Wendy McCaig is the founder and Executive Director of Embrace Communities, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening neighborhoods through community development. She has her M.Div from Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, VA. In 2009, Wendy was trained in Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and in 2021 was invited to become a steward (faculty) for the ABCD Institute. She is the author of From the Sanctuary to the Streets and Power Shift: A Field Guide for Community Cultivators Everywhere which serves as the core curriculum for Embrace Communities’ ABCD training.
Wendy has spent decades cultivating strong communities – initially within faith communities, then across Metro Richmond, and now through a global network. Since 2012, Wendy has been coaching and training institutions in how to strengthen communities from the inside out using ABCD. Wendy recently moved to my area in rural Virginia and I am excited to see how God uses her to catalyze my community into greater belonging and purpose together!
In this conversation, we dive deep into the inspiring journey of Wendy, from her infertility bargain with God to her path to ministry, and her unique experiences in ministry as a community developer. She describes the transformative power of building relationships in community work and emphasizes the need for churches to empower communities, release and support dreamers, and recognize hidden assets, as those closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions. And Wendy highlights the significance of spiritual disciplines in sustaining long-term commitment to justice and reconciliation work.
In an age of church decline and stark divisions, Wendy offers an important message about being the Kingdom of God outside of the walls of our sanctuaries, bringing salt and light to our neighbors and asking what our church can do to strengthen our communities. You can subscribe to Wendy on Substack to keep in touch with her apostolic vision for ministry today.
You can listen to our conversation on The Beautiful Kingdom Builders Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more! If you find our conversation helpful, please share it with a friend, rate and review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode! I started a Pinterest Board as well, where I am putting any books that are mentioned on the podcast. Check that out here.
TRANSCRIPT:
Ruth Perry (00:15)
My guest today is Wendy McCaig, the founder and executive director of Embrace Communities, a faith-based nonprofit that strengthens low-income neighborhoods through an asset-based community development approach, which I’m excited to talk about today. Wendy holds a Master’s of Divinity from Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond. And she is a prolific writer. She has a book called From the Sanctuary to the Streets, How the Dreams of One City’s Homeless Sparked a Faith Revolution. And she’s got writing on her website, wendymccaig.com. Thank you so much, Wendy, for being here today.
Wendy McCaig (00:50)
It’s great to be here.
Ruth Perry (00:52)
Before we talk about your ministry and your work, could you take us back and tell us about your faith background and the journey that you’ve had with Christ and how you found your spiritual giftings in your calling?
Wendy McCaig (01:04)
Actually your previous guest, Kathy Escobar and as I was listening to her journey, it mirrors mine a lot. I did not grow up in the church, but I was born and raised in a small town in central Texas, and it’s really hard to stay unchurched in the Bible Belt, but I managed to do it until I was in my late 20s. And I endured multiple miscarriages in my young adult years and that launched me on a journey.
My grandmother was a woman of faith and as I was grieving she said, well have you thought about praying about it? I always dismissed grandma, sorry grandma, but now it’s just like sure sure, but you know when you reach the bottom and nothing in your own power is seemingly helpful. I reached that place and just prayed a very, very simple prayer, and it was kind of like a bargain, like, okay, God, if you give me a baby, I will dedicate my life to you. Right?
And somehow even that twisted, manipulative way in which I was praying, God honored, and, the baby I was carrying, they had, determined that it was a non-viable pregnancy, but when we went in to go through the procedure, they found a heartbeat. So my eldest is a miracle, an absolute miracle.
And it was such a miraculous thing to have happen that I decided to honor my end of the equation and I had been drugged to church with a few friends, you know, through the years, but I had never committed to being a part of a faith community. And at that point I did. And I joined a ELCA Lutheran church in our little community and I started getting involved.
And I’d never owned a Bible, and I started going to everything. I went to Bible study, and they were people who’d been in the church their whole life. And so when the leader would say, turn to Leviticus, my heart would stop. I’m like, what is that? I had no idea. So I went to the pastor and I was like, look, you guys are all really nice and everything, but I have no idea what you were talking about. And they knew when to stand up and when to sit down and what words to say. And it was overwhelming to me.
And he said, well, what you really need is a small group. And this was in the early 90s. And I was like, what is that? And he was like, well, it’s a great place to really deepen your faith. And so he hosted this meeting and he invited the whole church to come and talk about this whole new idea of small groups. And he did this great pitch, if you want to grow, this is the way to do it. And I’m like, woo hoo, I’m so excited. Can’t wait to join this small group, right?
