The Fatherless Epidemic: Raising Up Men in Urban America

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Sarah Zylstra
Damian 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 was responsible for 10% of the violent deaths in Birmingham that year, and he allegedly did all of that before he turned 23

Speaker 1
We begin with that breaking news tonight about the man accused of more than a dozen homicides in the city of Birmingham. Thanks for joining.

Speaker 2
The last few hours, Birmingham police announced Damian McDaniel is now charged in connection to four more homicides

Speaker 3
in the city. McDaniel facing nearly 40 felony counts for his alleged involvement in multiple mass shootings, including the one at the hush lounge in five points south. With his

Speaker 2
latest charges, Damian McDaniel is now connected to a total of 18 cases within the city.

Sarah Zylstra
why?

Sarah Zylstra
Some reporters asked author and criminal profiler Bill Chalmers, some serial killers are lust killers. He told them, 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 childhood trauma. Here’s what else Chalmers said. I’m sure he had a messed up childhood. I’m sure he had some issues with his father, or no father, or a bad father, the breakdown of the family is usually the case. Sure enough, Damien was five 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.

Speaker 4
85% of the black boys in prison come from father’s home. Kids grow up with our dads. Don’t finish school, they join gangs, they go to prisons. 97% of the homeless in our country come from fatherless homes. I mean, it’s just the list goes on and on and on

Sarah Zylstra
that’s out and hardy. He also grew up without a dad in a sharecropping family in Alabama. He came to faith and then to reform 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.

Speaker 4
Family broken is broken. I’ve seen more young boys cry over the lack of their dads not being there.

Sarah Zylstra
Here’s why Elton was worried, and why we should be too. In 2023 the CDC recorded that 70% of black babies were born to single mothers. Overall, 40% of births in the United States are to unmarried moms, a number that has 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 that 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, young black men, 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 Elton’s church is growing, and his manifold vision ministry has been teaching kids to read, buying and repairing homes 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 Elton’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 Elton is hoping replicable. Over the last 10 years, he has begun to teach other young men to make a difference in their under resourced urban communities all over the Country. I’m Sarah Zylstra, and you’re listening to recorded you

Speaker 4
I grew up in Sardis, Alabama, which is right outside so my mom and dad were sharecroppers. My mom had 12 kids by my dad. My dad had other kids outside my mom community. Count. Don’t remember how many. And so I grew up in a typical sharecropping world. Some of my older siblings, they did, pick cotton and cucumbers and. Bale hay and all of that Southern Mississippi living.

Sarah Zylstra
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 in 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, or mother centered pattern that changed rapidly after slavery ended. In fact, from about 1890 to 1960 black men and women were more likely to have an experience with marriage, to 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% of African American children were living with just their mother, compared with about 7% of white children. Why the difference in 1965 then Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was worried enough about it 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 other 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 to care for your family or to marry your pregnant girlfriend lessened. Moynihan made it clear that he was not 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.

Speaker 4
By the time I was two or three or four, my mom and dad had separated. Never got officially divorced on paper, but they separated, so I really experienced a different kind of poverty with my mom, because she now is a single mom in the deep south living in a shotgun house with no plumbing. Bathroom was outside. So I just growing up No father, father in touch that much. My daddy would come and get us on Saturday and we would go pick some sugar cane and stuff like

Sarah Zylstra
that. The last time Elton 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 they couldn’t find them, so they grabbed another of Elton’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. He asked Alton’s mother where her guilty boys were, but she didn’t know. So the truck pulled forward again, and then a few seconds later, 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.

Speaker 4
Louisville was the first time we lived moving to modernization, first time there’s a bathroom with a toilet seat and drinking water and stuff out of a faucet. We never had none of that out in sargassum. We were still using the well when I left sarcast And then Louisville, I had neighbors. I had friends.

Sarah Zylstra
Alton noticed his friends didn’t have dads at home either. In the 10 years he’d been alive, the percent of black children living with single moms had risen from about 25% to 40% that is a huge jump in just one decade. But remember, it was the 60s.

Speaker 4
We had white flag. The 60s was an upheaval of all kinds of things happened. You had the big feminist movement. You had the drug movement. Vietnam. It was an upheaval, all kinds of worldviews classroom. And then you get prayer taken out of school. Then you get abortion on demand. I mean, it was just a lot. You’re getting presidents killed in that time the king. I mean, there’s a whole lot that’s happened.

