Damien McDaniel has been charged with murdering at least 18 people in Birmingham, Alabama, over the course of 14 months. His alleged victims include a firefighter, a UPS employee, and the mayor’s cousin, who was pregnant. Her unborn baby died too.
Police say Damien killed so many people in 2024 that he could be responsible for 10 percent of the violent deaths in Birmingham that year. And he allegedly did all that before he turned 23.
“Why?” some reporters asked author and criminal profiler Phil Chriotalmers.
“Some are lust killers,” he said. “Some are angry. Some are doing it for profit. There’s a reason why they do it and they’re all different.”
We could also add sin, neurological differences, or personality disorders to his list.
Or trauma. Here’s what else Chalmers said: “I’m sure he had a messed-up childhood. I’m sure he’s dealing with some issues of anger, he’s probably an anger retaliatory killer, caught up in the gang, street lifestyle. . . . I’m sure he’s had some issues with his father, or no father, or a bad father. The breakdown of family is usually the case.”
Sure enough, Damien was 5 when his dad was charged with murder—while he was out on bond for a previous murder charge. Currently, Damien’s father is in prison for trafficking cocaine and possessing a firearm.
“Eighty-five percent of black boys in prison come from a fatherless home,” pastor Alton Hardy said. “Kids grow up without dads, don’t finish school, join gangs, go to prisons. [More than 90] percent of the homeless in our country come from fatherless homes. The list goes on and on and on.”
Alton also grew up without a dad, in a sharecropping family in Alabama. He came to faith, and then to Reformed theology, while living in a poor neighborhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As he began working in ministry, he could see the fatherless pattern in his own life was being repeated in the community around him.
“Family is broken,” said Alton, who released a co-authored autobiography called Long is the Way in 2023. “I’ve seen more young boys cry over the lack of the dads being there.”
Here’s why Alton was worried, and why we should be too: In 2023, the CDC recorded that 70 percent of black babies were born to single mothers. Overall, 40 percent of births in the United States are to unmarried moms, a number that doubled across all demographics between 1980 and 2010.
Convinced that the breakdown of the family was the root of so many problems he was seeing, and convinced the gospel was the only solution, Alton moved to Fairfield, Alabama—which, by the way, is where Damien and his dad are from.
For the last 13 years, Alton has been preaching sin and salvation. He’s preaching that God is a Father to the fatherless. And he’s preaching life according to God’s commands—work hard, get married, and take care of your babies.
I’m not going to tell you that the neighborhood is having a wholesale revival. But I can tell you that Alton’s church is growing, and his Manifold Vision ministry has been teaching kids to read, buying and repairing houses for married couples, and working to keep a grocery store open in their food desert.
And I can tell you that the last seven babies to arrive in Alton’s church were all born to married parents. For the first time in decades, couples with baby strollers are walking the sidewalks in Fairfield.
The change is noticeable and, he’s hoping, replicable. Over the last 10 years, Alton has begun to teach other young men to make a difference in their underresourced urban communities all over the country.
Growing Up in the South
“I grew up in Sardis, Alabama, which is right outside Selma,” Alton said. “My mom and dad were sharecroppers. My mom had 12 kids by my dad. My dad had other kids outside my mom—too many to count. I don’t remember how many. And so I grew up in a typical sharecropping world. Some of my older siblings picked cotton and cucumbers and baled hay and all of that southern Mississippi living.”
Alton was born in 1966, about 100 years after the end of the Civil War. American slavery was particularly brutal on families. Many slaves in other places, like Brazil, could get legally married and have children without fear of separation. They could also get baptized, join churches, and practice their religion.
But Southern slave owners “neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block,” social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew observed. As a result, he said, “the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.”
That changed rapidly after slavery ended—from 1890 to about 1960, black men and women were more likely to have an experience with marriage (either be married, divorced, or widowed) than white men and women.
But they weren’t more likely to stay married or to raise their children together. By 1960, 25 percent of African American children were living with just their mother, compared with about 7 percent of white children.
Why the difference?
In 1965, assistant secretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was worried enough to do some research. He argued that Jim Crow laws in Southern states targeted black men, making it hard for them to lead their families. Sharecropping and low-wage jobs made it almost impossible for them to provide and difficult for women to depend on them. And as many African Americans moved away from the South and the extended families, churches, and communities that knew them, the social pressure to go to church, care for your family, or marry your pregnant girlfriend lessened.
Moynihan made it clear that he wasn’t talking about all African American families. Many were stable and thriving. Half had already pulled themselves into the middle class, a number that would continue to grow.
The fabric of the black family, then, was largely patchy, with sections that were strong and sections that were unraveling.
Losing Dad
“By the time I was 2 or 3 or 4, my mom and dad had separated,” Alton said. “They never got officially divorced on paper, but they separated. I really experienced a different kind of poverty: a single mom in the deep South living in a shotgun house with no plumbing—the bathroom or restroom was outside. I was growing up [with] no fathering touch that much. My daddy would come in and get us on a Saturday. We would go pick some sugar cane and stuff like that.”