So then he gets to the end and he was like, okay, now who here is willing to lead this? And it was crickets. And I sat there and my heart just fell to the floor. I’m like, I guess I’ll never grow. I guess I’ll never have this chance. And then there’s this like stupid idea in my head. And before I knew it, like my hand was doing this. And here I am, the only person sitting in the room who’s never studied the Bible, had just gotten a brand new one from the pastor, didn’t know her way around anything. And all of a sudden I’m leading the first small group.
And the pastor looked out and he was like, Thanks, Wendy. I could tell he was like, you are not what I was fishing for. He turned to this other couple and he was like, Candy and Randy, y’all have been in the church a really long time. Would you help Wendy? that’s how I became a small group coordinator. I started the first small group. I absolutely loved it. I loved the interaction. I loved asking questions. I loved digging into stuff and things you can’t do in worship. It fed my soul and then Pastor Kerry was our pastor and he was like, Wendy, you’re really good at this.
I had been working as an auditor. That’s my training. I have a degree in accounting, but I really wanted to stay home with my baby. And so I quit my job in corporate America, went to work for a church, working 10 hours a week, making $10 an hour and was never happier. It was a huge leap of faith. And so I became their first small group coordinator and that’s my entry into ministry was through small group ministry.
From there we moved from Katy, Texas up to the Woodlands and I got involved in church leadership at that time. Now we’re talking like mid-90s, the whole like seeker movement had just really taken off and my pastor at the time invited me to go to Willow Creek and I read everything from The Purpose-Driven Church, The Purpose-Driven Life, I was gobbling up all of this kind of seeker movement because that was me, right?
Like I felt so weird in this liturgical church with no background and I wanted people to experience the depth without having to have the history of knowing when to do everything. So my father passed away. My father died by suicide. So that was definitely a turning moment for me. And for a season, I just wanted to disappear.
I was really active in the church at the time, but I just needed a space to heal. And so we found ourselves in a seeker church that went from 800 to 8,000 in the few years that we were there. And I could disappear. I mean, it’s pretty easy to disappear in a room of 800 to 8,000 people. But over time, I did get more involved in church leadership, started doing children’s ministry and all kinds of stuff. And that church was non-denominational, but if you scratched the surface you would discover Baptist. I didn’t understand really the difference until I was told as a woman I could never be called a pastor and that I better make sure that nobody confused me for one. And that was devastating because in corporate America, I never encountered that level of sexism and I didn’t grow up in the church. So this was really mind-blowing to me.
My husband used to work for Enron; that didn’t go so well. So we ended up in Virginia and that gave me an opportunity to go seminary because we’re in Richmond there was seminary I went to a Cooperative Baptist seminary and I discovered not all Baptists are created the same and really loved my seminary journey and that led me into the missional church movement. During that time period the missional church, Shane Claiborne’s book had just come out and it was really exciting time for me and I started volunteering with individuals experiencing homelessness.
That led me into the field of community development. I started the largest furniture bank on the Eastern Seaboard. I was involved in churches. It was just a lot of missional style work. And that led me to asset-based community development. And I started coaching and training churches in ABCD, doing inner city ministry, working in neighborhoods and did that for a decade or so.
But what I saw was congregations independently really were not sustaining the development efforts and often the inside out way of doing ABCD, which hopefully we’ll dive more into what that is really hard. It’s really, really, really hard for churches to get this mindset shift.
We were primarily training churches, then started training multi-sector groups, and I now coach and train folks who are doing this across the globe. And so my primary role is as a network weaver. So I work with grassroots community connectors, community cultivators, working in schools, working in neighborhoods, working in different affinity groups, cultivating community is my primary thing. I know when you read the intro you mentioned working in the inner city not not really I work everywhere and the principles of ABCD are applicable to any type of community.
So that’s kind of my journey from inside the walls to outside the walls to across large swaths of community.
Ruth Perry (09:12)
Yeah, I’m really delighted to have met you. You moved to my little rural area now, and I’m excited to see what the Lord does through you here. And your whole testimony is so moving and exciting. Your enthusiasm is beautiful. And I think that your coming to the church, being unchurched, definitely lends you to just naturally be more missional, I think, than those of us who grew up in the church who are just kind of stuck in our traditions and this is the way you do it and this is the way we’ve always done it. So coming with fresh eyes is probably a real gift that you bring to the church and to ministry.