Sarah Zylstra
Right? 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.

Speaker 4
When we was in Louisville, my mother was on welfare, but it was called AFDC. The social workers would come out once a month, maybe, if I can remember correctly, and we never had beds, we just had mattresses. 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

Sarah Zylstra
there in order to make sure families weren’t cheating the system. For a while, women on welfare 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 weighted towards supporting single moms. Indeed, it still is having a man ain’t worth it. No way. Elton’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 Elton 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.

Speaker 4
Life is just coming at me fast. 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 drawing from five, nine to now, six foot to six, June to six, three and ultimate at six four. And I have this southern dialog, and I’m fatherless, I’m poor, so all of this is just kind of coming at

Sarah Zylstra
me over the next few years, Alton stabilized in an under resourced African American community in Grand Rapids. He went to school, met friends, and even started on the high school basketball team when his sister got tired of the city and decided to move on, he was supposed to go with 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 nearby, and he noticed the lights were never on and he hadn’t seen Elton’s family in a while. He started asking questions, Hey, are you okay? Are you alone? Alton ended up telling his coach everything. In response, the coach did not alert Child Protective Services. He did not call anyone in Elton’s extended family. He didn’t even tell the school. Instead, he brought Elton home to his house and eventually over to his sisters, a single mom herself, Lucille, took Elton 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 Elton and was so good to him that to this day, he calls her mom,

Speaker 4
living with this lady that I call my mom. I’m trying to get reintroduced to Christianity again. My mother was a Christian. My dad was a professing Christian. There was this air of Christianity around me, but there was no discipleship, and then I kind of go off to JUCO college playing basketball. Come back, still know that there’s a God. I’m praying. I’m reading the Lord’s Prayer, I’m praying the 23rd Psalm. But I’ve really never been discipled. But I just know don’t do certain things, because this is not right to do this.

Sarah Zylstra
Shallow Christianity was not much help when things got tough, Elton 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 they were both frustrated by it.

Speaker 4
I got married because I was broken. I was trying to feel, you know, holes in my heart, fatherless. I know anything about being a man, and marriage didn’t work out well. Well, I was almost I was a horrible leader. Nothing.

Sarah Zylstra
Was working out his family or his job, and it made Elton furious. He was mad at God, at himself, at Maryland and at White people.

Speaker 4
I was in my anti racism phase, probably more radical than any anti racism person out there on the only circuit right now. My first son, name is Ahmad Rashad Hardy, I was borderline. FRANKEL power, that I named my first son has tried to get away from naming him any white association that I could.

Sarah Zylstra
Alton was drinking all the time and cycling through entry level jobs. Then Marilyn filed for divorce, which put him on both sides of the equation. He was now a fatherless child and a childless father. He could not have been more miserable. Around that time, Elton ran into an old friend from high school who invited him to his charismatic church. Elton went and loved the feeling of love and acceptance there. He kept attending, and then began praying, and then began serving in the church.

Speaker 4
I was always a reader, if you know Grand Rapids, they got bookstores everywhere, and the bookstore there called Baker bookstore, and they have a lot of used books. Our church was right next door to that Baker bookstore, so I would go in the baker book almost every other day, at least three or four times a

Sarah Zylstra
week, the bookstore staff started handing out entitles like Calvin’s Institute’s 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

Speaker 4
was reformed in my thinking, in my soteriology and how, and we’ll say this too, if it wasn’t for the bigness of God and God’s sovereignty and God’s providence, I don’t know if I’ll still be here. It was those two main doctrines that gave me the strength and the ability to trust God.

Sarah Zylstra
Alton needed that perspective when his lead pastor got caught in a long time affair, the pastor refused to step down and the church split around him. Many of the elders planted their own churches, and Alton ended up at one of those. But before long, the Christian Reformed Church, a primarily white Dutch Reformed denomination headquartered in Grand Rapids, came calling

Speaker 4
in the CRC was really starting to reach out and across racial lines, at least in Grand Rapids, they did trying to reach out to black pastors and black churches. And the guy that I was, that I kind of went with, when this church kind of went away, they called him to be an evangelist within the Christian reform. And so now I’m like his second hand, second in charge, right behind him. I’m learning how to pray publicly. I’m 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 so he’s being pursued by the Christian reform our church that he’s leading becomes a CRC church plant.