The last time Alton saw his father on a regular basis, he was 11 years old. That year, his two older brothers began breaking into the local school to steal food. The cops knew who was doing it but couldn’t find them. So they grabbed another of Alton’s brothers, 13-year-old Andre, and stood him in the back of a pickup truck with a noose around his neck. The other end was tossed over a tree limb. Alton came home from school to see his mother on the ground, screaming, as the truck crept forward.
The sheriff let Andre dangle for a few seconds before easing the truck back. They asked Alton’s mom where her guilty boys were, but she didn’t know. So the truck pulled forward again. And then, a few seconds later, it backed up so Andre could find his feet and his breath.
“If we don’t find those boys, we’ll come back for the rest of you,” the sheriff told Alton’s mom. “Do you understand me?”
She did. Three days later, she left her husband behind and moved her children 450 miles straight north. They landed in a historically black neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky.
“Louisville was the first time we moved into modernization—first time there was a bathroom with a toilet seat and drinking water out of a faucet,” Alton said. “We never had none of that out in Sardis. We were still using the well when I left Sardis. And then in Louisville, I had neighbors. I had friends.”
Alton noticed his friends didn’t have dads at home either. In the 10 years he’d been alive, the percentage of black children living with single moms had risen from about 25 percent to 40 percent.
That’s a huge jump in one decade—but remember, it was the ’60s.
1960s
The ’60s were a time of upheaval, Alton said. “You had white flight. . . . You had the big feminist movement, you had the drug movement, you had Vietnam. There was a whole lot of stuff happening in the ’60s. And then you get prayer taken out of school, you get abortion on demand, you’re getting presidents killed in that time, you get King. A whole lot was happening.”
The social change was real, for both blacks and whites, and it wasn’t all bad. For instance, racial segregation was banned, voting discrimination practices like literacy tests or poll taxes were outlawed, and sex discrimination in education was prohibited.
But many of the changes moved away from a biblical understanding of how God designed the family to work. Some ideologies argued the opposite, teaching that family structures were a source of oppression. Flower children jumped on board, championing free love, the pill, abortion, and no-fault divorce.
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs introduced Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and the Head Start preschool program.
“When we were in Louisville, my mother was on welfare,” he said. “It was called AFDC. The social workers would come out once a month, if I remember correctly. And we never had beds—we just had mattresses. So we never had a bed like normal people because we were still really poor. But they would come out and they would make sure my dad wasn’t living there.”
To make sure families weren’t cheating the system, for a while women on government assistance had to prove there was no man around who could be providing a paycheck.
Even after that rule was struck down, assistance from the government was still weighted toward supporting a single mom—indeed, it still is.
“Having a man ain’t worth it, no way,” Alton’s mom used to say. She managed to keep the family going on her own for a few years, scrabbling by with government aid and income from cleaning houses. But when Alton was a sophomore in high school, she had a heart attack. Physically weak and out of options, she told him he had to go back south. He yelled and fought until she sent him 370 miles straight north to his sister.
Moving North
“Life is just coming at me fast,” he said. “I’m not living with my mom. I’m in a cold place. I’m in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I don’t really know anybody. I’m growing from 5′9″ to 6′2″ to 6′3″ and ultimately [to] 6′4″. And I have the Southern drawl and I’m fatherless. I’m poor. So all of this is just kind of coming at me.”
Over the next few years, Alton stabilized in an underresourced African American community in Grand Rapids. He went to school, met friends, even started on the high school basketball team. When his sister got tired of Grand Rapids and left the city, he was supposed to go with her. But he yelled and fought until she let him stay.
Alton spent 10 weeks alone in a home where the electricity and heat had been shut off. In Grand Rapids. In January. No amount of blankets, pairs of socks, or layers of sweatshirts could keep him warm. It was miserable.
Finally, one of his coaches began to get suspicious. He lived near Alton, and he noticed the lights were never on and hadn’t seen Alton’s family in a while. He started asking questions: “Hey, Alton, are you OK? Are you alone?”
Alton told his coach everything. In response, the coach didn’t alert child protective services. He didn’t call anyone in Alton’s extended family. He didn’t tell the school. Instead, he brought Alton home to his house and eventually over to his sister’s. A single mom herself, Lucille took Alton in for the rest of high school. She bought him food and clothes. She made sure he did his homework, cheered at every basketball game, and prayed with and for him.
She loved Alton and was so good to him that to this day, he calls her Mom.
“Living with this lady that I call my mom, I’m kind of getting reintroduced to Christianity again,” he said. “My mother was a Christian. My dad was a professing Christian. There was this air of Christianity around me, but there was no discipleship.”
Alton went off to junior college, then came back.
“I still know that there’s a God,” he said. “I’m praying. I’m reading the Lord’s Prayer. I’m praying the 23rd Psalm. So I’m kind of in that world, but I’ve really never been discipled. I just know, Don’t do certain things because this is not right to do.”
This shallow Christianity wasn’t much help when things got tough. Alton finished school and got a job delivering beer. Because he was black, his colleagues called him names, the cops stopped him once because they thought he stole the delivery truck, and one time a bar manager wouldn’t even let him in the door.
Outside of work, he met and quickly married a girl named Marilyn, but their marriage was immature and often hostile. She dominated the relationship, and both were frustrated by it.
“I got married because I was broken,” Alton said. “I was trying to fill holes in my heart—[to fill] fatherlessness. I didn’t know anything about being a man, and marriage didn’t work out well. I was a horrible leader.”