Wendy McCaig (09:42)
I think it is in some ways helpful. I think it sometimes, you know, kind of a disconnect between those who think about the goal of the church as to grow the church. And I have always kind of looked at the role of the church is to strengthen the community and be kind of that salt and light in the world. And I understand that for many people, the church is their refuge. It’s a place of healing that’s very personal and meaningful and knocking down those walls or erasing the lines between the ones on the inside and the outside.
It’s not for everybody. It’s that apostolic calling, you know, that deep commitment to love of neighbor balanced with the love of, you know, loving God at the same time. That’s really not as easy as I naively thought it was going to be. When I read Toxic Charity, was like, woohoo! Everybody’s going to get this. Everybody’s going to embrace this. No, it’s not. And we keep snapping back to those old ways of doing things without ever really thinking about why and how we got to where we are, where we’re going and what the world looks like today.
Ruth Perry (11:12)
Yeah. This sounds like your language of living between two worlds. When you had suburban church life on one hand and then the realities of the inner city right there and your heart for that. What did standing on that bridge teach you about the gospel?
Wendy McCaig (11:14)
It’s a gift that sometimes feels like a curse. Yeah, when I think about it, you know, so much of my journey has been a kind of an expanding of seeing bigger thinking about that one side not just specifically, kind of the suburban church or the affluent church and those on the margins, which was kind of probably the way I described it in the early days. It’s more about those that see themselves as part of a dominant culture, a dominant narrative and everyone else. And in our current times, the everyone else category seems to be getting larger.
And those lines are getting so much firmer or they feel so much sharper to me and especially in parts of the Christian tradition right now that are leaning into these more exclusive definitions of who’s in and who’s out. And so that standing on the bridge, I feel I’ve always felt called to the middle of the bridge to try to bring people together in conversation. Like when I write, one of my principles is to write to unite. But increasingly that is hard to do. And I get criticism from those on both sides of the bridge.
Because a lot of people right now think the center of the bridge has collapsed and if they head toward it they’re going to fall into a chasm and we have this binary thinking right now that you’re either this or that and we can’t hold those tensions in a way that reestablishes the connection that bridge connection and it’s extremely challenging right now and for me personally.
When I was in Richmond, I lived in a community where I felt like my values were kind of the same as my neighbors, especially when I lived in an urban community. I don’t know that that’s, I think probably that’s true for the majority of my neighbors, I just visually get cues that it’s not, like the Confederate flags that fly all around us. It makes me wonder what narratives are playing out in my new community. And I’m so new that I don’t understand. And so I have to enter curious and willing to learn instead of ascribing my meaning, and then I blow up the bridge and I kind of get my own way. So I’m trying not to do that, but it’s challenging. It’s a really different culture. I grew up in small town Texas. So it’s really, I just have to remember my roots and that there’s good people everywhere. I haven’t found a whole lot behind Confederate flags, but I haven’t looked.
Ruth Perry (14:10)
Yeah. In your work, you also suggest that the richest expression of Christian faith often happens outside of Sunday worship. What does that look like,
Wendy McCaig (14:20)
So when we first started, I started working with individuals experiencing homelessness. I had a women’s ministry that I had started in Woodlake, which is an affluent middle-class community. And we had 70 women in seven small groups that were all gathering. And I started asking them, if you could do anything to change the world, what would you do? And the number one thing I heard was people saying, we have so much out here in the suburbs, but our neighbors in the city don’t. And so I had a chance encounter with a woman who was experiencing homelessness. She and I became friends. We started what became the largest furniture bank on the Eastern seaboard.
At the time we were gathering once a month, we would collect stuff in my garage. I would haul it and pick up trucks, me and my neighbors, down to this abandoned United Methodist Church in the middle of city. We would throw it all on the yard. We’d pray over it that it’d find a home. And we started networking with homeless shelters. So as people were exiting the shelter, they would come, they’re giant free yard sale and take what they needed.
We started inviting, started practicing this hospitality. Every person who came to receive assistance, I asked them, would you come back and help the next family in need? And about 20, 25 % did. And what I watched was those suburban neighbors who came to the city next my new friends from the city who were coming out of unsheltered status became friends.
And so we would sit around and eat fried chicken and pray for each other. And it was the most beautiful expression of what I imagined the kingdom could look like. Because in that act of serving together, everyone’s gifts counted. There was no giver, no receiver in that team. We were one. And what we learned about each other and each other’s journeys, most of us were moms.