Sarah Zylstra
Around that time, Alton met a girl I

Speaker 4
saw seven at a park and Martin Luther King Park in Grand Rapids, and just my heart leaped out for and I really didn’t start smiling and getting laughter until I met Sandy in my life. My life, up until then, I was just a sad individual, you know, a fatherless, a motherless, and she made me smile in a way that I probably have been smiling and been smiling ever since.

Sarah Zylstra
Sandra was also divorced with two small children. She also loved to read and she was also a Christian.

Speaker 5
He was always happy, always smiling, never, you know, just down or grumpy or anything like that. It was like he was one of the few people that I could say was always like, upbeat, you know, and just happy and smiling and joking and just, you know, somebody that when you see him coming, you like, you kind of look forward to him coming.

Sarah Zylstra
A year and a half later, Alton and Sandra were married, to be honest. This is not 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.

Speaker 5
Alton, he’s the type of person he wants to reconcile. And so oftentimes, you know, if we were, if we were at an impasse of a conflict, and you know he would say, you know, let’s pray. And he grabbed my hands, and I never turned him down to pray. You. And somehow the Lord would work in that grabbing my hands, I grabbed his hands, and we would pray through it. And it would, it would, it would relieve the tension and help us be able to move past whatever, whatever it was, you know. And that happened multiple times throughout the years, especially early on.

Sarah Zylstra
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, under resourced African Americans to get ahead. Black boys especially, were behind in school, in finding jobs and in staying out of trouble. Elton thought he knew what the problem was.

Speaker 4
I was very let’s go to Civil War type guy, Malcolm X, almost on some levels. Thank God there was no Internet, and some of them old sermons can’t be found because but Satan had almost convinced me that people who believe the Bible hold to the Word of God, especially my white brothers and sisters, are somehow unable, incapable to love blacks and to do good And to do justice and to do mercy among them. 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’ve seen it all, and I played a part of that. And that camp almost convinced me that I should have abandoned biblical theology took on a theology that basically didn’t hold to the Word of God at all, but that was my only hope of bringing about a Shalom among the urban poor.

Sarah Zylstra
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 is 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 mean, we need reminders to keep a constant guard over our own reactions to and assumptions about people whose skin looks different from ours.

Speaker 4
There was a lot of wrong guns in my family, out in Cyrus, and some of my family members still struggle with that. And so in my dilemma of trying to solve these things, I did a lot of history reading about what is went wrong. What did John help us to speak out more on race and on slavery Winfield, go back to Georgia and tell the state of Georgia to keep slavery. I’m screaming at God about this stuff and and I tell people this, if you’re going to keep studying history, and I encourage that you do so, but the gospel in Calvary and God gossip healed is history as well. While you’re going back in history, please, my brother or sister, did you make your way over to the east. Sit there for a while and just look up to the hill where they hung them wide. You gotta sit there understand how the God man would die for the ungodly. That’s history too, and I would tell you in my own healing process of trying to figure out, and by the God’s providence, to me, thoroughly made my way over there to Golgotha, the old Calvary, and I just sat there in my mind at the foot of the cross. And I just wanted

Unknown Speaker
to know, who

Speaker 4
are you? Why did you do it? And wise is the solution, the remedy for everything that’s wrong in this world. It was Tim Kelly’s teachings. It helped me understand that ain’t just any story, the Gospel story Jesus coming into the world and dying and being beaten and being bruised and being spat upon and being kicked and being stopped and being laughed at, and when you sit there long enough, like I did, oh, man, when I came out of that, I was reconciled to everybody, and

Speaker 6
that’s where reconciliation starts. That’s where it begins. That’s where it ends.

Sarah Zylstra
You 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 in Ephesians, 310, 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. Alton knew the key to all of this was the discipleship and leadership development of young black men.