Nothing was working out—his family or his job—and it made Alton furious. He was mad at God, at himself, at Marilyn, and at white people.
“I was in my antiracism phase,” he said. “I was probably more radical than any antiracist person out there on the circuit right now. My first son’s name is Amaad Rashad Hardy. I was borderline black power. Why did I name my first son that? I was trying to get [as far] away from naming him any white associations that I could.”
Alton was drinking all the time. He was cycling through entry-level jobs. Then his wife filed for divorce, which put him on both sides of the equation—he was now a fatherless child and a childless father.
He couldn’t have been more miserable.
Turning Point
Around that time, Alton ran into an old friend from school, who invited him to his charismatic church. Alton went, and he loved the feeling of love and acceptance there. He kept attending, then began praying, then began serving in the church.
“I was always a reader,” he said. “If you know Grand Rapids, they’ve got bookstores everywhere. And there was a bookstore called Baker Bookstore that had a lot of used books. Our church was right next door to that Baker Bookstore. So I would go into Bakers almost every other day—at least three or four times a week.”
The bookstore staff started handing Alton titles like Calvin’s Institutes, J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, and A. W. Pink’s The Sovereignty of God. Within a few years, his theology no longer matched his charismatic church.
“I fully was Reformed in my thinking, in my soteriology, in how I was,” he said. “And if it wasn’t for the bigness of God, and God’s sovereignty, and God’s providence, I don’t know if I’d still be here. It was those two main doctrines that gave me the strength and the ability to trust God.”
Alton needed that perspective when his lead pastor got caught in a longtime affair. The pastor refused to step down, and the church split around him. Many of the elders planted their own churches, and Alton ended at one of those. But before long, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—a primarily white, Dutch Reformed denomination headquartered in Grand Rapids—came calling.
“The CRC was really starting to reach out and across racial lines, at least in Grand Rapids they were—trying to reach out to black pastors and black churches,” Alton said. “And the [elder] that I went with—the Christian Reformed Church began to call him to be an evangelist. And at this time I’m second in charge right behind him. I’m learning how to pray publicly. I’m learning how to get over my fears of public preaching. I’m learning how to preach. I’m learning how to just do a lot of stuff that I had never done before. And because he’s being pursued by the Christian Reformed, our church that he’s leading becomes a CRC church plant.”
Sandra
Around that time, Alton met a girl.
“I saw Sandra at a park—in Martin Luther King Park in Grand Rapids,” he said. “My heart leaped. I really didn’t start smiling and getting laughter until I met Sandy. Up until then, I was just a sad individual—fatherless, motherless. And she made me smile in a way that I probably hadn’t been smiling. I’ve been smiling ever since.”
Sandra was also divorced with two small children. She also loved to read. And she was also a Christian.
“He was always happy, always smiling,” she said of Alton. “He was never down or grumpy or anything like that. He was one of the few people that was always upbeat, happy and smiling and joking—somebody that when you see him coming, you look forward to it.”
A year and a half later, Alton and Sandra were married.
To be honest, this isn’t a marriage that should have lasted. This relationship was waving nearly every red flag—Alton and Sandra were on their second marriage, attempting to blend kids, and not earning a high income.
But they had one major statistic in their favor: They regularly went to church, and they took their faith seriously.
“Alton is the type of person who wants to reconcile,” Sandra said. “Oftentimes, if we were at an impasse of a conflict, he would say, ‘Let’s pray’ and grab my hand. I never turned him down to pray. Somehow the Lord would work in that. We would pray through it. And it would relieve the tension and help us be able to move past whatever it was. That happened multiple times throughout the years, especially early on.”
Alton was growing at home and in ministry. He started working for a larger CRC church in urban Grand Rapids—one that wanted to help the poor as much as he did.
But remember that simmering frustration? It was still there. It seemed impossible for urban, underresourced African Americans to get ahead. Black boys, especially, were behind in school, in finding jobs, and in staying out of trouble. Alton thought he knew what the problem was.
White Privilege and the Gospel
“I was a very ‘Let’s go to Civil War’ type guy—almost Malcolm X on some levels,” Alton said. “I thank God there was no internet and some of those old sermons can’t be found. Satan had almost convinced me that people who believe the Bible, who hold to the Word of God—especially my white brothers and sisters—are somehow incapable of loving blacks and doing good and justice and mercy among them.”
When he preached to his primarily white CRC congregation, Alton would tell them, “When you as a white person wake up in the morning, you’re like a fish in the ocean swimming in privilege. And no matter what you do, you can’t get rid of it. And you’re just born by God’s providence [like that]. So then you need to do the work of trying to undo your privilege of whiteness.”
He laughs, remembering.
“I was reading Romans, but maybe it just went over my head that those who have the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God,” he said. “And I don’t find anywhere where Paul is setting the Jews and Gentiles down and saying, ‘Well, you need to unlearn your Gentileness.’
“And I promoted this stuff. I preached it. I held to it. I made white people feel guilty for being white, for being born. Man, I played a part in that. And that camp almost convinced me that I should abandon biblical theology and take on a theology that basically didn’t hold to the Word of God at all—that that was my only hope of bringing about a shalom among the urban poor.”
