A Vision for Urban Ministry — Clayton Shenk — Ep. 075

Well, hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here in York, Pennsylvania, with Clayton Schenk, and you've started a school here in the city of York, Pennsylvania. I think there's also a church you've been heavily involved with for the last while. Can you just start by telling us something about this city? What unique aspects does it have? What makes this city really tick? York, like many other inner city, inland cities, is a dying city. That is, it's declining in population. But at one point, York had 60,000 people, and today there are 43,000 people. Whoa. And so Caterpillar, Alice Chalmers, Mack, all of those manufacturing jobs have more or less disappeared. Harley-Davidson is still here, but a lot of the manufacturing jobs have left York.

One of the things that really makes York unique, and we're only across the river from Lancaster, so in just an hour you can be in Lancaster. But William Penn, when he bought the land from the Indians, he promised that nobody would ever settle west of the Susquahona River.

So Lancaster filling up with people. In 1783, there was about 581 people in Lancaster, and they were sure that was too full. They were sure they had to go somewhere else. And so they began to come over, and the Indians complained and went to Harrisburg, and the National Guard came down and physically took the settlers back to Lancaster County. And so the people of York, traditionally, way, way back, you know, 250 years ago, were the rebels, were the ones who were defying an agreement with William Penn. So now a lot of people went to Chambersburg, which was far enough west that the Indians didn't care about that, but the ones right here in York County really cared about that treaty that William Penn made.

And but York, the Articles of Confederation were settled here. Continental Congress met here for seven months during the Revolutionary War. And so there's a number of historic things that happened here, but it has an interesting root. And so in the book, Taking Our Cities for God, Dawson says that there's a spirit behind every city. And if you're going to be a missionary to the city, you should figure out what that spirit is. Well, one of the spirits here is that spirit of rebellion, the spirit of, no, we're not going to listen to the treaty, we're not going to listen, honor what was happening there. Okay, so tell me about how long have you lived here?

When did you move? In the early '80s, when I was born in '60, so '80, I was 20 years old, and I wanted to do some VS somewhere. I wanted to figure out how to serve the Lord. And I volunteered my time, actually, at the Lancaster radio station. It's now called WJTL, but back then it was WPTG. And I served my nine months of VS as an evening board operator, and I had a program there, a children's goodnight program. I played the Moody stories. One of the stories I played was Dwight Moody's story. And when he became a Christian, he wanted to teach Sunday school class. They didn't have a Sunday school class for him.

So he said, well, if you let me find the boys, will you give me a room? And they agreed. So eventually he had four rows that he rented, and he had filled up with boys, and he had his own boys' school. They had two weeks of summer Bible school here, and my girlfriend, now my wife, was one of the Bible school teachers. Monday night was my night off from the radio, and so I came along with her, and she had no scholars in fourth grade. Nobody showed up that night. So she said, oh, should I just, should we just go to the adult class? I said, no, let's do what Dwight Moody did. And so we went down the streets and went around.

Are you in fourth grade? You in fourth grade? You in fourth grade? You in fourth grade? And so by the end of the two weeks, she had the biggest class. She had 12 fourth graders, and they said, we got to get that guy here.

And so they started hounding me. Will you come to York? Come to York. And they don't realize all I was doing was what I learned from somebody else. Yeah, I'm not very original in many things. I hear from other people, and I say, well, I just did what Dwight Moody did. So I agreed to come for one year. Actually, they asked, will you come for six months? Just come for six months. So that's all I agreed to was six months. I've been here for 35 years now. I came as a Sunday school teacher and then summer Bible school superintendent. And when they talked about an ordination, I was ordained pastor. Did you help start this school then?

Was this here already? The church was up the street. The church building was there. And this was a building that was a handicapped daycare center for handicapped adults. They had an open house, and I came through and I said, if you ever want to sell, I'd like to have a school someday. I'd like to start a school. Jay Fox from Redding was encouraging us to get a school started and telling us the advantages of a school. And so he called me one day and he said, hey, we're going to move out. You may assume the mortgage. Just take over the mortgage and you can have the building, $70,000. And I said, well, that's very kind of you, but we're not going to go in debt.

We're just not going to go in debt. And so we'll have to pass up the offer. A year and a half later, he called and said, my tax accountant tells me I can give you the building at half price, and so give me 30 or 35,000, you can have it. And I said, do I get to choose which one of those two? He said, of course. I said, well, that's very kind and generous, but no, we're not going to go in debt. So I can't take it. We decided that by July 1st, if we have $5,000 in a fund for the school and we have three students and one teacher, we'll start this year. But July 1st is the day is the year that we're going to start.

So that was sort of the fleece. Those three things by July 1st. July 1st, we had no money, no teachers, no students. So I was like, okay, well, forget that. Well, on July 3rd, he called back and he said, I don't want that building for one more year. It's a headache. You may have it. Just take it. If you pay closing costs, you may have the building. I said, I'm very, very interested. Yes, indeed. Whoa. And so praise God, we got the building. I have this little enclave. We have a church building, a school building, three houses. My son owns a house on the block. One day, somebody called the police and they complained here.

