Rev Robert McCathern and His Hip-Hop Civic Park Church

Arthur Busch 0:07

You're listening to Radio Free Flint. Thank you for joining us. Today we have Robert McCatherine, who is from Joy Tabernacle in Flint. Welcome, Pastor.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Glad to be here. Glad to be with you.

Arthur Busch 0:21

I appreciate you coming and joining me. Now, in uh some of the the research I did, it called your church a hip urban church. How do you feel about that description?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Well, it it's pretty accurate. Uh, we've had the ability to draw a lot of young people. We've been able to, through our program, uh, to work with a lot of young men that most people would be afraid of or wouldn't put into the traditional church realm. So we've been able to work. So when people see our congregation, see our programming, they're usually surprised uh with the audience that we serve. The building is 85 years old.

Arthur Busch 1:04

Fill us in on what the church used to be and where it's located.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

The church was the community Presbyterian church. People who lived in the Civic Park neighborhood, the Presbyterians started the church. They stayed there till the families uh dwindled from that area to the change. The young people kind of left. And so it was a small uh congregation of elderly people, most of them 70 and 80, who held on as long as they could. And then we got together and they basically passed the torch for community development to us, which kind of described the spirit we still have for that community. It is about an 85-year-old spirit that we still care for the Civic Park neighborhood. They did a lot of things. However, they did give some of the homes to residents in that area. So there was a connection with the church that was there prior to us that helped build our relationship with the community. But many of them already had a relationship which was quite ironic in the fact that these were 70 and 80-year-old people who were never bothered by the change in the neighborhood. When we got there, many of the windows of the church were not locked when there was so much vandalism around the church, but nobody ever bothered the church because of the relationship that the community presbyterian had with the neighborhood.

Arthur Busch 2:33

Going back even further, the neighborhood has quite a history. It has a history that that dates back to Charles Stuart Mott and the General Motors Corporation.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

It does. It does. Those families are the families that were the first owners of the homes. It was a railroad that, believe it or not, where the mediums are, it was a railroad that came through there. They built, it was a planned neighborhood, one of the first in the country. They built it, I think, the whole neighborhood in less three years. And don't quote me on the exact time, but it was it was one of the first major ventures of the country and building uh subdivisions, almost like a uh prefabricated situation.

Arthur Busch 3:21

Mott needed housing because there were people coming and flooding uh Flint. They were living in shanty towns outside of Buick, and they needed housing uh for the people who were working in the factory. Your neighborhood became one of the first neighborhoods that was actually put together and gave Flint the feel of a company town.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

We just celebrated the centenue, uh the 100-year centenue of Civic Park, and we have redeveloped a five-year plan, first 100 years, and now we're defining what will be the next 100 years in terms of developing that area. We have what is called Umbutu Village with encompasses African and philosophical uh points, principles that as growing up in the 50s and 60s, it was the neighborhood that defines who we were and who we are. And so we're really trying to build a philosophical framework for redevelopment of a neighborhood based back on the principles of neighbor to neighbor. The Mbutu uh word means I am because you are. So we're trying to redevelop that very similar to the community schools concept that used to be in Flint. And uh very similar to that cohesiveness of the community. We're trying to redevelop that in Civic Park, and we've been pretty successful in bringing people in.

Arthur Busch 4:48

You're looking at building a community that's multicultural, is what it sounds like.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Absolutely. Not only multicultural, but that draws in businesses again. There's that corridor at Welch that we're looking at as could be one of the strongest African-American business sectors down Chevrolet, the Welch area. There's a lot of abandoned geo-usable businesses there. So we've been talking with people about reinvestment in that area as well. They've had a lot of demolitions to redefine Civic Park. And so we're we're looking at how we can make a difference in that neighborhood as a model for all of the neighborhoods that's invested in. So it's kind of a pilot project through the Ruth Mott Foundation. We're we are a community hub, considered a Ruth Mott community hub there.

Arthur Busch 5:44

You came from another city to come to Flint. Tell us about why you came to Flint and why you stayed.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