And so we had this deep connection. Our kids would run around this old abandoned church. My daughter has so many memories of playing with kids and I mean, we were family and that was my first taste of it. And I was hooked from then on out. I was like, this is real church for me, for someone like myself.
After that I started working in a community called Hillside Court. So it’s a public housing complex. And what we saw was those that were coming through the experience of housing, a significant percentage at that time were losing their housing. And so they were coming back through to receive. And what we realized is that those individuals who were serving with us, when they went into housing, they had a family, they had us, if something went wrong, and let’s say they had an unexpected bill, medical bill or the car broke down or whatever. We were able with very low funds to keep people in housing.
And so we realized the stuff is nice, right? But it wasn’t changing the outcome. What was changing the outcome was people in relationship, authentic, deep relationship. So I spun the furniture bank off to Caritas, the largest homeless services provider in Richmond. And I started doing community development work in Hillside Court.
And it was remarkable. I mean, we just asking the community members if you could do anything to strengthen this community, what would you do? And the number one thing we heard was keep the children safe. Okay, what would you do to keep the children safe? Because there was gun violence, significant gun violence, people literally being gunned down in the street and then two teenagers were shot. And it was like, reached the point where the community had to do something.
And Lindsay Gulletly and Patrice Shelton, they said, if we could do anything, we would provide activities for young people. And so that launched a new community development effort around Keep the Kids Safe. And we had 10 resident-led initiatives that emerged over the next five years. And it became that same experience.
Once a month, we had Fellowship Day. We had church groups bring in the meat, like fried chicken or whatever it was and all the residents would cook. It was a big, giant, community-wide potluck dinner with hundreds of people. And we would baptize people with t-shirts if they volunteered. And so my understanding, if Jesus were here right now, what would this look like? You know, when Jesus is with people, He’s in their life, He’s in their world.
It’s not like, okay, today we’re going to feed the 5,000 come to the temple, we’re going to do it at the temple. You know, like that’s not what I see. It’s, it’s doing life where people are joining in where people are. And then inviting people to be a part of the solution. If you have some fish and some lows, let’s see what we can do with it. You know, it’s just that willingness to use what’s already there.
So Brooklyn Park was the next community I went to. I moved into that historically black community with a rich, rich history. Same thing happened. Moved from Brooklyn Park out here to middle of nowhere Virginia. And I would say it’s still a little early, but finding you and Kay and all of the folks in my backyard that care about this kind of thing. Stay tuned. I have no idea what will happen. And that’s what’s so fun. It’s a fun, fun thing to watch. When everybody gives what they have to achieve their wildest dreams for their community, cool stuff happens.
Ruth Perry (19:38)
Especially when you got a cool catalyzer like yourself that comes in and gets people together and gets them thinking. Can you explain what the asset-based community development approach is? What does that mean?
Wendy McCaig (19:51)
Yeah, so asset-based community development was developed by John McKnight and Jody Kretzman, and it actually got its naming more in academia. So they traveled across the country. They interviewed like 3000 communities about what made them strong and they identified six assets.
And so the official definition of ABCD is that ABCD considers the local assets as the primary building blocks for sustainable community, building on the skills, talents of the residents, and the power of local groups, supportive functions of associations. The way I like to think about it is simpler. Everyone has a gift. Everyone has a dream. If you discover the shared dream, people will invest their gift and bring that dream to life.
And so that’s pretty much the process is this discovery process that you go to. And ABCD is simply a tool for that. It’s a way of seeing the world. And when I wrote Power Shift, which is my second book that we use as the curriculum for my training, I wanted to kind of make it really easy to remember. So I love organic metaphors. So imagine you’re growing a tree, you know, that tree, what kind of tree you can grow depends on what kind of soil you have. And that soil is made up of particles of this bedrock of those rocks underneath. And so I really wanted to zoom in on four bedrock principles of ABCD.
And those bedrock principles are asset-based lenses, like how are we looking at the world? And I think Philippians 4.8 is the most helpful, that we are focusing on what is true, what is noble, what is right, what is pure, what is lovely, what is admirable, that’s asset-based lenses. So if we get in a room, and all we want to talk about is what we don’t have. We want to talk about how we need more children in the church and we need more tithers and we need more and we need more. All that does is suck the life out of the room. You can’t build on broken.
You’ve got to figure out what do you have? What are those building blocks? So asset-based lenses helps you see the world for what’s already there. And the role of a pastor in helping the church see its abundance is one of the greatest transformational practices.
