After years of datHouse dreams, the project has finally begun. That is to say if you live in the Bates-Hendricks neighborhood or drove by on East Street south of downtown last Saturday, you may very well have seen a former strip club—pink building, you can’t miss it—full of activity. But not the activity you might think.
At least 37 people participated in the beginning of what we expect to be the complete transformation of a building (into a community center). We stripped (no pun intended) paneling, we smashed mirrors, we broke down a stage, and we hauled materials that cannot be used again out to trucks in the parking lot. Several curious neighbors stopped in to ask what was going on. One person thanked us, saying a relative of his had been killed by the violence birthed there.
This work was really initiated by the neighborhood itself, which—disturbed by the same violence our guest mentioned—worked to shut the place down. Immediately after that political success, datHouse began scheming to buy the building with the hope of doing the work that has now begun. The purchase finalized last Thursday.
A poet-farmer that many of us admire, a man named Wendell Berry, once coined the phrase “practice resurrection” in a beautiful and prophetic poem called “Manifesto: The Mad Liberation Front.” It is poignant phrase, isn’t it? It’s also one with which we identify. We see resurrection most fully in Christ, but we also see it on a daily basis in the soil on which we walk. Have you stopped lately to contemplate how the deaths of plants and animals decay into the lifeblood of the food we consume?
What we hope to do with the building really isn’t that different. It was a dark place, a sad place. One in which people sought answers in a broken classroom, healing in an out-of-commission hospital. As people, even if we never frequented Sassy Cats, we surely know the loneliness and the brokenness that might lead a person there. We have no stones to cast because we are too entrenched in our own sin.
But we hope for new life. For children playing instead of women objectified. For painting pictures instead of lap dances. For literacy courses instead of drunkenness. For shooting hoops instead of murder out back.
The dream, though, is nowhere near fully realized. God forbid that we wait expectantly on the proverbial pie-in-the-sky. There is too much work—physically on the building and relationally with our neighbors—left to be done. Won’t you come join us in that work or at least begin it in your own neighborhood?
-Chris
