for the activity that first landed you in jail.
Most readers will not have experienced any of these challenges, and many have no concept of the uphill battle formerly incarcerated people face in order to simply make ends meet without returning to patterns of behavior that got them in trouble in the first place. Those readers wouldn’t be alone.
Founder Phil Bowers decided to leave the business world and start Sustainable Alamance 15 years ago when he first learned about the probation fees people are required to pay for the duration of their probation, and that the punishment for not making payments is often further jail time. The Catch-22 of this situation is that it’s virtually impossible—without help—for someone with a criminal record to find a job that pays enough to take care of these requirements along with rent, utilities, and other necessary life expenses. So, Phil decided to help.
Beneath the different life experiences of the people at the table, the ties that bind us tend to emerge during these weekly hour-long conversations. All are on equal footing—making this space feel like sacred ground. We all desire to truly belong, to find acceptance as the beloved child of God that each of us are created to be. We all face shame. We all deal with grief. We all want to thrive, to live abundantly, to leave the world better than we found it—to love and to be loved.
We celebrate milestones together, from birthdays to release dates. We mourn with those who mourn, we weep with those who weep. Recently, we celebrated a birthday while also lamenting the loss of a man who had sat beside me the previous week—he had been trying to get his life on track but, in the process, succumbed to his battle with addiction.
This ministry is not for the faint of heart, but it is for those with tender hearts softened by the Holy Spirit—to see the pain and suffering of God’s fellow children and to come alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ with not only our prayers, but our presence.
At Sustainable Alamance, the notion of “success” is closer to the upside-down ethic of Jesus’ Beatitudes:
“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.” (Matthew 5:3-4; 7 in The Message)
Success is finding a seat at the table based solely on your inherent, infinite worth as a member of God’s family. Join Sustainable Alamance in helping to restore lives and community, and you’ll find yourself part of God’s redeeming, Kingdom-building work in our local community. There’s no greater form of success, or blessing.
For more information, visit sustainablealamance.org, email Phil (phil@sustainablealamance.org), or join us at the table in the basement at 715 N. Church Street at 1pm on Wednesdays.
-Rob Wooten