This is such an easy trap to fall into because the historical sins of white Americans toward black Americans are painfully obvious. Slavery, and then Jim Crow, and then systemic racism like redlining or unfair hiring were so horrific and so long-lasting that it’s easy, and in some cases even right, to keep talking about repentance, restitution, or structural change.
It’s even necessary to address racism at church. The sinful bent in all our hearts means we need reminders to keep a constant guard over our reactions to, and assumptions about, people whose skin looks different from ours.
Alton loved the urban poor and badly wanted to help them. But as he spent time with them as a pastor, he started to see their hurt—and his own—from a different angle.
“There was a lot of wrong done to my family in the South,” he said. “In my dilemma of trying to solve these things, I did a lot of history reading about what went wrong: Why didn’t Jonathan Edwards speak out more on race and slavery and all of that? And why did Whitefield go back to Georgia and tell the state of Georgia to keep slavery? I’m screaming at God about that stuff.
“And I tell people this: If you’re going to keep studying history—and I encourage that you do so—the gospel and Calvary and Golgotha are history as well. Did you make your way over to the East and sit there for a while and just look up to the hill where they hung him wide?
“You gotta sit there and understand how the God-man would die for the ungodly. That’s history too. And I will tell you, in my own healing process, I finally made my way over there to Golgotha, to Old Calvary. And I just sat there in my mind at the foot of the cross. And I just wanted to know, Who are you? Why did you do it? And why is this the solution, the remedy for everything that’s wrong in this world?”
It was Tim Keller’s teaching that helped Alton understand.
“Jesus coming into the world and dying and being beaten and being bruised and being spat upon and being kicked and being scoffed and being laughed at,” Alton said. “When you sit there long enough, like I did—oh man, when I came out of that, I was reconciled to everybody. And that’s where reconciliation starts. That’s where it begins. That’s where it ends.”
Called to a New Ministry
Alton started dreaming of a movement of God among the urban poor. The epicenter would be the church, where the gospel would be preached, discipleship practiced, and Christian love expressed. From there, like it says Ephesians 3:10, “the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known.”
Alton could see exactly what that wisdom was in his context—an emphasis on biblical marriage, solid work ethic, and love for neighbor through education and economic development. He started calling it his Manifold Vision.
Key to all this, Alton knew, was the discipleship and leadership development of young black men.
“It was like the Lord had said to me, ‘I’ve called you for such a time as this to confront the urban woes—all the fatherlessness, all the gang banging, all the failing schools, all these young black boys dying,’” Alton said. “So go the men, so goes the family, so goes society, so goes the nation. Everyone knows that.”
Alton focused on the gospel and, after that, on calling black males to lead their families, communities, and churches.
He was doing this instinctually, knowing from his experience how hard it was to be fatherless and watching the struggles of the men and women around him. But studies also confirm it: We know children without fathers in the home are at greater risk of poverty, more likely to be abused or neglected, more likely to have behavioral problems and drop out of school. They’re more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to commit a crime and go to prison. They’re also more likely to be obese, develop fewer language skills, and have higher levels of stress and depression.
And that’s just the children. Studies show mothers whose partners are involved are more likely to get prenatal care, have healthier births, and run a lower risk of postpartum depression. They get more leisure time and experience less parenting stress than single moms. Fathers who stick around have better physical and mental health, are more active in their community, are more likely to find a secure job and less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs. They have more money, live longer, and report being happier than absent fathers.
If you want to make a clear, lasting, and healthy difference in an underresourced urban black community, you must start with the gospel. But secondarily, you could do a lot worse than encouraging men to be strong, faithful husbands and fathers.
Pushback
Right away, Alton ran into pushback—not from the African American community but from the white CRC church. The CRC was also offering him finances, people, and a building complex to develop into a church, school, workforce development facility, kitchen, and gym in the inner city. It was an unbelievable dream come true.
There was just one catch. This church was strongly egalitarian and told him, We can move ahead together if you stop talking about strong male leadership and stick with a message about race and reconciliation.
For Alton, it felt like they were asking him to ignore the elephant in the room. He wanted to talk about racial reconciliation. But he also had to talk about strong male leadership.
“Ninety percent of the issues I was seeing in our community were directly related to or caused by men who were not present,” he wrote later.
Convinced of that, Alton resigned from his job.
Two years later, he was offered an opportunity to work in Fairfield, Alabama. Remember that long, straight road north from Sardis to Grand Rapids? If you turned around at the top and headed back down, you’d hit Fairfield about two hours before you bottomed out again at Sardis. This was the wrong direction—it was the road south that Alton had been yelling and fighting against ever since he’d left.
But Fairfield was an urban, underresourced African American community. And the Presbyterian Church in America told him he could preach the gospel, encourage marriage, and emphasize male leadership all he wanted.
He said yes.
Fairfield, Alabama
Dion Watts is from Fairfield. He grew up there in a house full of women—his mom, his aunts, his grandma, and his great-grandma.
“I’m the oldest of my siblings,” he said. “My mom has four children by three different men. My sibling that’s right under me is the only one with the same mom and same dad. My dad obviously had me and my brother. And then he had two other children, that I’m aware of, by two different women.”
If you found that confusing, imagine a whole community with similar relationships.