I came to Flint. I'd I'd preach periodically here as we talked about some of the elder voices, Pointer and Audridge and other preachers, but I used to come as a boy with my pastor, who had a lot of friends here. But over the years, I continued to come and preach in some of the congregations, get off the interstate, go to the church, get back on the interstate. I had never really rode around or knew a lot of people in Flint, but I came home for vacation. One of the pastors asked me to preach. I did. He asked me, could I stay? I was taking a month off from work. I was doing consultant work in Racing, Wisconsin at that time. So I agreed and found out that he was really resigning from the church and had some problems. So the church asked me would I serve as interim. So I worked with the people I was working with. I was doing consultant work from Racine, but I was doing it from here, and I decided to stay at the church. They asked me would I become their pastor. I had not planned to pastor again and just to continue to do social work, but I considered it. Nine months later, it really didn't turn out to be what they stated it to be. A group of people asked me, would I come? And so we started at the YWCA. Our first baptisms were at the YWCA, and a lot of transit people would come to our services. So it started then defining our social perspective of knowing Flint. But then I had a learning curve. I had to learn Flint, learn the wounds of Flint, learn all about Flint. And I learned a lot from young people's perspective of how they saw Flint, how their lives had been traumatized, the effects, so many different effects we can talk about. The Ritland, there's so many different effects that being around many cities, I never experienced nor knew a population to experience what the city of Flint had experienced.

Arthur Busch 7:58

Your church started meeting at the YWCA. Yes. Yes. That's a long ways from the River Jordan. You started with a core of people and you had left. You're a graduate of the uh American Baptist Theological Seminary. I believe that's in Nashville, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

That is in Nashville, yes.

Arthur Busch 8:26

You had pastored other churches before you came to Flint.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Yes, yes. My first church was 50 miles outside of Nashville. It was uh the Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chestnut Mountain, Tennessee. After you came to Flint, what was it that drew you to stay? What drew me to stay in Flint was such a dire need, particularly for help, as I said humanitarianly. I had never seen in my lifetime the infliction of the soul that I experienced here. And it was people who had never seen people come home from work in their lives. Uh, young people who had never saw that, young people who had been on Ritland and then dropped off of a Class C drug. I started learning the dynamics of a city that was kind of had a class system. It was the general motor workers, it was the richer, and those who never made it into General Motors was another class. So it was very similar to patterns that I experienced in Africa in terms of class systems. As I said, it was a learning curve, relearning everything I knew about social work, everything I knew about Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. I had to relearn it, redefine it to be able to do real effective ministry here.

Arthur Busch 9:55

You have traveled across the globe to places like Brazil and Africa to do work. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah, it's it was a rich experience. My first journey was to uh Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, and it was a life-changing experience. I had never been to Africa. It excited my DNA, knew I was home. And it was like when I was young, going down South Tennessee, also is where my family uh roots are, Lebanon, Tennessee, about 30, 40 miles outside of Nashville. But it was like going home for the first time. And uh, and it was just once again another learning curve that we work hard now to bring a lot that I learned in Africa, philosophically, communally, tribal, back to the Civic Park in the Flint area. It's turned out to be real successful. I think when we lost the cohesiveness during integration during times when we were basically lost the concentration and neighborhood, I believe that the reason why we're not effective as a community is because we lost the power of the neighborhood. The neighborhood creates community, which is a combination of all neighborhoods. When you lose neighborhood, and that's why we have a problem in getting people to community health, because we skipped over the neighborhood health. I'm probably changing the subject, but that is the subject right there.

Arthur Busch 11:31

Yeah. The neighborhood. Yeah. What happened to them? And you've just explained uh part of it. Well, what's it take to fix it? Is the question. Can it be fixed? And if it can be fixed, what does it take to fix the neighborhood?

SPEAKER_00 11:47

It can be fixed. Part of the fixing, we're working on an Mbutu village, which is once again the philosophical Mbutu means I am because you are. And that's that humanitarian connectedness that we've lost as a community, as a neighborhood. And we have community health, we have community focus, but we lost that neighborhood where not well, the same concept. It takes a village, it takes a neighborhood to raise a child. And we lost the village concept of raising children, of being accountable for humanitarian. There is a thing that Mark Odom wrote, I think that's his name, but it's what I quote a lot. It says, he drew a circle to shut me out, heretic rebel, a thing to plow. But love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that took him in. And that's that Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. I tell people all the time: the reason why you see graffiti on the walls is because somewhere we missed them being able to actuate or see themselves accomplished in our social setting. So they recreate their own subculture. The reason why you see the sagging pants and the white t-shirts is because we excluded them for academics from football, from coaches, from things that they needed to really make neighborhood, to make community. So they created a subculture because everyone has to have the theory of human need, actualization. So if I can't get it in your setting, I recreate my own. So that goes back to why we're rebuilding our neighborhoods to give people that self-a sense of um actualization in their own setting.