Something was happening in the neighborhood. Neighbors were being loud or whatever. And they said, hey, the church has that block. That's the church block. You tell the church. Really? That was 911's response. Wow. Just go tell the church. And so we started to say, oh, well, if that's how it is, we're going to have to become more active and more.

And so one of our neighbors can just barely walk. Really handicapped, but she doesn't have a handicapped parking. So I got blue paint. We painted the sidewalk. We put up a little sign. No parking. We put a crosswalk so our children could walk across. I was like, oh, okay, what? And so. How has this neighborhood received you? I'm sure it's been a progression. You've been here for quite a while, but. You're always going to have some who are just real happy to see you, and some are like, what's going on here? You know, there are some who your question was, how did we get received? Yeah. As long as we just smile and we're happy and we're cleaning up the neighborhood and we're having parties and block parties and those kinds of things, everybody's happy.

But when we begin to preach on the street corners and do tract distributions and those kinds of things, not everybody's happy. Yeah. You're forcing them to confront what does the Bible say? And okay, so the Bible says this. I have to deal with that. And I think sometimes people don't like it. That's right. They would just be, I'd rather just live my life and not have to face these things, just ignore them.

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So tell us about the different ways that you've been able to engage with this city. You've already went into some of those, but what are some projects you've done and especially how were they received? Maybe difficulties you might have had. How did you overcome these, especially since you have so much experience? You have been here a while.

Yeah, go into some of that. One of the things that we have in the city is tremendous fear of criminals. So when something goes wrong, nobody wants to be a snitch. Nobody wants to tell. We don't go out of the way to inform people, but we don't lie. And so when a police officer says, did you see something? The answer is yes.

This is what we saw. The state of Pennsylvania passed a law that if you sell drugs within 1,000 feet of a school, you automatically get five years. And so the city plots where the schools are, and they say, oh, Titans of Peace here. That's wonderful because now they're 1,000 feet and this 1,000 feet. So don't move.

Stay where you're at because we need you right there. We had across the street fire. It didn't affect our houses, but the ones right next door to us affected it. And then I read in the newspaper the next day that the fire marshal rolled at arson. And so I looked at our security cameras and you could see the three teenagers going into the house next door, the yard next door, and leaving and about five minutes later, the fire truck's coming. And so I said, I called the police and I said, I might have some information you would like to see on our security cameras. And they said, yes, yes. And so I saw this. When they put that in the newspaper, the picture, one frame of these three guys walking, it was very obvious it was our house.

It was the teacher's house. It was the girl's house. It was their car. And so anybody who knows the neighborhood could know who was working with the police on that one. That was Wednesday morning that was put out and they're asking, anybody who knows these guys, please let us know. Thursday night Bible school, we had a couple of the children who were acting rowdy. And so two of our staff members walked this child home. And as they walked, they delivered the child and they were coming back to the school, they met three young men perpendicularly and they passed them. And about 25 feet beyond that, they turned around and shot at them. And the girl got three holes in her dress.

And so the police were like, oh, I had nothing to do. Nothing to do with the e-reporting. Yeah. I was like, well, I don't believe that. But anyhow. So we were at prison next week, next week later. And as soon as I walked in, the guy's like, oh, you're the guys with the camera. You're the guys that, well, thank you. That was my brother's house to burn.

And so he was grateful for it. Well, I said, well, I have a question for you. Was that right for us as a church to have cameras? Because all of a sudden there was this debate. No, no, no, no. You shouldn't have had cameras. Oh, well. And so the prisoners themselves were somebody like, yeah, you should have cameras. Interesting. I said, well, if it's right for us to have cameras, was it right for us to call the police? No, no, no, no. Pretty well universal, except for this one whose brother's house burned. He was on our side the whole way.

Most of them agreed we could have cameras, but we shouldn't have called the police. I said, well, then what do we do with that information? Well, you should have gone and talked to the guys. You should have just. But I said, I don't know who they were. I didn't know who they were. What was I supposed to do? I'll tell you another interesting part of this. I told the prisoners about these two staff members getting shot at and the girl.

And they almost came out of their seats, the whole thing. I was like, you need to run. You got to get out of town, man. You're had. Your day is up. Go. Really? And I said, but why? Greater is he that is in me than he is in the world.

There's nothing going to happen to us unless God says, okay, I'm going to lift the hedge. Why do we run? We're as secure as can be here. Is it dangerous? Yes. Have we been shot at? Yes. One day I came into school and I'm coming to the back door through the gym and my teacher's coming running into the gym. They're shooting at us. They're shooting at us. Well, somebody shot three holes in our front window. And that particular, like in six months, we had 29 gun incidents in this neighborhood. 29 different situations. Some shooting, some just that we saw a gun. We mark it up as a.

Yeah, there's times. You think about it. You have children. But we have to remember that the hedge of protection and Job, nothing could happen to Job unless God lifted the hedge. And so you're safe and you're guarded and you're protected. That's important to remember because, well, because one question I have then, what encouragements do you have for people watching this who may want to get involved in their own city or maybe move to a ministry in the city? Obviously, fear plays into a lot of this. People are scared of some of the things that happen in cities. Yeah, what would you say to encourage them? Listen to the Pineapple Story series. Okay. Okay. We'll put a link to that.