Even for Alton and Sandra, who had been working for years with the poor in Grand Rapids, Fairfield was a surprise. Not only were the families a lot messier, but the buildings were more dilapidated. The public transportation was nonexistent. The city was more dangerous—on one crime analysis scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the safest, Fairfield ranks 1.
“The poverty here is on a different level than what I was even used to in Grand Rapids,” Sandra said. “This is not just a physical poverty—a lack of money, lack of resources—but there’s a mental poverty. Oftentimes people don’t even know how things should go. Women often will say they didn’t know that sex outside of marriage is not good. They never heard that before.”
Some people in Fairfield have never been to a wedding, Alton said.
“They don’t even know what a wedding is,” he said. “A kid in the high school asked, ‘What is that ring on your finger for?’ They’re not getting it from the music industry. They’re not getting it from the YoungBoys. They’re not getting it from the Drakes of the world and the Kendrick Lamars.”
Alton and Sandra got to work. Their first job was to meet everybody they could. Alton introduced himself as PA, for Pastor Alton.
“PA’s a very on-the-ground, can-spark-up-a-conversation-with-anybody type guy,” Dion said. “I remember that first group of guys that he interacted with that started getting connected to the church. He just kind of pulled up on them—they were out playing basketball in the street, and he just walked up to them and started sparking conversations with them.”
He’s still like that, said Phaye Wilson, who is now the director of development for Manifold Vision.
“Pastor Hardy, when I say boots on the ground, I mean, boots on the ground,” she said. “He is walking up and down the sidewalk. We can barely get through a meeting because if he sees someone on the street, he’s like, ‘Hold that thought’ and he’s out there, evangelizing and ministering.”
Phaye grew up in Fairfield and met her husband in the mall while she was shopping for a prom dress. They’d been dating for a year when she got pregnant.
“Once we got pregnant with Avery, there was just an innate feeling [that we wanted] something different than what we were used to,” she said. “We really just wanted something different for our son. And so we decided that we were going to get married.”
Phaye and her husband had no healthy examples of what marriage should look like.
“My mother was very aware of that,” Phaye said. “She told me, ‘You don’t have to marry him. We can raise this baby. I’ll help you.’ I don’t know if it was my rebellious nature at that point, but surely it was a move of the Holy Spirit, because marrying my husband is one of the best decisions that I’ve ever made.”
Phaye and her husband, Tory, were already living in Fairfield when Alton planted Urban Hope Community Church. In the borrowed fellowship hall of the local Episcopal church, with no air conditioning, Alton began preaching. Dion was there, with no idea he’d one day be Urban Hope’s director of ministries.
“We had to do all this setup and tear down,” he said. “We had these ugly plastic yellow chairs. [Alton] had this whole little portable projector kind of screen. We were using YouTube videos for our singing and worship. Sometimes commercials would come on. It was a rough experience, but the preaching—Pastor Alton’s a strong preacher. The Word of God just did what the Word of God does, which doesn’t return void.”
Alton preached the gospel from top to bottom. He preached sin—and included in it sexual sin, abortions, lack of work ethic, and bitterness. He preached salvation that comes from Christ alone. And he preached sanctification—that every square inch of the world and of us belongs to Christ, and that only through him can we live rightly, forgiving each other, working heartily as unto the Lord, and leading and caring for our families.
That can be a jarring message for a community to hear. It’s a little easier if it’s coming from somebody who loves you like a father.
“I knew that my life, my growing up, was so rocky and so hard because I didn’t have my dad,” Dion said. “And I didn’t know how to be a man because I needed a dad to teach me. And so when [Alton] came with his church and the emphasis on strong men—that tugged at my heart. I wanted to be a strong man. I wanted to be a good husband. I wanted to be a good father. And so that message resonated deeply.”
Hard, Slow Ministry
Alton started by preaching expositionally through the book of John. Growth was slow, sometimes nonexistent. Lives weren’t being dramatically changed. The people he was ministering to kept losing their jobs, doing drugs, and getting arrested.
“PA was really discouraged,” Dion said. “He was about to quit. He was like, ‘Yeah, this ain’t working.’ And God just showed up. There was just a move of the Spirit on that Sunday. There was conviction of the Spirit, there were tears, people were confessing their sins in front of everybody.”
That happened more than once—that when Alton was really discouraged, the Lord would give him an encouraging interaction, a good conversation, or a new face in the congregation. He never did quit. Instead, he started a program to help high school dropouts earn their GED. He started a basketball league to meet more young men in the city. And he started a program called Detox, where he unpacked the gospel for guys in rough situations—guys who had been to jail, had killed people, or were selling drugs.
Sandra also began working in the local schools, where in 2022, about 17 percent of the high schoolers were proficient in reading and language arts and just over 1 percent were proficient in math.
Three-quarters of those kids are economically disadvantaged. Nearly 20 percent are homeless.
“I see these young guys in my community—I saw one yesterday that had a gun tucked into the sleeve of his jacket just hanging out, like an extended clip,” said Jacquez Young, who moved into Fairfield in 2015 to be part of Manifold Vision’s leadership program. “He’s a drug dealer who sells in the neighborhood. So you still see that, or you see extreme poverty. One of my neighbors lives out of his car. His house is uninhabitable. And he’s with his mom living in his car, with a bunch of stray cats. We’ve witnessed people get gunned down on the corner. All those things are happening and obviously those things—they break you, they make you weary, they make you want to quit, make you want to give up. But it’s the Lord ultimately who upholds us.”