The second is around hospitality. So the second bedrock principle is bond-building relationships. We have a lot of service providers that say that they’re building relationship, but they’re really not. It’s very transactional. If your church is doing a food pantry and during COVID you went through the line and somebody bags the groceries and gives it to you through your car window and that is not a relationship, that is a transaction. Transactions do not transform people the way relationships do.
And so bond building relationships are peer to peer connections and the practice of hospitality. When you look at Jesus, like he was always at parties and dinners and like he was having fun with people, like hanging out, doing life. That is our core practice for ABCD is, you know, people are like, well, how do you get started? Throw a party, like invite people over.
Go out for coffee. Like It’s not rocket science, but it’s that presencing. It’s that willingness to sit and be and listen and discover stories. Like, So that bond building relationship is critical. The third is community driven action. And what, what that principle is about is don’t expect the outside group to come in and do for your community. Be the body.
You’ve got all the parts. I believe that in every single community, the spirit has assembled. It’s kind of like those dry bones and they’re all spread out all over the place. How do we bring those bones together? How is that breath of life breathed in? Those relationships are like the tendons that hold those bones together. So thinking about community-driven action is us living into our purpose. And the final principle is developmental impact. So we’re not just bringing the body together and saying, okay, body, let’s go lay on a beach and soak up the sun. It’s like, why? What is our why? What is our purpose? What is our shared calling? What is it that spirit is doing in this place at this time?
And so that grows out of community listening. So that’s our first capacity building process that I teach churches and others to do. In the church we call it holy listening and you’re going to be a part of an experiment. So I’m going to try doing holy listening with a whole church, now granted it’s very small church, with a whole church in a few weeks to discover what are their gifts, what is their shared dream. And to start to imagine if those two pieces came together, what would that make possible? So that’s ABCD in what, five minutes or less? I don’t know.
Ruth Perry (25:01)
Good job. That’s really, really compelling. Yeah, I love all of it. How does seeing people as asset holders rather than problems change ministry relationships?
Wendy McCaig (25:12)
Yeah, so a lot of times to help people understand this practice of hospitality, I read this book in seminary and right now it’s escaping me. But she talked about how hospitality is reciprocal and that when we only see one half of the equation where we’re the givers and I think sometimes faith language is problematic because we see ourselves as servants and servant leadership. I’ve gotten to where I don’t use that language because it it’s missing the reciprocal.
The last chapter in John McKnight’s first book, talks about Jesus saying, no longer do I call you servants, I call you friends. That idea of friending, of mutuality, of exchange, that doesn’t happen until people see the gifts of others. And so one of the ways I help into my trainings for people to get this is I would have two people face each other, volunteers. One puts their arms out wide and the other has Velcro on their hands and they have to stand like a board. And then the one with their arms out gives the other one a big hug.
And then I ask them what that felt like, and the person who goes to give the hug you know always says it felt weird because the other person couldn’t give back. They couldn’t hug back. if you’ve ever, if you have a teenager like mine, you’ve experienced the one way hug, right? Like it’s just part of mothering a teenager and it is, there’s just something wrong about it. It just really feels weird because we are hardwired, We are just, it’s in our nature to want to give back and the greatest need of
anybody, any community is the need to be needed. And when we don’t invite people to give whatever gift they have, it could be a smile, it could be a kind word. Like everybody has a gift to give. If we don’t invite that, we are telling people they have nothing to contribute to this. We got it. We got this. You go sit down. You do nothing. Let me serve you.
Sometimes people are in crisis and that’s what they need, right? But not everyone all the time. And so it’s that reciprocal nature that it makes possible. And that is transformative for everyone in the equation. Not just those who have come to receive something. If they get to give, then somebody else is receiving. And within the church, what I found is people have a really hard time receiving.
Church members who their whole life pride themselves on being a servant and serving others really struggle with receiving. So that’s one of the homework assignments that I like to give out when I’m training in churches. And I’ve heard some amazing stories of how the gift of receiving gave the gift of giving to someone else.
Ruth Perry (28:02)
That is so true. I was just talking with one of my elderly parishioners and she’s still, in her mid 80s, still doing, doing, for her children and her grandchildren and doesn’t like to receive any care from them. And she prays to God that they’ll never have to take her in and care for her. And I think it’s that need to just be the servant and not receive.
