Now that the South Bend Housing Authority has removed nearby public housing, Granger Community Church is moving its community center from downtown South Bend to Mishawaka.
For 20 years the church has operated the Monroe Circle Community Center on Western Avenue. They still run a food pantry there but they’ve ended most other programming because they’ve seen so few clients since the housing authority has vacated and demolished the buildings.
The city and housing authority in October announced they applied for a federal grant to rebuild the neighborhood with plans to reserve 60% of the units for low-income tenants.
But Granger Community Church Pastor Ted Bryant says that plan is too vague to keep their community center so underutilized.
"The level of concreteness of that I still think is fairly vague, and the timeline of that," Bryant says. "So we're trying to live in the reality of what we see now and what is going on now, and take that as the primary evidence of what we have."
So the church plans to open a new community center in the former Hubcap Annie building on McKinley Avenue in Mishawaka.
“That location on Fir and McKinley really seems to meet all of those needs and there is not a lot of ministry or organizations meeting that need, and the property itself has a lot of potential for the types of programming that we'd want to have,” Bryant says.
Bryant says the church doesn't yet have a firm timeframe to renovate the building and its nearly three acres of green space behind it. He says it very likely will also have a food pantry but beyond that, Granger Community wants to ask neighbors what they want to see in a center.
"This is not a, 'Hey, we're going to come down and do all these things to fix all of the problems.' That is not our attitude. What do they see? What’s their hope for their community? What's their hope for their neighborhood? For their kids, or for their families? Or if they're at an older age, what is their hope for the legacy of this area?”
Bryant says the church realizes that some people might find it odd that they've decided to move their ministry from an urban part of South Bend, where poverty rates are higher, to suburban Mishawaka.
"This is why we pray about this, and we want to have peace and discernment from God, and then leave the consequences up to him. If we believe this is what he's asking us to do, then we want to obey that."
But he says if there are such critics, they haven't studied the issue.
"There's at least 14 other organizations that have some redundancy in ministry with what we're doing in that area," Bryant says. "That wasn't there 20 years ago. The vast majority of our traffic, even for food pantry, is by car. It's not pedestrian anymore. So people are driving from all over the place to get some of these services. It's not just the 46601 ZIP code.
"So as the dynamics of agencies, offerings, what the city is doing in that area, all of those things have changed significantly, to where we believe how God as called us to serve our neighbors, we're not able to thrive with those specific initiatives in that area."