As Alton began to grasp the magnitude of Fairfield’s challenges, he knew he needed help. One of the places he looked was across the railroad tracks. Or, as they say in Birmingham, over the mountain.
Over the Mountain
If you’re a PCA ministry looking for assistance, it helps to be in Birmingham. It’s in the Top 10 list for cities with the most PCA churches, including two of the 10 largest. There are roughly 13,000 PCA members in the metro area.
Nearly all of them are white.
That would be tricky anywhere, but in Birmingham, where Martin Luther King Jr. penned his famous letter from jail, it’s even more complicated. And the PCA has its own history with race—even though the denomination was founded after the Civil Rights Act, some early churches barred blacks from membership, participated in white supremacist organizations, and taught that the Bible sanctioned segregation. In 2016, the PCA voted to officially repent for racist actions.
Still, it’s safe to say race relations in Birmingham are sensitive.
“I asked Alton, ‘Would you come just share with us your perspective about what the church can do to minister to those that are hurting in the urban core?’” said housing developer and Faith Presbyterian Church elder Steve Ankenbrandt. “And the conversation was gospel-driven.”
Alton told the guys, “You shouldn’t feel guilty because of privilege. It was God who gifted you. You didn’t get to choose your parents. You didn’t get to choose where you were born. You didn’t choose your school. Those were all gifts from the Lord, and the question from the Lord is ‘What will you do to steward those gifts?’”
“That changed the whole tenor of the conversation,” Ankenbrandt said. “And at the end of our meeting with him, everyone was asking, ‘What can we do with our gifts to serve you?’”
Alton had lots of ideas. Over the years, under his direction, the established PCA churches in Birmingham have helped bring his Manifold Vision to life. Part of that was purchasing a storefront and remodeling it into a permanent space for Urban Hope to hold worship services, Bible studies, funerals, and weddings. The ministry quickly stretched to include tutoring children in the public schools, running summer programs, and bringing lunch to teachers. Manifold Vision staff and volunteers have held GED classes, financial literacy classes, and cooking classes. They’ve helped to provide jobs and transportation to jobs. They’ve drawn two new businesses into the community. They’ve purchased and remodeled a handful of homes so married couples in the church can root themselves in Fairfield.
Today, Urban Hope has a membership of around 70. They also have five full-time staff members working on the many facets of the ministry.
You don’t do that without enthusiastic outside support from people who have resources. I asked PCA member and attorney Greg Mixon why he’s given so much time and money to this.
“One, they are on the ground in the area where there is desperate material need and spiritual need,” he said. “Two, they preach the truth and are unashamed and unafraid of it. And three, they genuinely care about the people and want them to be a part of their congregation. All three of those things are extremely unique, and to have all three of them in one place is shockingly unique.”
Sam Tortorici, former CEO of Cadence Bank, member at Covenant Presbyterian Church, and chairman of the Manifold Vision board, agreed. He pointed to some advice Tim Keller gave Birmingham leaders a few years ago: “What you do is you make sure you get the most gospel-centered pastor, and then resource him, resource him, and resource him. That’s the secret sauce.”
But it’s one thing to convince a room full of well-resourced, gospel-loving, Reformed guys to support an African American PCA pastor in the hood. It’s another thing to convince the hood.
The Hood
“When I was in school, Fairfield had a poor reputation,” Jacquez said. “So it was never a place that I wanted to go to unless we were doing something illegal with drugs or something like that, we would come in and come out.”
Jacquez went to high school “over the mountain.” Hoover High School is a good school, where 18 percent of the students are enrolled in Advanced Placement courses and the average SAT score is 1250. While there, Jacquez learned how to play football, drive drunk, and be intimate with girls.
When Jacquez was a senior, he went to a track competition in Boston. While there, he learned that his cousin, who’d been living a similar lifestyle, had been killed.
“For the first time in my life, it made me contemplate if that was me, if I had died living a similar lifestyle, where would I be?” he said. “And I remember being in the hotel room and just thinking, Man, that was me, if I was to have died, then I was just unconfident that I would be in heaven . . . So out of fear, I picked up the Bible in the hotel room and started reading it. I took it with me. And I don’t know if I was supposed to have taken the Bible, but I took it with me. . . . And then from there, the Lord was just working through the power of the Spirit.”
While Jacquez was at Troy University, he got involved with Campus Outreach, a college ministry founded by a long-time Birmingham PCA pastor, Frank Barker. And Campus Outreach introduced Jacquez to Alton.
Alton was inviting young men, especially young black men, to work for a year or two in Fairfield with him—to learn how to follow Jesus and how to lead others, from their churches to their families, to do the same.
“When I thought about Fairfield, I thought about my family,” Jacquez said. “When I saw it, it was a mission not only for serving Christ, but also being able to serve people that in a lot of ways reflected my family.”
Jacquez was in. He and about 10 other guys moved into Fairfield in what would become Alton’s first class of the Urban Hope Leadership Initiative. They were young, energetic, and fired up about changing the world for Christ. I asked how that first year of ministry went.
