One of the pleasures of getting older is experiencing long life with childhood
friends. Life’s tapestry is rich and interwoven with both tears and laughter, both answered and unanswered prayers. The photo above is of two longtime friends and a lot of their neighbors. Ted and Shelly Travis have spent their adult lives in city ministry. They are very neighborly, even naming their organization Neighborhood Ministries. Shelly and I go back to first grade in a rural North Dakota community. Ted grew up in Long Island, New York.
The group photo is of a recent church reunion. The church shuttered its doors a few years ago, but the Travises were central to the reunion. Isn’t it beautiful how integrated and multigenerational the photo is?
Doing ministry in the city has not been easy. When Ted and Shelly were newlyweds they chose to live among a poor black neighborhood with a rich history. Shelly, in the minority, was viewed with suspicion at first, but her extravert personality and gifts of leadership and hospitality won over the diehards. I visited the Travises a few times back then. Their phone was always ringing, and people liked to stop by at all hours with all kinds of needs. Ted and Shelly worked with their neighbors to get a drug house off their block. Basically, they reported en masse all drug activity to the police and badgered the landlord to do something about his tenants.
Besides being loving neighbors in community, a lot of the Travis’s ministry has been training teenagers through camps and after school programs. The teenagers, possibly for the first time in their lives, are given responsibility to train the younger children. This supervised empowerment often results in confidence and God-honoring leadership skills. Throughout the years, Shelly also has mentored many young moms.
Ted, who received his Doctor of Ministry degree from Bakke Graduate University, has recently published a book on what he has learned and applied in 30 years of urban work: Building Cathedrals, Urban Youth Discipleship That Works (available from Amazon.com).
Ted’s story of how he became a follower of Jesus is not typical. He was a black American studying opera in Austria and converted and discipled by European missionaries. Music was his first love, until God’s love undid him. But it was a long process for Ted to accept God’s calling to urban ministry. It probably began with his first Christmas after giving his life to Jesus. Ted writes in Building Cathedrals:
“I had already made plans to fly home for two weeks. Fear of returning to my home environment gripped me. I was terrified to go back, for fear I would somehow lose this ‘feeling’ of new life within me. With great anxiety, I shared my dilemma with the man who had led me to Christ.
I tried as best I could to describe the source of my fears—the harsh realities of my neighborhood. As I talked, I noted Bud smiling. I thought to myself, He’s not understanding what I’m saying. So I continued, adding graphic detail to the descriptions of my city. But the more I talked, the bigger he smiled.
Finally, in vintage Bud fashion, he burst out in a hearty laugh. Then, in a strangely reflective yet joyful tone, he said, ‘What a tremendous opportunity!’
I thought he was crazy.
In actuality, he was right. I survived my stay at home. I even made new Christian friends who introduced me to a wonderful local church body. When I returned to Vienna after holidays, I made a plaque and hung it on my wall. It read, in big bright letters: ‘What a Tremendous Opportunity!’”
Ted and Shelly were longtime friends and staff members in Denver’s Youth for Christ ministry before they started dating. Back in the eighties an interracial couple was not that common. The North Dakota town Shelly and I grew up in was all white. In fact, I don’t recall interacting with any black Americans until I went to college. What we knew of black culture came from movies and TV: city riots in places like Detroit and LA., Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, civil rights marches, Sanford and Son, Julia, To Sir with Love, Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?.
When Shelly told her parents she was seriously dating a tall, dark, and handsome man with the emphasis on dark, they were alarmed. It took a long time for them to understand that this love was genuine. Ted remembers being grilled by his future in-laws, with emphasis placed on protecting their daughter in the inner city. Throughout the years, whenever the Travises visited Shelly’s family, Ted was singled out as “that black fellow married to one of those Samuelson girls.” But the provincial small town had its advantages too. The Travis children loved its freedom and safety, like being able to ride bikes anywhere they wanted.
After doing ministry in Buffalo and Chicago for a few years, Ted and Shelly recently returned to their Five Points neighborhood in Denver. After receiving a kidney transplant last year, Ted has a new lease on life; he doesn’t want to squander this gift. He is busy teaching what he has learned in urban ministry to the next generation of leaders.
The Travis’s Denver neighborhood has changed over the years. It now has lot of “gentrys,” young professionals who enjoy city life and are rehabbing old homes. Their demand for housing has pushed many poor out of a neighborhood becoming less and less affordable. Ted and Shelly, renting an apartment, live a stone’s throw from the house they raised their family in. Some of their neighbors are from countries like the Congo. The changing geography presents challenges, but Ted and Shelly emphasize that people shouldn’t be afraid. The mission field has come to the back door. We should take this change as a tremendous opportunity to love our neighbors as ourselves.
For more information on Neighborhood Ministries, go here: http://tdinitiative.org.