Speaker 4
It was like the Lord has 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. You’re going to focus on young men, because men are crucial to how I orchestrate. So go the men. So go the family, so go society, so go the nation. Everyone knows that

Sarah Zylstra
Alton focused on the gospel, and after that, on calling black males to lead their families, their communities and their churches. He was doing this instinctually, knowing from his own experience how hard it was to be fatherless, and watching the struggles of the men and women around him, but the numbers were backing him up. 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 crime and go to prison. They’re also more likely to be obese, to develop fewer language skills and to 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 communities, are more likely to find a secure job and are less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs. They have more money, live longer and report being happier than absent fathers. But right away, Elton ran into pushback, not from the African American community, but from the white CRC church, the church that 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. The church leaders were egalitarian, and they 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 Elton, it felt like they were asking him to ignore the elephant in the room. He wanted to talk about racial reconciliation, of course, but he also felt he had to talk about strong male leadership. 90% 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, Alton was offered an opportunity to work in Fairfield, Alabama. Remember that long straight road north from Sardis to Louisville to Grand Rapids. If you turned around at the top and headed back down, you would hit Fairfield about two hours before you bottomed out again in Sardis. This was the wrong direction. It was the road south Elton had been yelling and fighting against ever since he’d left, but Fairfield was an urban, under resourced 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,

Speaker 7
I am originally from Fairfield, and grew up in Fairfield. Graduated from Fairfield High School.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Dion watts. He grew up in a house full of women, his mom, his aunts, his grandma and his great grandma. Here’s how he describes his family.

Speaker 7
I’m the oldest of my siblings. So my mom has four children by three different men. My sibling, that’s right under me, is the only one with 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, that I know by two different women.

Sarah Zylstra
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 one to 100 with 100 being the safest, Fairfield ranks a one

Speaker 5
like the poverty. Here is on a different level than what I was even used to in Grand Rapids. This is like a, it’s a it’s not just a physical poverty of you know, lack of money, lack of resources, but there’s a mental poverty. Oftentimes people have that. I don’t think they even know that they have just, just of life, how things should go. They you know, women often will say they didn’t know that. You know, sex outside of marriage is not good. They didn’t they never heard it before.

Speaker 4
We meeting people in each sport community, never been to a wedding. They don’t even know what wedding is. Kids come to us in the high school. So what’s that ring on your finger for? They’re not getting it from the music industry. They’re not getting it from the NBA. Young boy, they’re not getting it from the drakes of the world and the Kendra lamars.

Sarah Zylstra
Alton and Sandra got to work. Their first job was to meet everybody they could. Alton introduced himself as PA for Pastor Elton.

Speaker 7
Pa is a very on the ground. Can spark up a conversation with anybody type guy. So I remember the first that, first group of guys that he interacted with that started, you know, getting connected to the church. He just kind of pulled up on him. They was out playing basketball on the street, and he just walked up to him and started sparking kind started sparking conversations

Speaker 8
with him. Pastor Hardy, when, when I say boots on the ground, I mean boots. You know, he is walking up and down the sidewalk. We can barely get through a meeting, because if he sees someone on the street like he’s like, hold that thought and like he’s out there evangelizing and ministering.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Faye Wilson, who is now the Director of Development for the manifold vision ministry. She 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.

Speaker 8
Once we got pregnant with Avery there was just an innate feeling for wanting something different than what we were used to. You know, we really just wanted something different for our son, and so we decided that we were going to get married. And it’s crazy now that I think about it, because we didn’t really have a healthy example of what marriage, you know, looked like. And I think my mother was very much aware of that, and she actually told me, she said, You don’t have to marry him, you you know we can. We can raise this baby. I’ll help you. And 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

Sarah Zylstra
made. Faye and her husband Tori, 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 that he’d one day be urban Hope’s director of ministries.

Speaker 7
We had to do all this setup and tear down. We had these ugly plastic yellow chairs, like he had this whole little portable projector kind of screen. And, I mean, like we were using YouTube videos for for our, you know, singing and worship, because we having to worship. I mean, sometimes commercials would come on. I mean, it was, it was a rough, like experience, but the preaching, I think, like the, I mean, Pastor, Alton’s a strong preacher, and the Word of God, I mean, just did what the Word of God does, which it doesn’t return void. You know,

Sarah Zylstra
Alton preached the gospel from top to bottom. He preached sin and included in it the sins he saw in the community around him. 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.

Speaker 7
I knew that my my life, my growing up was so Rocky and so hard with this stuff, because I just I didn’t have that dad, and I didn’t know how to be a man. I needed a dad to teach me how to be a dad, I mean, a man, and so when he came with this church, an emphasis on the church, but an emphasis on strong men. In that tugged at my heart, and 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.

Sarah Zylstra
Alton started by preaching expositionally through the book of John. Growth was slow, sometimes non existent lives were not being dramatically changed. The people he was ministering to kept losing their jobs, doing drugs and getting arrested.