Arthur Busch 13:43

I mean, your neighborhood isn't exactly in the south part of Flint or or uh the north north end, it's more west side. Those neighborhoods are probably gone forever, aren't they? Passing on now, but there has been a want to recreate that.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Exactly. That is part of why we're working with the Mbutu village. When the migration of black people came to Flint, they it was because of segregation that they lived in their areas. But in those areas were strong families, it's still resembling that today. They all know each other, they know their roots, they know their family roots. It was uprooted. It left a tremendous void in terms of collective power, economical power, power, uh, collective power of black America, who I always say that the four parents came here thinking it was a promised land, it turned into a wasteland. And when you ask me why do I work here, it's because what was supposed to have been a promised land for many African-American families had become a wasteland for their descendants, which they would turn in their graves if they knew what happened here. And coupled with the poisoning of even of the water. That's where my heart is for the people here. Uh, as I said, human suffering here is greater than I've seen anywhere. It's concentrated. Back in the day, they put the kids on Ritland, many of them. And then that's a Class C drug. So the weed smoking is just self-medication that they were, I mean, it's just a vicious cycle that it takes a humanitarian effort, heart, and commitment to bring back Flint. It can't just be from building buildings, it can't be just um redeveloping homes. We've got to redevelop lives.

Arthur Busch 15:46

One of the things that's really hip about your project is that it's multiracial, that the people that you're trying to connect are not just African-American people, they're white people. And your statement about what their grandparents could see what happened applies equally as well to many Southern migrants who came from Arkansas and Tennessee and Missouri as my family did, only to see the promised land turned into something that wasn't so promising. Exactly. And so this is a problem throughout the community.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

That's why I qualified humanitarian with reference to what you're absolutely right. It's a humanitarian injustice with the so many factors that happen here. I see that we have a strong relationship with the Central Nazarene Church, with the Wesleyan churches as well. Through the water crisis, we've joined in many ways, many projects. But I do see, particularly in the last two years, that pulling back from mainstream society, recreating a system of actualization is the best way I can put, even with Christian nationalism. Again, it's people who feel uh left out of a system.

Arthur Busch 17:10

You came to Flint, you saw a community that was in tremendous need, and that's that's your game. That's that's what you felt you could best contribute to the area, and you started this little church, and eventually you ended up in Civic Park. Correct. And then you started programming, but before you got to Civic Park, you ended up in a building, I believe it was on Hamilton. That's correct. Next door to New Pass, which is a a rehab center, basic, but it was also a place where we where the county, where the county could take and put people instead of put them in jail, they could put them there, they would get treatment for a lot of different problems. You ended up next door to that place. We did.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Was that by chance? It was definitely by divine. I called it, you call it chance, I call it divine uh orchestration because God told me to go out and engage my neighbors, and I walked out and I said, There are no neighbors. And basically, he told me to look at Job Corps behind and look at New Pass. So I did. I went and talked to the director there. I talked to a lady who was there as a consultant. She connected me with the director, who's still the director now, and they allowed their clients to come out on Sundays. And sometimes we'd have 30 or 40 uh young people who would come along with them, would come their families. And so I began to recognize there's three and four generations of unchurched people in Flint. We start having meetings for them on every Friday. We worked with them. Many of them are still a part of our ministry. It started changing the dynamics that makes us the hip hop thug church. Many of them followed us, many of their families followed us to where our new location. The new location, oh my God, there were shootouts in the parking lot. There was, uh, it was so crime-ridden when we went there. But many of those young people were the ones that have now helped to rebuild the neighborhood. They own homes there, they're reinvesting in the neighborhood. The young men to get work, they were living in their cars, they were living in all kinds of circumstances, trying to get employed. These kids had never for a couple of generations seen anybody come home from work. This is when Flint went into the scrapping. There were really no jobs. And so it's that period when there were no jobs here. Well, we raised generations with work, no work ethic. And so we had to build a work ethic, uh, continuity in coming to work, how to come to work. And so that's we defined our programs based on what was needed in the community. We didn't come and bring programs to fix the community. We assessed what was needed. The University of Michigan said they would walk with us for 10 years in helping us. So we have social work classes that meet their own before the COVID. They would meet health classes, health interns. We have interns from the University of Michigan, interns from the uh Wayne State University, that it really made. We had the Ford Split, which is a Nazarene program, 30 and 40 and 50 kids who would do their summer work. These were uh white kids from all over. And it kind of reconfigurated and redefined the Civic Park neighborhood. So it is a different neighborhood. It does embrace all races now. We have white families moving back into the area as well as black professional families moving back. What makes our work so real and effective to young people is they always say real, recognize real. So it's that soul approach that is that missing frontier. People want, you can't, you can't reach them by the head. They have too many skills and resilience to change, but you can reach them by the human spirit. That's a universal, that's a humanitarian way that we we seem to have become so academic or so programmatic that we we we forget we're working with human beings, humanity, which is the same anywhere you go.