And I’m also thinking about how you grew up in the, or you didn’t grow up, but you experienced the Baptist Church. And that was the tradition that I grew up in. And so I had that idea that God had an order to things. And this idea of hierarchies. And it was really transformative for me to realize looking back in Genesis and never seeing it before, but God gave dominion to Adam and Eve, both of them.
I think reading Lisa Sharon Harper’s The Very Good Gospel is where I had the recognition that God didn’t just give Adam and Eve dominion, he gave every human being dominion. We all have the capacity to have dominion. And I’ve realized as a woman undoing patriarchy that women are the best guides out of patriarchy. And so the poor are the best guides out of poverty. We should look to the people on the margins to be our leaders in these areas where there are hierarchies that need to be taken down.
Wendy McCaig (29:16)
Absolutely. So ABCD operates under the principle of subsidiarity, which basically says the individual closest to the challenge is closest to the solution. And listening and centering the voices of those who are most impacted by whatever decisions get made. I think a lot of our current, well, yeah, we’ll have an advisory circle, right? But they don’t have the power.
And so in Power Shift, we really focus on how do we transfer decision-making power. And if you can get bond building and you can start building relationships, then you have to start asking yourself, who made the decision on what day our food, meat feeding ministry is happening? Who made the decision on what food gets, but you know, who made the decision on how long it like, like the transferring of decision-making power is exceptionally difficult especially in high control religion.
And yeah it’s a journey for a lot of different faith communities to start to lean into these principles little by little and and I’m kind of a dive into the deep end of the pool kind of girl. And a lot of my friends that were born and raised in the church are like, what’s the kiddie pool version? You’re not going to get them jumping off the high dive, Wendy. You need to like give people a way to acclimate to the waters. so I’m over the years recognize that about myself. I tend to coach and train people who really want to make a big splash, you know, off the high dive. But then they’re then coaching and training individuals who can help shepherd people to that end to the pool. It’s really not my greatest strength. And I recognize that as one of my limitations.
Ruth Perry (31:06)
You can’t be good at everything. So what are some common mistakes that well-intentioned churches make when they’re trying to help communities in poverty, Wendy?
Wendy McCaig (31:15)
It goes back to what I said a little bit ago about the need to be needed. When we deprive people of the gift of giving, we don’t see it as a kind of selfish act, but in many ways it is. Like so many of what we term our missions, you know, kind of outreach is really driven by our need to be needed internally and there’s tremendous resistance to undoing that way of thinking.
I had this experience with a church that I went to talk to and I was talking about this process. Oh yes, we’ve been serving the homeless for 45 years and we’re really good at it. And I said, really? You just hosted Caritas, right? Did you meet John? Did you meet Rudy? Because I knew the people who were there and the church members were like, we don’t learn their names.
And I was like, okay, I just made the only point I’m going to make. I didn’t have to say anything. I’m just like, there’s a difference between what you’re doing and what I’m trying to get you to do. Simply learning people’s names, learning their story, that willingness to be in relationship. That’s the greatest
missed opportunity. You know, it’s not that just handing out food and not learning names is bad, but it’s a deeply missed experience of mutuality and giving people dignity along with the bag of groceries. Like, can we do both? I often get criticized. People think I’m saying, Don’t do these things. I’m just saying do it different. Do it with the input of those that you say you’re seeking to serve. Yeah, so I think that’s my soapbox that I probably should get off now.
Ruth Perry (33:08)
Can you share a story where recognizing hidden assets in a community changed the outcome entirely?
Wendy McCaig (33:14)
Yeah, so Hillside Court, mentioned it earlier, they had had a number of murders. So there were three separate murders in the first three weeks of, I think it was 2010. And then those two teenagers were hit by a stray bullet. So in my brain, I’m like, my God, we need to get the cops in here. We need to have a community wide meeting and we need the police to come tell us what we should be doing.
So I hosted this meeting for my key leaders or about a dozen key leaders from the community and I invited the police to come in and talk to us and we walked out and there’s a guy we all call Big John and Big John said, don’t you ever do that to me again. He said, if my neighbors see me walking out of here, with that cop in there, I’m going to be branded a snitch and there is no good that can come out of what you just did.
John was a big teddy bear. Like he never ever said anything to me like that before. He was scared and it really rattled me. And at the time I was being coached by an ABCD person who did for me what I do for others. And he asked me, said, whose idea was that, Wendy? And I said, it was mine. And it was me and the outsiders. Like, that’s what I would do with my neighbor. And he said, you never, you need to let the community tell you what would be most helpful.