Speaker 7
Pa was like, really discouraged, Hey, man. He was like, he was about to quit. He was like, Yeah, this ain’t working. Like, and when the and God just showed up, there was just a move of the Spirit on that that Sunday conviction, you know, of the spirit you know. And like, there were tears people were confessing their sins, like in front of everybody.

Sarah Zylstra
That happened more than once, that when Elton 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 GEDs. 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, who had killed people or who were selling drugs. Sandra also began working in the local schools, where, in 2022 about 17% of the high schoolers were proficient in reading and language arts, and just over 1% were proficient in math. Three quarters of those kids are economically disadvantaged. Nearly 20% are homeless. Here’s Jaquez Young who moved into Fairfield in 2015 to be part of manifold visions Leadership Program.

Speaker 9
I see these young guys in my community. I see him walking down the street like I saw one yesterday that had a gun tucked into his, his sleeve of his his jacket, and just hanging out like an extended clip. And he’s a he’s a drug dealer who sells drugs in the neighborhood. You still see that, or you still see just like the extreme poverty, like one of my neighbors who lives out of his car, and just like, you know, his his house is uninhabitable, and he’s just like, with his mom living in his car, like with a bunch of stray cats we witnessed people get, like, gunned down, like on the corner, you know. So you have all those things that are that are still happening, and obviously those things, they break you they make you weary, make you want to quit, make you want to give up. But it’s just the Lord ultimately that like upholds us.

Sarah Zylstra
As Elton began to grasp the magnitude of Fairfield 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,

Sarah Zylstra
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 it was founded after the Civil Rights Act, some early churches banned blacks from membership, participated in white supremacist organizations and taught the Bible, sanctioned segregation in 2016 the denomination voted to officially repent for racist actions. Still, it’s safe to say that race relations in Birmingham are sensitive. Here’s housing developer and faith, Presbyterian Church elder. Steve ankenbrant,

Speaker 10
I asked Elton, 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 poor. And the conversation was gospel driven, and it wasn’t you should feel guilty because of privilege. It was God’s 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? And that changed the whole tenor of the conversation, and at the end of our meeting with them, everyone was asking him, well, what can we do with our gifts to serve you?

Sarah Zylstra
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 things like tutoring children in the public schools, running summer programs and bringing lunch to teachers. Manifold vision staff have held GED classes, financial literacy classes. Classes and cooking classes. They’ve helped to provide jobs and transportation to jobs. They’ve drawn two new businesses into the community. They have purchased and remodeled a handful of homes so that 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 the enthusiastic outside support from people who have resources. I asked PCA member and Attorney Greg Mixon why he has given so much time and money to this one.

Speaker 11
They are on the ground in the area where there is desperate material need and spiritual need. 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.

Sarah Zylstra
Sam tortorisi, 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, but

Speaker 12
he said, what you do is you make sure you get the most gospel centered pastor, and then resource and resource and then resource. That’s the secret sauce.

Sarah Zylstra
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

Speaker 9
when I was in school, Fairfield had a poor reputation, so it was never a place that, like I wanted to go to, unless we were, you know, doing something illegal, you know, with drugs or something like that, we would come in and come out.

Sarah Zylstra
Jaquez young went to high school over the mountain. Hoover High School is a good school where 18% of the students are enrolled in advanced placement courses, and the average SAT score is 1250, while there, Jaquez learned how to play football, drive drunk and be intimate with girls. When Jaquez was a senior, he went to a track competition in Boston. While there, he learned that his cousin, who had been living a similar lifestyle, had been killed

Speaker 9
for the first time in my life. It made me contemplate if that was me, if you know, if I had died, living a similar lifestyle, where would I be? And I remember being in the hotel room and just thinking, Man, if I was, if that was me, if I was to have died, then I was just unconfident that I would be in heaven. So, um, out of fear, I picked up the Bible in the hotel room and started reading it, took it with me, and I don’t know if I was supposed to have taken the Bible, but and then from there, the Lord was just working through the power of the Spirit.

Sarah Zylstra
While Jaquez was at Troy University, he got involved with campus outreach, a college ministry founded by longtime Birmingham PCA pastor, Frank Barker. And campus outreach introduced Jaquez to Alton. Alton was inviting young men, especially young black men, to work for a year or two in Fairfield with him. He wanted to teach them how to follow Jesus and how to lead others, from their churches to their families, to do the same.