“Very frustrating,” he said. “Things that we’re completely oblivious to, doing ministry in the context of the college campus—simple stuff like people reading—you just take that for granted. I remember one time trying to set up a Bible study in our house with some of the other college guys. And we had a guy that was a native of Fairfield, and we tried to read the Bible with him. And I mean, he couldn’t read basic words. So essentially we had to try to put it on the whiteboard and just kind of break it down, do one verse at a time and just try to, you know, go really slow.”
Ministry in Fairfield was unbelievably slow and difficult. And yet eight of those guys stayed for a second year. When that was over, three of them ended up buying houses in Fairfield. When I asked why he was still there, Jacquez told me a story.
“Recently, I was cutting my grass, and my neighbor was flagging me down,” he said. “He told me how he had been robbed by some young guys. He knew their mom, and him and their mom got into an altercation. He said some stuff about their mom, and they took it personally, and they came and robbed him. He’s probably late 60s, and was getting beat up by some younger guys in their 20s or even younger. And then one of them shot him in his leg.
“He was so mad about being shot that he was like, ‘I’m gonna kill him.’ He’s like, ‘Next time I see him, I’m killing them.’ As best as I possibly could, I tried to point him to how killing them wasn’t the answer—that if he killed them, they were likely going to come and get vengeance. And the way that people act nowadays, it won’t stop with just you. It may end up being multiple bodies or more people in his family that are now in danger because of that. And I took him to [the Gospel of] Matthew and I was like, ‘Hey man, I don’t know where you stand as it relates to the Word, but . . . you shouldn’t fear the one that can kill your physical body. You should fear the one that can kill your physical body and throw your soul into hell.’
“And I was like, ‘I don’t know if you recognize this, but there is a God that has created you and he’s made you. He’s made you for purpose. Your life is not intended to be lived in this way.’ I prayed for him—and he didn’t go kill him.”
Because Jacquez was mowing his lawn—the most ordinary and mundane of tasks—someone in Fairfield is still alive. Maybe multiple someones.
That’s why he stays. And yes, the drug dealer still stops by the neighbor’s house, and that’s hard for Jacquez and his wife, who have three children, to watch. But there have been other conversations with this man, Jacquez said. “He’ll just say, ‘Man, I see you. I see you with your family. I see you taking care of your family. Much respect.’”
When another Urban Hope member works in his lawn, the neighborhood kids like to come over—because they haven’t seen men working in the yard, caring for their homes and families, and the kids are intrigued.
There are a hundred other ways that Urban Hope is making the Christian life visible in Fairfield. Young women walk together in the park in the afternoons, and the neighborhood kids ask if they’re church friends. When young married couples walk together with babies in strollers, the neighbors comment that they’ve never seen that before.
“This year we did a little Starbucks gift card for the teachers,” said Merill Wilson, who joined Urban Hope and began teaching in the Fairfield schools about five years ago. “And one of the teachers was like, ‘Your church is always coming up here to show that they support us.’ There are a lot of ways that you see little things of morale that go a long way, especially in a hard environment.”
When Merill first introduced her husband to her students, they were thrown off by their shared last name. They asked Merill if he was her brother.
No, she explained. When you get married, the wife typically takes her husband’s last name.
Those examples—of mowing your lawn, of going for a walk, of introducing your spouse—are so tiny that it’s hard to imagine them as witnessing. Really, they’re just the beginning.
“There’s one student that was in our summer program, and has since gone to college and was studying abroad in Europe,” Merill said. “And it was like, ‘Who would have thought that you would be able to go do this?’ I’ve had a few parents be like, ‘I want to come to y’alls church. I’ve heard good things about it,’ or ‘I saw that they opened the grocery store.’ The grandmothers were so excited about a grocery store in Fairfield because they’re like, ‘We’ve always had to go elsewhere. I’m so glad that your church did that.’ Or, ‘That’s amazing that the Lord used Urban Hope to do this thing.’”
Those are reactions from people who live in the community, and some of them are showing up at church, asking questions, and coming to know the Lord.
Alton would love to see change not only in Fairfield but in urban communities all over the country. That’s why, since 2015, he’s been inviting new college grads like Jacquez to spend a year or two living, working, learning, and serving with him in Fairfield.
“We emphasize strong men,” Dion said. “We emphasize marriage and family and doing it God’s way. We emphasize sexual ethics and the impact of music in the culture. And African American Christians—black men—they resonate.”
They absolutely do. Of the 26 young men who have completed the program so far, fewer than four grew up with married parents. But as of today, 24 of them are married or engaged.
“These guys don’t want to leave,” Dion said. “They moved into the community. So they’re husbands, they’ve had children, they’ve been a part of our church for so many years. Some of them are deacons in our church. Because it’s a life: the church ain’t for a season.”
The Church
The church ain’t for a season. Urban Hope members keep coming back to that. Everything they do, from teaching financial literacy to offering a community cooking class, is tied to the church.
“I have been in the nonprofit world for almost 20 years now,” Phaye said. “I have been on the ministry side, and I’ve been in the secular nonprofit world. I’ve seen it from both sides. And it’s funny, because every nonprofit that I have ever served, there is this idea that they have the answer. ‘We are the ones that have the answers. We can solve the world’s problems.’”
