The car pulled up at the steps of Alexander Hamilton High on Albany Avenue, a blue Chevrolet licensed to seat six.  The smiling youthful driver popped out; his wife was with him.  His children came pouring out too.  The rest of the people he had brought to the youth meeting also came out.  A car load of young men from the projects of Coney Island had been packed in with his family.  This scene was an often repeated one through the years at different places in Bedford Stuyvesant.  We had been journeying through the "deserts" of Brooklyn looking for a place to call home for a ministry that had grown too big for our initial site, the home of the Delmadges.

From the home of the Delmadges at Eastern Parkway, we traveled to P.S. 93, Old Boys and Girls High, Alexander Hamilton High (now Paul Robeson) and The Fulton Community Restoration Plaza.  For some places we made repeat visits; for others it was a single stop over a period of months.  To keep up with the locale of the Youth meetings you had to be in tune with the movement of a people that was not just moving from place to place but drawing a wider circle of people to the Gospel of Christ.  Some administrators wanted us to move out when they found out that we taught the way of salvation and not some other way.  We moved on and prospered.  We moved on and sought for a place to call our home.  We moved on with Christ and His promises.

Sunday worship services were more stable.  We started at Restoration Plaza in August 1987.  We moved to a small hall on Eastern Parkway when our lease was not renewed.  We moved again the following year to our present locale in March 1989.  Now we want to start all over again in the places we have left, opening groups in the neighborhoods to meet the needs of the new faces that have taken the place of the ones that have moved out.

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The snow lay thick on the ground.  The roads were slippery.  The morning was cold and biting.  Our young men were undaunted, our young women fearless.  They were doing what they had been doing for what seemed like countless Sunday mornings and Friday afternoons.  They were moving the necessary musical and audio equipment from the basement of the Delmadges’ home onto the church bus to go to the next meeting site.  Everything had to be ready for that day’s meeting.  It was time to move and get things going.  They had been doing it for years and it seemed like there was no end in sight.

The perils of living as a people on the move are many.  These young people were part of a body of people moving through the desert with their every possession seeking a place to call their own.  They were part of Christian Heritage Church.  Today, their jobs are different, but their spirit is still the same. 

And now from these journeys of faith, "The Vision Continues." circlerightarrow