Yeah. That's a good point. Otto Koenig, what a powerful, powerful testimony of he was over there with the headhunters. He was over there with the rattlesnakes and the poisonous, whatever. And nothing can happen to us. And Job, read the book of Job. I mean, it's a powerful house. One day I said, so God, would you just show your power? I was laying in bed. I woke up. Just show your power. Lift the head just a little bit, just like to see your power. It was a stupid prayer. Never pray.

Don't do that. My son trips and falls and we had to go to the hospital. So now I pray, dear God, make it higher and make it wider. Otto was such an encouragement to me to recognize that I am safe when I'm in the midst of God's will and wherever I'm at, there's nothing going to harm me. There's nothing going to get me. I'm still human, right? Okay. He's not in flesh. So I'm pretty comfortable in this neighborhood. People know me. I've been here back and forth. We go from here going across town to our house. But I was on the west side. I was in an area I wasn't sure about. I wasn't neighboring.

And here comes two guys coming to me. I don't know who these guys are. Oh, boy. And so I started immediately, God brings to mind, Peace Be Still, the song. And I started singing it. It's just great peace came upon me. It's just a tremendous thing. All right. One day I had heard that Satanists, their service lasts till about two or three in the morning. I forget which one. And then the last thing they do in their service is they cast spells on Christian pastors. And so the speaker who told me this, said, if you ever wake up and you look at your clock and it's three o'clock, you know that you just got attacked by Satan.

And the Satanist just attacked you. I'm like, I get up three o'clock lots of times. Lots of times. I look at my watch. Oh, my. It's three o'clock. So I began to pray. Before I went to bed, I said, dear God, put a mirror around me. Make this hedge a mirror so that any weapon from the enemy that comes my way is reflected back to their camp.

And so I sleep through three o'clock. I hardly ever get up at three o'clock anymore. No kidding. And so there's this awesome protection. One day we met with a demon-possessed person. And I reckoned, oh, boy, now you're in the controversy.

But that's a whole other story. But I walked in the room after a number of times. There was a number of encounters. But I walked in the room and she said, I hate you. Well, I knew by that time that I'm talking to a demon and also an individual. I said, you don't hate me. You hate Jesus Christ who lives inside of me. They were talking to us. Well, through that whole experience, and it's a long, long story, but through the whole experience, the power that we have in Jesus, the protection we have in Jesus, the fact that they couldn't even touch me. There was another lady, demon-possessed, and riding on the floor. She was crawling on the floor, and there was four or five of us there kneeling, praying.

We're forming a straight line, and she's going back and forth along the sink and the stove and the refrigerator, back and forth, just screaming and hollering. But she couldn't touch us. There was no way she could touch us.

There was a young boy one time. He called me Slick. I don't know. That was my nickname back then. But they said, Slick, I can hit you. His nose is about this far from my nose. He was really, really mad at me. And I said, you can't touch me. You can't touch me unless God lets you.

And just the confidence that that is. Now, yeah, sure. There were days where you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, here's who's coming. I think my number is up. But yet there's so many times when I look back, so many times being here in this city where I see God's power, God's protection, God's way. And I could go a long, long time telling you about many, many stories of God's protection. And I have hundreds of stories I don't even know about because I don't even know how many times God protected me. I wasn't aware of it. Oh, I got to tell you this next one.

There was a young lady who came to Christ, and she went home and told her boyfriend, we can't go to bed together anymore. Until we're married, we can't go to bed. So we were living upstairs above the church, and we're in the back apartment. And I hear these footsteps. I hear somebody coming up, coming back the hall towards my door, but nobody knocked. And all of a sudden, I hear running, running down the steps, slamming the door. And I'm like, well, that's strange. I'm going to go find out what's going on. So I walk out and I go downstairs. Well, here, I'm in Arlene and are having a Bible study with Emma and Gloria. So the four of them are saying, oh, Clayton, we're glad to see you.

I said, yeah. This Virginia's boyfriend just came in and said, where's Clayton? He said, he's upstairs. I said, I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill him. My girlfriend won't go to bed with me anymore. I'm going to kill him. And so he came upstairs with the intent of getting me. And I think he met the angels at the front door. He met the guardian angels because he ran. He never knocked on my apartment. He ran and slammed the door and he was gone. And so that's why I say there's so many times that God protects us we don't even know about. But that was exciting. I mean, just to think about the fact that greater is he that is us than he that is the world.

And so you can go to the darkest, dimmest, darkest place on the earth. You can go into the cities and God will protect you. Wow. That's really powerful. Well, that's all the questions I had for the interview. So thanks for sharing those stories. Thank you for having the opportunity. Yeah. And for all the time you've put in here. And also, I think the inspiration you've been to so many people. I know there's been a lot of volunteers come through here serving at your school and your church, what you're doing here. I think that's really powerful. And I really want these stories to get out there. So thanks for joining us. Thank you.