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roadmap to renewing communities
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Modern Good Samaritan Barbara von der Heydt, a star reporter for PBS and Deutsche Welle television, experienced a life-changing episode of self-security in 1989 that caused her to scrap her journalism career and take up ministering to Cold War refugees in Germany. During her self-examination, she "stopped and thought about what I had done and what in my life, if anything, had produced anything of lasting consequence," she says in an interview. "And I came up with a pretty short list. So I prayed. The answer that I got was not something I was expecting. The answer was refugees." In the summer of 1989, a hole had opened in the Iron Curtain between Hungary and West Germany. A huge stream of some 300,000 people poured through. They fled the communist countries of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even Russia and flooded into the West Germany on a scale far too big for the Bonn government or the international Red Cross to handle. "What was impressed on my heart was not just that somebody should take care of them but that I should," says the 48-year-old von der Heydt, who since her remarriage two years ago is now Barbara Elliott, a mother of four-a boy and a girl from her first marriage and a boy and a girl husband's previous marriage. The daughter of a publisher of a small mid-western newspapers and an artist mother, she became editor of Imprimis, a magazine put out by Hillsdale College in Michigan, and director of Hillsdale's Center for Constructive Alternatives. Then she worked for three years as the conservative Heritage Foundation's first director of congressional relations. On the basis of her Heritage accomplishment, President Ronald Reagan offered her a job in 1981 to be his deputy special assistant in the Office of public Liaison. But in December 1981, she married a member of Germany's parliament and moved to the continent to start a new life, with a new language and culture, leaving family, profession, friends, and country behind. SUCCORING REFUGEES In 1984, she got her job with Deutsche Welle TV. At the same, and for years afterward, she seemed to have it all: married into the German aristocracy, a high living, a record of having worked at the White House and on Capitol Hill, a grand journalism job. But then came her 1989 reexamination and determination to aid the refugees. With one friend who had a similar vision, she launched a small initiative "to scoop up those who were in driving distance of where we live in Cologne and to bring them clothes and pots and pans and blankets, to help them find jobs, to find a place to live, to find a doctor, tutor their children, and basically love them through the transition. It was a time to serve, and also a time to listen." She heard hundreds of the stories of these people who had lived for decades amid unspeakable suffering and fear in communist countries. She spoke with people who had gone through forests, hungry and furtive, carrying their children on their backs, who had swum rivers and dodged bullets to leave and who were suddenly facing the most overwhelming trial of all: building a life from scratch in the West. From listening to the refugees, she was amazed to discover a picture of what had taken place in the East bloc that was completely different from what she as a reporter had assumed to be the case. She began to see that the Iron Curtain was snipped into scrap metal primarily because of a revolution of the spirit-a result of countless thousands of moral decisions by individual people who stood up and said no to the communist system. Among the moral decisions that buckled the will of the oppressors were: � A border guard on the East Germany side of the Berlin Wall refused to obey his orders to shoot his countrymen trying to escape. � Pacifists carrying candles in the streets of Leipzig, East Germany, faced down troops who had orders to shoot them. � A young Muscovite woman went up to a tank during the attempted Russian coup in 1991, knocked on the tank until the driver opened the hatch, and extended to him a Bible, saying: "It says here not to kill. Are you going to kill me?" She peered at him steadily, her courage quelling his will to fire. A book called Candles Behind the Wall grew out of her conversations with the refugees. Through the stories of the courageous refugees-the candles-she sought to discover why the Berlin Wall fell. After the book was published, Elliott traveled through Eastern Europe and Russia. "I saw a pattern of the people who had been the moral resisters-who had brought back about the end of communism-who were then the moral renewers in the wake of the collapse of the empire," she says. RENEWING THE INNER CITY When Elliott returned to the United States four years ago, after spending the previous 14 years in Germany-"I had become almost as much European as American"-she "came with the same desire to see both moral and economic renewal in the inner cities of America. Just as I found the unsung heroes in eastern Europe, I've been looking for the unsung heroes of America's inner cities." She became a senior fellow at the Acton Institute for the study of Religion and Liberty. There, she was director of the Samaritan Awards, a nationwide competition for effective non-profits. For two years, she traveled around the country interviewing inner-city-ministry leaders. This work provided her with a vision of what takes place at the grassroots level all over the country, in state after state, where inspired people work on a shoestring, with virtually no budget or staff, and change people's lives in socially transforming ways. "And those are the people I'm attempting to find now," she says. "To find the jewels and hold them up in the light and say to those who will listen, 'Hey this is beautiful! Support them. Help them. Go and do likewise!'" After working for the Acton Institute, she struck out on her own two years ago, founding the Center for Renewal, based in Houston. The center has some 500 organizations in it's database. The largest proportion are in Texas, especially the greater Houston area. Finding a "jewel" of a social-service group is only the first step for Elliott. Her next task is to assess each and determine which are particularly effective. Then comes the effort to assist them, which could include connecting them to resources, helping them tell their story, writing about them, speaking about them , helping them submit grant proposals to foundations, aiding them in building their boards, and helping them restructure their management it need to be. Elliott, who studied English literature as an undergraduate and political science in the graduate level, came to have great faith in the power of politics. But her attitude changed dramatically after a spiritual experience in 1987. In her life before, she always counted herself a believer-she was raised in the Episcopal Church, though she and her family now attend nondenominational inner-city black church-and never would have thought of denying God's existence. "I just didn't know Him," Elliott says. "I hadn't had a life-changing encounter with the Creator. And that happened, first in 1987, and then, when I finally surrendered, in 1989." FINDING THE INNER FLAME In 1987, although surrounded by material success, she was "hungry" in her soul. At that time, confronted by the lack of real accomplishments in her life, she said in her heart simply, "Lord, I've nothing of lasting significance. But if you can take this life and make it a witness to you, please do." And, Elliott says, God did. "There was a flame that was lit then that has not gone out. The longer I walk with Him, the more I let go of the old self and try to make myself available for what He is doing." "I love Mother Teresa's words about being a pencil in the hand of God. I'm not there yet, but I admire the way she lived it." The late Roman Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity is, in fact, Elliott's greatest model. Despite her success in many areas, Elliott's life had not been a cakewalk. For example: Her struggle through a failing marriage was wrenching. "I think I'm a different person," she says, "for having gone through this crucible of pain. I had an opportunity to let go of a lot of pieces of myself that I thought had merit. But whatever is left over after the fire is what's real." �She raised two children for a while as a single mother-very tough experience. "I have a newfound respect for those who do it," she says. "There's just not enough energy or time to go around for anyone who's in that situation." �Her move to Germany was "a real stretching exercise. It hurt, and it was hard, but in the end it gave me a broader wingspan." �She constantly struggles "to have the old self die and the new self flourish"-the old self meaning the part that is driven by ambition, ego, and the need to achieve, and the new self meaning that which is brimming with love and a willingness to serve. In pursuit of the latter, she diligently reads the Bible, having perused it cover to cover 10 times in the past 10 years. In addition, she's currently enrolled in a theology program at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston that will lead to a master's in pastoral studies. Regarding the future she's an idealist and an optimist. "I have a vision for this country returning to its soul," she says, "rediscovering the capacity to care for one another compassionately. "I would love to see this country populate with people who find the time in their own lives to reach out to others, not because it's something the government has asked them to do, or even because it's a social service, but to do it out of love-because it changes not only the people we are attempting to reach; it changes us." |
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