And so a few weeks later, we hosted a big pizza party. We invited anybody who wanted to come, no cops, no outside officials, no government reps, nobody but the community and I asked the question, if you could do anything to strengthen Hillside, what would you do? And these voices about keeping the kids safe, the motivation for action. Most people like Big John, they knew what to do. They knew if they heard gunfire, where to go. They felt like they were navigating it but it was the fact that they were locking their children inside their apartments and they couldn’t play outside.
That was devastating to the whole community, those with and without children. And so I asked who in this room would be willing to be a part of the solution. I don’t live here. When the guns are going off, I’m 30 minutes away. And Patrice Shelton raised her hand and said, I’ll do it. And as soon as she did, Lindsay Gallet-Lee raised her hand and those two built a team, interviewed parents and said, if we could do anything to keep our children safe, what could we do.
And that is how that development effort really took off. And so Lindsay used to be a cheerleading coach and she said, well, what if we offered activities here at the rec center? So the rec center had been shut down. It was like a community room that had been shut down for a decade. And so they wouldn’t give the keys to the community, but they’d give it to me because I had a million dollar liability insurance. And so I gave the key to the residents and they started organizing activities for kids. we had cheerleading and football, then all kinds of stuff grew out of how do we keep our children safe?
I would never have thought that cheerleading would be the pathway to community safety. The wisdom of how to best address what is going on in a community lies with the community members themselves. The other thing I learned through this, so they started gathering parents, largely single moms and many of them very young, together for a family support group. And when I learned from this circle, where were the gunmen coming from? They were not residents. They were people taking advantage of very young moms. They were men coming in, living in the community with these women against all the rules, you know.
And the way that the community responded to that was a block by block support structure where we had block captains across the community that worked with their block to help people feel safe and to help those young girls who were being taken advantage of find other alternatives and to liberate them from that oppressive situation. I wouldn’t have thought of that. So when you listen deeply and you allow the community itself to think about what it has and how it can be a source of solution to its own problems, the power that creates, that sense of efficacy and agency that grow out of that cannot come from the outside. It has to come from the inside lived experience of making a difference. And that power grows over time until they can take on systems. I saw all kinds of things happen in Hillside Court. So that’s, yeah. That’s kind of a long story, but I hope it illustrates the point.
Ruth Perry (38:05)
Yeah, You use the phrase dream-releasers. that I like. What does it mean to cultivate leaders rather than create dependency?
Wendy McCaig (38:13)
Yeah, and that story with Hillside, so we had a cheerleading team, so Lindsay’s husband’s name was Tony. And Tony was like, well, you have cheerleaders, you need a football team, but it was gonna cost like several thousand dollars for them to join this league. And we formed a dream team at a local church. And we said, your job dream team, is to support the dreamers in Hillside Court. Tony’s dream is to have a football team that is led by residents. Here’s what you can do to support the team. And they did it. Versus going to this suburban affluent community and saying, what do y’all want to do for the residents?
We took Tony and Lindsay to the church and said, these are your missionaries. Like they are the ones making a difference in their community. What can you, how can you come alongside? And so miraculous things happen, too many to name in a podcast. But the thing I most appreciate and did not expect were these very long-term relationships that formed between folks who otherwise would never have met each other. But deep, deep, deep, deep, deep friendships that have lasted decades. That’s the real fruit of that long-term connection.
Ruth Perry (39:32)
That’s beautiful. What spiritual disciplines sustain you, in your long-term justice and reconciliation work?
Wendy McCaig (39:39)
So I guess through the years I’ve kind of like developed my own like phrasing around spiritual disciplines. I Every morning I get up, I get my coffee, I get my journal and I position myself where I can watch the sunrise and I try to capture, I love Mary Oliver’s instructions for living, it’s like, pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. And so my journal is really about capturing what is astonishing me in this moment. And then speaking it back to the divine, to the universe, to the sacred and saying thank you.
Thank you for this conversation with Ruth. Thank you for this opportunity to join in where your spirit is already moving in my backyard. So my facing the dawn practice is both about recognizing and being fully present in my own experience, but the facing of the dawn is leaning into the possibility. What is this new day? These fragments of awe that I’m bringing from yesterday, what are they pointing toward for this new day? And when what happened the day before is not so beautiful and it happens, right? We have bad days. It’s like, wow, it’s a newness here. There’s a new emerging right in front of me. So facing the dawn has been a practice of mine for forever.