Speaker 9
When I thought about Fairfield, I thought about my family when I saw it as a mission, not only for like serving Christ and give my life away for Christ, but also being able to see people that, in a lot of ways, just reflected my family.

Sarah Zylstra
Jaquez was in he and about 10 other guys moved to Fairfield in what would become Elton’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

Speaker 9
went. Very frustrating. And just like things that you were just completely oblivious to doing ministry in the context of the college campus, you know, just like simple stuff, like people reading, you know, 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, you know. So essentially, we had to try to, like, put it on a whiteboard and just kind of break it down, do one verse at a time, and just try to, you know, go really slow.

Sarah Zylstra
Ministry in Fairfield was unbelievably slow and difficult. And yet, eight of those guys stayed for a second year, and when that was over, three of them ended up buying houses in Fairfield. When I asked why he was still there, Jaquez told me a story

Speaker 9
one time recently, I was just cutting my grass my neighbor like, he was, like, basically flagging me down, and then he just proceeded to tell me about, like, how he had been robbed by some young guys who he knew their mom, I guess, like him and their mom got to an altercation. He said some stuff he said about their mom, and then, like, they took it personal, and they were like, they came. Robbed him, and they would be, he’s an older he’s in his probably, like, late 60s, and you know, you got getting beat up by some younger guys in your 20s, or even younger, and then one of them reached out a gun and shot him in his leg. And he was so mad about being shot that he was just like, I’m gonna kill him. He’s like, next time I see him, he’s killing and then I mean, as best as I possibly could, just tried to, like, point him to like, how killing him wasn’t the answer that, like, if he killed them, they likely gonna come and get vengeance. And the way that people act nowadays and move nowadays, they won’t stop with just you it may end up being, you know, multiple bodies, or, you know, more people in his family that are now in danger because of that. I just took him to Matthew, and I was just like, hey, man, this is where I don’t know where you stand, as it relates to the word about just like said, You shouldn’t feel the one that should that can kill your physical body, but you should feel the one that can kill your physical body and throw your soul into hell. And I just like, I don’t know if you recognize this, but like, there is a God that has created you, and he’s made you, and he’s made you for a purpose, and your life is not intended to be lived in this way. You know, I just prayed for him, and he didn’t go kill him

Sarah Zylstra
because Jaquez 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 Jaquez and his wife, who have three children, but there have been other conversations with this man.

Speaker 9
They’ll just say, em, I see you, man, I see you with your family. See you taking care of your family. You know, like much, much respect

Sarah Zylstra
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 their families. And the kids are intrigued. There are 100 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 they’ve never seen that before this year, we just did,

Speaker 13
you know, like little Starbucks gift card, whatever for the teachers. And one of the teachers was like, your church is always like coming up here to show that they support us. I think there’s just a lot of like ways that you see little things of morale that I think can go a long way, especially in a hard environment.

Sarah Zylstra
Meryl Wilson joined urban hope and began teaching in the Fairfield schools about five years ago, when she first introduced her husband to her students, they were thrown off by their shared last name. They asked Meryl 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, it’s hard to imagine them as witnessing, really, they’re just the beginning.

Speaker 13
There’s one student that he was in our summer program and has since gone to college and was studying abroad in Europe. And it was one of those where it was like, Who would have thought that, you know, you would be able to go do this? Like, I’ve had a few parents even be like, well, I want to come to y’all church like I’ve heard, you know, good things about it, or I saw that they opened the grocery store. Like 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, like, that’s amazing that the Lord used Urban hope to do this thing.

Sarah Zylstra
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 has been inviting new college grads like Jaquez to spend a year or two living, working, learning and serving with him in Fairfield,

Speaker 7
we emphasize strong men. We emphasize marriage and family and doing it God’s way, like we emphasize like these, the sexual ethics and the impact of music in the culture. African American Christians, black men, they resonate.

Sarah Zylstra
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 those young men are married or

Speaker 7
engaged. These guys would come. They moved into the community so they’re husbands. They’ve had children, fathers, 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. You know, the church ain’t for a season.

