Randall Murphree

AFA Journal editor

June 2013 – Rasheen grew up on the violent, drug-infested streets of Camden, New Jersey, a turn-of-the-century epitome of urban dysfunction.

Gangs and drugs: rampant. Crime: highest in the U.S. in 2008 – 2,333 violent crimes per 100,000 people (five times the national average). Schools and police department: taken over by the state (2005-2012). Corruption: three recent mayors jailed. Families: 22% of households had married couples living together; 37.9% had a female head of household.

Did Rasheen have a chance to escape? Hope for a normal life? He didn’t think so. Nor would anyone who knew him and his lot in life. Everything around him created a frightening formula for failure.

Finding direction
But then Rasheen found UrbanPromise Academy – a private Christian high school – and UrbanTrekkers, both part of Urban Promise Ministries. Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope. He was accepted into the freshman class in the mid-2000s. Rasheen was one of the fortunate few – at the time, UPA had a total enrollment of 35 students in grades 9-12.

Throughout high school, he not only found academic success, but also benefitted from UT. Under the leadership of Trekkers founder Jim Cummings, Rasheen was soon exposed to experiences that shattered the confines of the world he had known and showed him a world of endless possibilities.

Years later, Rasheen told Cummings, “When I left for college after graduating from the UrbanPromise Academy, my biggest fear and concern was, would I make it outside Camden and UrbanPromise. No one in my family had ever gone to college – most had never finished high school.

“I’m a kid from Camden, my father is in jail, my mother is addicted to crack. How could I ever feel like I belonged at college?” In 2012, Rasheen graduated from college, one of UPA’s and Trekkers’ many success stories.

Trekker extraordinaire
“In 2004, I decided to volunteer and start an outdoor club for the kids at UrbanPromise,” Cummings told AFA Journal. One Saturday a month, he took the kids on local outings.

Cummings would come to UPM and announce, “I’m planning to go canoeing in the Pine Barrens [a national reserve in southern New Jersey]. I’ll make lunches for us and I’ll pick you up at 8:30 Saturday morning. We’ll be out all day.”

Rasheen went on some of those early excursions, and said those experiences were invaluable to him even on the college campus. When he was around other students, he began to realize that he too had stories to tell. Not the typical tales of middle-class American kids, but stories of adventure and travel that helped him establish his place in a world bigger than Camden.

Cummings planned 10 Saturday trips his first year, including visits to museums in the winter months, across the river into Philadelphia and into other environments the kids had never imagined. The excursions were a big hit with the inner city teens.

“I started to realize that I was dealing with young people who had some pretty serious issues,” Cummings said. “The environments they were growing up in, the stress they were dealing with, parents incarcerated, friends killed by gun violence, drugs, teen pregnancy – all of these issues were just overwhelming.”

Trekking forward
Cummings first learned of UPM when Dr. Bruce Main, its founder, spoke at the small church in Pitman, New Jersey, where Cummings and his wife Rae Ann were active in youth ministry.

Founded in 1988, UPM was conceived in a dusty East Camden church basement by a small cadre of college missionaries who created a summer camp for urban kids. Overwhelming response showed that the city was wide open for such an outreach.

Through the decades, UPM has grown to include many components, but Main said, “The core of our organization will always be about relationships and the message that every child and teen is wonderfully created in the image of God.” It was established as a non-profit 501(c)3 in 1993.

After meeting Main, Cummings quickly responded to an urge to help the ministry. He soon learned that, though it was only 15 miles away, Pitman was, in many respects, a world away from Camden. “I really had no idea of the scale of brokenness or abandonment I was going to find in the city,” Cummings said. “It wasn’t until I started taking kids home, picking kids up, going deep into their neighborhoods, that I realized how broken and poor and disconnected they were.”

In the summer of 2005, Cummings visited a program called Trekkers on the coast of Maine. It inspired him to take his own volunteer Trekkers group to another level. Based on that experience, he began to formulate a structure for what he could do with UPM. By 2006, Cummings was all the way in – he sold his business at age 53 and joined UrbanPromise full time.

“We created this program called Urban Trekkers and started to focus on how to integrate this into the curriculum and into the disciplines that were part of the school,” Cummings said. UPA had identified six core values that contribute to building character in their students – integrity, compassion, gratitude, grit, craftsmanship and faith. They wanted Trekkers to reinforce these values.

And Cummings delivered. For example, he coordinated with history teachers to lead a history trek focused on the nation’s Christian worldview. With the biology teacher, he created a trek to take students fishing; they studied organs, and they filleted and ate fish. Those early treks have grown in sophistication and depth so that today they include multi-day expeditions, e.g., a U.S. history and government tour to Washington, D.C.; a week-long adventure to the Asheville, North Carolina, area; and a two-week expedition to Colorado and Utah.

In another innovative program, UT oversees Urban Boatworks, a boat-building project in which a teen works a few hours each week for a year in the shop with adult volunteers to build a canoe, kayak or paddle boat. The next summer, he gets to paddle his own vessel on boating trips. Clearly, it’s a ministry that continues to grow and refine its resources to maximize the time these leaders spend with the at-risk teens.

The umbrella of UrbanPromise includes numerous other creative outreach ministries. But the word unique is nowhere more apt than to describe both Urban Trekkers and Jim Cummings.

“It’s a deeply relational program,” Cummings said. “We’re involved in the lives of our kids, sometimes 24/7. It can’t be a one-and-done kind of thing.”  

The Cummings Challenge
“I used to jokingly tell people, ‘I run a ministry in the city for 50- and 60-year-old men,’” Jim Cummings said. “I get a few kids together, and we build wooden boats and go backpacking with them.” Then over time, Cummings began to realize there was a lot of truth in that jest.

“Only later did I realize that it wasn’t a joke,” he said. “I’ve discovered that when we go to the very places where God calls us, to serve the poor and the broken, we are transformed. I’ve come to realize great ministry goes full circle; as we change lives, we are changed.”

With their wealth of talents, time, compassion and resources, Christian seniors are a perfect fit for creative ministries. Jim Cummings’ example should challenge his generation to:

▶ Take inventory of what they have to offer to others.
▶ Prayerfully determine where God would have them serve.
▶ Abandon a self-centered lifestyle in favor of following Christ.

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Measuring up
Urban Promise Ministries now annually reaches 640 youth in Camden alone. In addition, it serves at-risk youth through affiliates scattered across North America as well as in Africa and Latin America.

▶ 30,788 donors have given to UP
▶ 93% of UPA grads go to college (about 15% of all Camden grads)
▶ $12,000 first budget
▶ $3.9 million current budget
▶ 55 full time employees
▶ 145 volunteers monthly
▶ 100 young adults work part time (city’s largest private employer of teens)

For more information visit Urban Promise USA or call 856-382-1875