Following beauty for me is a practice that emerged during my time in seminary. So I took a course in Celtic spirituality and Dr. Brocklow would have us go into the forest. He would tell us to get lost and go talk to trees. And we were to come back 45 minutes later and tell him what the frog said. It was this incredibly liberating kind of experience and it was also stretching for me, the accountant, to lean into the contemplative and mystical side of the Christian tradition. And that practice of spending quality, deep time in the wild led us to buy our property. We have 23 acres of heavily forested land and that’s how I ended up in Ruth’s backyard. Always dreamed that one day we would move out here and that’s where I am and I want this place to be a place where people can experience that. That magical, mysterious spirit that roams around like a fairy in my forest.
So following beauty and probably the last one I’ll share is kind of a new or something I’m learning to do. And that is standing in the darkness. I’ve been through multiple seasons where it felt like the light went out. When I had the three miscarriages, when my dad passed away, I went through a really hard time in 2017, 18, multiple things happened. And then again, more recently, and every time I I was able to pause and the last two I took sabbaticals and was able to just stand with the darkness, not run from it, not lay under it and just give up, but just stand in it and to feel it and to be present to it.
I think a lot of people would tell me, you what’s the lesson? Okay. Sometimes there is no lesson. I don’t understand a lot of it. And I think that is part of our growth is to not have to make sense of it all. Sometimes senseless things are just senseless things. But in that we can be held. We can find the ground of our being and it’s the only thing helping us stand. And that is a, I’m a fix it kind of girl. And that was a really hard, really hard for me to stand, just stand still with it. So those are the ones that are kind of daily reminding myself of and trying to practice.
Ruth Perry (43:43)
Yeah, you have to fill up to pour out, If every church embraced the vision that you describe, how would cities look different? And rural communities like ours, how would they look different 10 years from now?
Wendy McCaig (43:55)
think that the main thing around this vision is really about people coming alive. And so I love Howard Thurman’s quote, don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. When we discover our own gifts, when we help other people find their gift, and then we bring all of it together, not just those in the church doing for those outside, but the whole community coming to a common place, a common table, investing our gifts, watching our communities really thrive. What do all communities really need during this time?
And there’s two things that are in my experience, invaluable. One is belonging. We live in a season of life where loneliness is an epidemic. Our individual tendencies, individualistic tendencies have led us to this place and we need to get back to recognizing we’re all connected. We all belong together.
So belonging and the second is around purpose. I see a lot of hopelessness. I see a lot of apathy, especially among our young people for whom the promises that were delivered to our generation that motivated us just don’t hold water. And finding purpose, finding something more than a promise of a 401k is really what our world hungers for. It can’t just be about that physical world of stuff. There’s something so much deeper. And so if people embrace this vision for coming alive and are willing to give their gifts, that’s what I see is a world marked by belonging and purpose. And the walls that separate and divide us will disappear and we will see ourselves in one another and the spirit moving and binding all of us together when we’re willing to do that.
Ruth Perry (46:07)
May it be so. Well, we should probably wrap up our conversation, Wendy. I’ve kept you long enough. Is there anything else that you want to share before we sign off?
Wendy McCaig (46:17)
No, I’ve just so enjoyed this conversation and thinking through all the different questions. I think you did a lovely job of guiding us through what my career as a minister of community cultivator of 50 years, it feels like, in one hour. So thank you. You’re very, very good at this. I appreciate it.
Ruth Perry (46:42)
Everyone should visit wendymcaig.com, and is it embracecommunities.com as well, or is it something else?
Wendy McCaig (46:49)
embracecommunities.org. And I will just add currently that WordPress site wendymccaig.com, I’m about to point it over to the Substack but if you want to see 10 years of content, just go look at it real quick. to be pointing to the news space. Yes.
Ruth Perry (47:05)
So they can find you on Substack then. So what is your Substack, Wendy McCaig?
Wendy McCaig (47:09)
Wendy McCaig and you can either search for me, Wendy McCaig, or Walking with Wildflowers is the publication, and that’s where I’m capturing a lot of what’s emerging today, what’s growing out of these cultivating efforts, and a lot of my own personal journey trying to figure this out in this weird time we live in. So I would recommend the Substack.
Ruth Perry (47:32)
Well, thank you so much for being here today, Wendy. I’m super pumped and excited for what God is gonna do through you here in this area, and I’m grateful to be your friend now. God bless you.
Wendy McCaig (47:42)
Yeah, I’m excited. Thank you.
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