Sarah Zylstra
The church ain’t for a season. Urban hope. Members keep coming back to that every. Everything they do, from teaching financial literacy to offering a community cooking class is tied to the

Speaker 8
church. It is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed. I have been in the nonprofit world for almost 20 years now. I have been in the ministry side. I’ve been in the secular nonprofit world. You know, I’ve been, I’ve seen it from both sides. And it’s kind of funny, because every nonprofit that I have ever served, there is this idea that they like they have the answer like this is we are the ones that have the answers. We can solve the world’s problems, and so I know for a fact one of the things that lends to just the success of our ministry is that the church is the foundation of what we’re doing, regardless of what our ministry action is, the Lord has been our home base, because we know that anybody can, anybody can provide tutoring, anybody really can open a grocery store. If you have the money, anybody can provide, you know, an education or any organization can provide housing, but when there’s no foundation of the church and the Gospel, that’s all it is. It’s just a provision. There’s no change. You know, when we’re when we’re putting married couples into homes, we want them to be a worshiping Bible, believing Bible, you know, learning couple, you know, not just a couple that’s just taking up space in that house, you know. And we want them to to have children and bring their children up in the word so the church is the foundation of what we’re doing, the church and in the Word of God, and a lot of organizations, I hate to say, don’t really have that component, you know, it’s, it’s just, you know, a provision.

Sarah Zylstra
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 Elton, who is six foot four and beg, who laughs all the time, who will see you coming down the street and run out of the church to talk to you, who doesn’t hesitate to tell you the truth is like a father to them even better. He is using fatherhood to introduce whoever he can to their Heavenly Father.

Sarah Zylstra
It is it is 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 is also a theological problem.

Speaker 7
I grew up hating my dad like he abandoned us and I just felt rejected, and I didn’t understand why I’m like, this good kid. I mean, I’m doing well in school. I graduated salute to her high school. I did well in sports. Went to college. I just couldn’t I couldn’t understand why my dad wouldn’t want to be involved in his son’s life. You know,

Sarah Zylstra
today, Dion is a faithful husband and father of two. I asked him what it was like to be a dad who lives with his children.

Speaker 7
I love it, man. I don’t understand how dads can leave their kids. I can’t wrap my head around I love them too much. I’m about to tear up. I love them. Oh, sorry. So yeah, I love it. I love being a dad. It’s one of the greatest joys in my life, just being a dad and coming home to my kids every day, I’ve experienced a 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 got the hospital, my wife’s asleep, you know, and he’s asleep, and I’m just up and I’m just looking at him and just overwhelmed with joy, I went to the bathroom and I just sobbed, like I was just 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. Done nothing, just here. He’s just here, and he’s mine. And. That was the first time I realized, Oh, God loves me that way, like 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. And so I man. Fatherhood is one of the greatest joys of my life.

Sarah Zylstra
That truth that the Father loves us because we are his, was also life changing for chiquiz.

Speaker 9
But high school, I had, like, a lot of hatred towards my dad. But then in becoming a believer, like I just, you know, 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 can just tell, based on, like, how the conversation went, that he still was kind of, like wrestling with a lot of shame, or just like, yield, or just like, maybe not like forgiving himself for not being there. So I called him back, and I was just like, Hey, Dad, I just want to say I love you. I was like, you want to know why I love you. He was just like, wow. I was like, because you my dad. Like, God really used that to, just like, mend something that was broken in our relationship. Just like extending that level of forgiveness, letting them know that it was, you know, positional, not conditional, and that ultimately, because he’s my dad, like, I’m gonna love him because of that, regardless of whether he’s been there or not, and that freed us up to like, have like a relationship.

Sarah Zylstra
See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. There is nothing we can do to earn our Father’s love. It is already ours in Christ, and there is nothing we can do to lose it. It is 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 him. 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, when we see the persistence of generational poverty, or when we learn the numbers of unmarried births, of failing schools or of incarceration rates, what could right the wrongs here

Sarah Zylstra
only Jesus as you seek to help those in tough situations, consider the Advice shared by Sam tortorisi, 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 the 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 under resourced urban neighborhoods all over the country. His name is Alton Hardy.

Sarah Zylstra
Thank you for listening to this episode of recorded which is part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. This episode was written by me, Sarah Zylstra, and edited by Colin Hansen, Darryl Williamson, Megan Hill and Cassie Watson. Our audio editor was Scott Caro and our producer was Newbridge studios. Recorded is made possible by generous donations, if you would like to join in supporting this work, we would love for you to do so at tgc.org/donate.org.