For some, success means going back to rough neighborhoods

WACO—Alexie Torres-Flemming grew up in the South Bronx projects surrounded by difficulty. About half the residents there were impoverished, and 30 percent of men were unemployed.

By her own description, people would have described her as “at-risk” of becoming pregnant as a teen, of dropping out and of any number of problems.

People who saw promise in Torres-Flemming as a smart and hard-working girl told her if she wanted to succeed, she needed to escape her surroundings.

Kathy Dudley

“The measure of my success would be how … far away from community and my family I could get,” she said.

By that gauge, Torres-Flemming succeeded. She graduated from college and got a prestigious job in public relations. She travelled. She lived in Manhattan. She made it—to a place where she wasn’t happy. She was still at-risk, she said.

“I was at-risk of losing myself, losing my soul,” she said.

Looking for purpose and satisfaction, Torres-Flemming found herself in her old neighborhood. She walked into her old church, where she found a small group of members starting a community action group. There were seven crack houses near the church. Drug trafficking took place at a nearby gas station.

The church had had enough. Members were organizing a march to “pray the devil out” of the houses and gas station. Torres-Flemming jumped right in. Soon after, she joined several hundred people in prayer walking the area.

For Torres-Flemming, that was just the beginning. Drug dealers exacted their revenge on the church shortly after, burning its buildings to the ground. The church announced it was organizing another prayer march. The pastor received daily death threats, and he resorted to wearing a bulletproof vest. Church members also were threatened.

Still, roughly 1,200 people marched two weeks later, including Torres-Flemming and her father. This was her home. She would continue ministering in it, starting Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, an outreach to area young people.

Now she delivers a message she wishes she could have heard: Each person is God’s child, not a statistic waiting to happen.

“Every day I had to look into young people’s eyes and say: ‘You are God’s beloved. You are not to be pitied. You are to be loved. You are to be fought for,’” she said during the No Need Among You Conference, a Christian community development training event in Waco.

Christ calls his followers to make a difference in communities where people are hurting and struggling, Torres-Flemming said.

“We must go with a fire in our hearts as if we were walking into that dark crack house and our baby was in there,” she said.

Experience with difficult circumstances can draw people to make a difference, such as Torres-Flemming and Kathy Dudley, another featured speaker at the conference.

Dudley is the 12th daughter of sharecroppers. Her dad was smart but illiterate and for a time was an alcoholic. An encounter with Christ ended his dependence on alcohol. From that moment, Dudley set out to minister to the poor.

Dudley and her husband began taking in people in need. The effort developed into a nonprofit organization where people would open up their houses and allow homeless people to live with them. Since then, she has started three more nonprofit ministry organizations, each seeking to help the impoverished in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“If ever there was a time we need transformational leaders, it is now,” she said.

Dudley moved into an impoverished area so she could better serve. Community development starts with spending extensive amounts of “porch time” visiting with the community a person seeks to help, she said.

Through relationships, community developers can discover neighborhood needs, and community members can participate in obtaining solutions to problems.

“Many of us want to ride in on our white horse and ride out with all the accolades,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way. In fact, if we ride in like that, we will probably do more harm.”

Many Christians are responding to the cries of the poor, Dudley said. Churches are attempting to reach into pockets of poverty and work with people to alleviate struggles.

“I believe the church is the dominant vehicle God wants to use to change the world,” she said.

“I think we’re doing pretty good. I may be different in that than some people. But we have a long way to go.”