Arthur Busch 21:46

And you have worked with kids in other communities, uh in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Racine, Wisconsin, as well now as Flint. What is it about Flint that makes you think that we we can take gangs and dismantle them?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Well, it's he drew a circle to shut me out. Heretic rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the strategy, approaches to win. We drew a circle. We put programs that brought them back into the mainstream circle. The University of Michigan is a good example. Young people who had not finished school were invited to meetings at the university. So one day, one young man who hadn't finished school, he was going to a meeting with me and he had a briefcase. And I said, Where are you going with your briefcase? He said, I'm going to the university. So we've been working really in reconnecting those young people, even though some of them have gone back, got the degrees, some of them have gone to university of gone to the University of Michigan with the students coming and their familiarity with the neighborhood. The human problem is not as complicated as we make it when we realize basic values, do under others as you have them to do under thou shalt not kill. It's just basic civility. We got to just get back to the basics.

Arthur Busch 23:15

You've been pretty fortunate. You have a center that's operated from your church called the Urban Renaissance Center. And you have a bunch of partners in this project. Who are those partners and why do they give you some hope of addressing some of these deep-seated problems in the community?

SPEAKER_00 23:36

The partners are Genesee County Land Bank, that we partnered with them to get many of the demolitions in Civic Park, which is historical, so it was federally protected. You couldn't tear them down. We worked hard, one of the first in the nation to get it approved that many of the houses had lost their historical integrity. So that allowed them to be taken down. We worked with, of course, the city of Flint. We worked with Margaret Cato, Habitat for Humanity. We worked with a lot of people. When we first got there, they kept saying, not yet, there's no plans for that area. But I kept seeing abandonment, and I kept seeing retired people who had retired from General Motors looking across the street at nothing but abandoned houses. I knew that that was not fair, that was not right, that was not the way, uh, that's not the way at all that I had grown up. Um that's not American to me. That's and so we started doing fabricated windows and doors and covering the houses. That's when the Wesleyan churches helped us do a thousand boarded of houses. A lot of attention came back to Civic Park. We did uh corridors, so we would do the outside, the Hamilton and the Civic and the Chevrolet streets, and people would say, Oh boy, look at the neighborhood. It's it's uh coming back. But what it is is most people can't see beyond abandonment. So we started fixing up, doing landscaping, boarding up and painting houses, painting doors, taking care of the young people of the neighborhood, taking care of. And so with that, we generated uh partners with um so many others. The University of Michigan wanted to work in the community. So we had a meeting, and as I said, they've been working and partnering with us. We did asset mapping to see what was the value of the neighborhood beyond the blight, and from there we started working and teaching the neighborhood how to see the good in the neighborhood.

Arthur Busch 25:54

How much of Flint and its resuscitation is uh a matter of assets or lack of them versus the way people perceive their city?

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Flint is rich in assets. The civic park is rich, it's parks there, it's forests there, the way people perceive their city.

Arthur Busch 26:15

If they perceive their city as something that's abandoned and torn apart, is that a handicap to try to do what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

No, it's because basically, when young people who are included back into the process, they become protectors in the neighborhood. I've vandalism and scrapping and all those things have gone down drastically, is because now when you ride by, you see young people from the neighborhood working, cleaning the neighborhood, you see other people coming out, you see people you never met before coming out, giving water to these young people who used to terrorize a neighborhood. They put down hammers, I mean, they put down guns and picked up hammers. And that's possible in every neighborhood. Be willing to work with people. I've been crying out this can happen, and been willing to share our strategic approaches. Dan Kildee, congressman, has come many times back to the neighborhood which he grew up in and walked the streets with us, have met with a lot of the young people there. The mayor comes frequently and walks the streets with us. So it's doable. If we have an army of humanitarians, you don't even have to know social. You just got to value people again over property. I think that's what happened. We lost the value of people in the midst of prosperity, in the midst of General Motors. We lost the most valuable thing we had, and that is the community, the neighborhood, the value of people, the value of our young people. Most older people don't like young people anymore. Never heard of it before. They're scared of them. We lost that connection, and a lot of that was lost, as you said. They uprooted neighborhoods. When we're talking about the African-American community, oh, we're talking about East Flint. We lost the neighborhood, we lost the grandparents. I preached Sunday that what's missing is the elder boys. There is no elder voice for young people. There is no connection with them, with with the voice of wisdom anymore. They're on their own. The rap has become their teacher. There is no connectedness to the family. We have young people who we meet who have never set out at a kitchen table to eat with a family in their life. Unheard of, but that is becoming the norm, not a rare situation.