This time, Phaye knows her organization—the church—does have the answers.
“One of the things that lends to the success of our ministry is that the church is the foundation of what we’re doing—regardless of what our ministry action is,” she said. “The Lord has been our home base—because we know that anybody can provide tutoring, anybody can open a grocery store if you have the money, anybody can provide an education, or anybody can provide housing—but when there’s no foundation of the church and the gospel, if it’s just a provision, there’s no change.”
Urban Hope is aiming for deep change.
“When we’re putting married couples into homes, we want them to be a worshiping, Bible-believing, Bible-learning couple, not just a couple that’s just taking up space in that house,” Phaye said. “We want them to have children and bring their children up in the Word. The church is the foundation of what we’re doing—the church and the Word of God. And a lot of organizations, I hate to say, don’t really have that component. It’s just a provision.”
You might even say that offering provision without the Father’s love and truth is a little like a baby daddy sending a child support check once in a while, showing up for a weekend visit, or remembering to call on your birthday.
What Alton is doing is fathering an entire community. Over and over, people told me that Alton, who is 6′4″ and big, who laughs all the time, who will see you coming down the street and run out of the church to talk with you, who doesn’t hesitate to tell you the truth, is like a father to them.
Even better, he’s using fatherhood to introduce whoever he can to their Heavenly Father.
Why the Father Loves You
It’s sad for kids to grow up without a dad. Dozens of studies have proved that those children are more likely to get into trouble and less likely to succeed. But it’s also a theological problem.
“I grew up hating my dad,” Dion said. “He abandoned us. I just felt rejected and I didn’t understand why. I’m a good kid. I’m doing well in school. I graduated salutatorian in my high school. I did well in sports, went to college. I just couldn’t understand why my dad wouldn’t want to be involved in his son’s life, you know?”
Today, Dion’s a faithful husband and father of two. I asked him what it was like to be a dad who lives with his children.
“Man, I love it,” he said. “I don’t understand how dads can leave their kids. I can’t wrap my head around it. I love them too much. I’m about to tear up. I love them. Sorry.
“I love being a dad. It’s one of the greatest joys in my life, being a dad and coming home to my kids every day. I’ve experienced the Father’s love in a new way. I thought I knew the Father’s love before I became a father myself. And I remember when my son was born and we were at the hospital. My wife’s asleep, and he’s asleep, and I’m looking at him and am overwhelmed with joy. And I went to the bathroom and I sobbed. I was crying because I knew how much I love my son, and he had done nothing. It wasn’t because of any achievement or any way that he had done something to make me proud or to make me love him. I just loved him because he was mine. That’s it. He’d done nothing. He was just here. He’s just here and he’s mine.
“And that was the first time I realized, God loves me that way. The Father loves me just because I’m his, not because I’m doing ministry for him or I’m accomplishing all of these things to make him proud. I’m just his son and that’s enough. That’s enough for him to send his Son, his only begotten Son to die for me and adopt me into his family. So, I mean, fatherhood is one of the greatest joys of my life.
That truth—that the Father loves us because we’re his—was also life-changing for Jacquez.
“In high school, I had a lot of hatred towards my dad,” he said. “But then in becoming a believer, I experienced the forgiveness of Christ. So I had it in my heart to want to extend that to him. And then in talking to him, I could tell based on how the conversation went that he still was wrestling with a lot of shame or maybe not forgiving himself for not being there. So I called him back and I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, I want to say I love you. You want to know why I love you?’”
“Why?” asked his dad.
“Because you’re my dad,” Jacquez said.
“God really used that to mend something that was broken in our relationship,” he said. “Extending that level of forgiveness, letting him know that it was positional, not conditional, and that ultimately, because he’s my dad I’m going to love him, regardless of whether he’s been there or not. And that freed us up to have a relationship.”
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are (1 John 3:1).
There’s nothing we can do to earn our Father’s love—it’s already ours in Christ. And there’s nothing we can do to lose it—it’s always ours in Christ.
When we believe that truth, when it changes us, we can love others—our parents, our kids, our friends, our neighbors—with mercy and grace and truth. We can tell them about sin and salvation. We can open our homes, bring gift cards to the local public school, or mow our grass in ways that point to the glory of the way God designed us to live.
In a culture that pushes against the biblical idea of a family with AI girlfriends, Pornhub, open relationships, or easy abortions, we can choose a more excellent way—if the Lord grants you singleness, you can keep your mind and body pure as you delight in the Lord. If he brings you a spouse, you can love that person, commit to be faithful, and rejoice in parenting together any children he might give you.
And then let’s look over the mountain. I know the problems seem insurmountable—we feel this when we read about Damien McDaniel, see the persistence of generational poverty, or learn the numbers of unmarried births, of failing schools, or of incarceration rates. What could right the wrongs here?
Only Jesus. As you seek to help those in tough situations, consider Tim Keller’s advice: Find a gospel-centered pastor who is preaching the whole counsel of God, and then resource, resource, resource him. Pray for him. Open your checkbook for him. Volunteer when he needs help.
If you’re wondering where to look for a guy like that, I know a great person to ask. He lives in Fairfield, Alabama, and he’s training up gospel preachers to work in underresourced urban neighborhoods all over the country. His name is Alton Hardy.