Arthur Busch 28:57

Pastor, some people think the answer is more police.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

Well, you build the wall, they just learn how to get over it. They just learn how to strategically figure to get over. And that's why I talked about reaching at the soul level, is because these kids have ran from police, fought with police. Their minds are so strong that you will not break, penetrate their minds. They're built for survival, but their hearts are still, and that's where uh beyond their faces, the book I talked about, the the voy inside is still there. He hear it because of traumatization, he hear because of all of what happened in Flint with the uh uh de-industruction, I can't say that word. All of the things that happened here um has affected people, but the human spirit is very resilient. And when people talk about resiliency, I think you said 98% says resilient. It is, it's that spiritual part that's still there, it's that spirit of living that is still able to be uh ignited or reignited and go forward. That's really the value we use in Civic Park, and it's working.

Arthur Busch 30:20

How has it affected you, the wire crisis? Personally, how has it affected you and your church?

SPEAKER_00 30:27

It has affected our church. There's many impairments from hearing. I instantly saw a difference in the children, their hyperactivity. Um, it has affected it. I, which is not a public knowledge, but it is now. I have multiple melanoma, which is a cancer that can come from contaminated water. I just had a stem cell transplant in April. So it has affected. If it's from the water, I don't know. You never know, but it can definitely come from the chemicals that's in the water can cause multiple melanoma, which is not curable, it's only treatable. So that's how it's affected me personally, but it's affected our church. I see the difference. And especially when COVID came, the government said, health department said drink the water. The government said, drink the water. So the hardest thing now is to get these people who were betrayed in the water crisis to trust the process of COVID. You trust the government? I trust God. It's so crazy now in this world that I don't trust the government. I have to trust that God will help me to come up with the best solution for people right now that is caught in a government that is breaking down right in front of our faces. Uh, a government that doesn't even know from one day to the next what it's going to tell us. Those people come to me, that community come to me for direction. Where do we go from here? What do we do? I've never experienced in 50 years of ministry. I've never experienced anything that my parishioners are going through. I would have never thought America would be where it is right now. Do you trust the water today? No, I still have problems wherever I go in the country drinking water. I still have trouble drinking water. I have trouble drinking bottled water because they say that can affect you in the long term, too. This is a humanitarian injustice beyond anything that I know.

Arthur Busch 32:48

And you're determined to fix some of it.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

You have to. We're created for good works. That's what everybody's got to turn it around. There's a thing to brighten the corner where you are. They put us on Hamilton. I mean, they put us on uh Chevrolet and Dayton on the corner. And so we go to brighten the corner where we are. Um that's our actualization. That's our contribution to working, to be a light and darkness. Um, the community Presbyterian Church for 80-something years were committed to that neighborhood. For the first 100 years, it is where it is. For the next 100 years, we have a front seat in helping to make the difference. We've acquired a lot of the land bank land to build an agriculture and self-sustaining neighborhood. We got 2.5 acres that we're really working. We have an agricultural house where we're really working to bring agriculture, teach people how to preserve. Most young people don't even know how to cook. They don't know. Kids eat all kinds of uh potato chips for breakfast. We need a lot of work in Flint. There is a resiliency, as you said, that I've never found anywhere like I found in Flint. That is one aspect of resiliency. People are making it, people are determined to make it. But that's that's fast, fastly eroding with the next generation, is because the neighborhood is totally, in most areas, gone. So these kids are coming up now with no governance, no rules, no respect for civility. That's the next generation of 12 and 13 and 14-year-old kids are the kids that we've got to reach because they're going to be a problem to handle if we don't do what we should do as a society, and that's uh raise our children instead letting them raise themselves.

Arthur Busch 34:57

Pastor Robert McKieron, I appreciate uh all that you've done for Flint. I appreciate the fact that you've taken your time uh to appear on Radio Free Flint and tell us uh all the good things that you have been working on and your hopes uh and dreams for the future. Uh you are uh uh what I would call a great American. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 36:21

Spent seven miles hiking the trails one gas, ain't cheating smokes no less It's a buggy road, it's a mighty push like taking a place from all the wrong books. It's a present making through the night. It's a good goblin This creep number It's a face past one way to lane highway One glimpse of the glitters, what you hold a face One taste to the water should it's down your spine Now that you finished yours No you can't have mine All that is a means like a broken arrow in a bad lead It's a rocket road It's a muddy bush It's like taking a face from business to make it through the night It's a good time This pretty um Right All right to mighty push It's like taking the page for more books It's a blessing of mind to make it through the night It's a good girl wheel This creak down right