Unique had a request the first night of vacation Bible school. She wanted to pray. With the support of Marcus Harris, the Bible teacher, she got up front and prayed, “God, we thank you for VBS. We thank you for everyone here.”
Then she kept going. “She just started preaching in the middle of it,” Luke Swanson, pastor of Community Covenant Church in North Minneapolis, Minnesota, said. “Help us to be good. Help us honor our parents. Help everyone be kind to everyone.”
Then she paused. “And the church is open,” she said. Then again. And again. By the third time, the room was answering back, “Preach, preach!”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Swanson said. “The church is open.”
Two years without meeting in person had affected the congregation. When Community Covenant returned to worship after the pandemic, the children were gone and so were the volunteers. With no programs to restart, Swanson and two leaders, Sherry Scott and Shelly Harris (who is married to Marcus), decided to pray, asking God for twenty kids to join their VBS. They walked the neighborhood, hanging up flyers, driving the church van to pick up whoever could come.
Twenty children registered on the first night.
What happened at Community Covenant after COVID echoed what had happened before. In 1943 two Christian couples opened the Lighthouse Gospel Mission in a storefront on Olson Memorial Highway, wedged between two bars, the Highway Bar on one side and the Bucket of Blood on the other. Its focus was children.
Esther Jensen, who ran it for sixteen years, had wanted to be a missionary to China. She ended up in North Minneapolis instead, and she grew the Sunday school from sixty children to a hundred in a year. By 1966 the church had opened a nursery school with St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Edina, and by 1969 that partnership had built a playground.
Decades later, a longtime member told Swanson never to get rid of the playground. “That’s a billboard that says children are welcome,” the man said. “And in our neighborhood, there’s a lot of places where children are not welcome.”
“Dear God, thank you for the food we ate. I’m not afraid of the kids who pick on me or treat me wrong in school, because you are my shield, Father.”
Come as you are
Ryan Bynum showed up at Community Covenant because a woman from Japan named Chie would not stop asking. He had come to the area from Washington, D.C., in 2004 for music school and had no church home. He played piano at a Baptist congregation where Chie sang in the choir. She then left every week for midweek gatherings at Community Covenant. “They need a musician,” she kept telling Bynum. She eventually hired him to accompany a choir concert at the church. When he arrived, he found a small, acoustic church with a grand piano, a drum set nobody played, and Pastor Luke on guitar. That was eighteen years ago.
What Bynum remembers is not the music. It is how he was received. He had long hair—“cornrows or an afro”—plus jeans and Timberland boots. His previous Baptist church was in the proud African American tradition, “full of scholars and judges and lawyers.” But they always made comments about how he dressed, which hurt. At Community Covenant, nobody was dressed up. “It was come-as-you-are,” he said. “I just felt very much welcomed, no matter what I was wearing, no matter what my hair looked like. And these people didn’t even know me yet. They didn’t know I played piano.”
Now Bynum is the music director. “I might have to tour and go on the road a lot,” he said, “but Community Covenant Church is my home.” As an Emmy-winning musician, Bynum has accompanied stars including Diana Ross, Ice Cube, and Debbie Allen. But he’s clear about the difference between his work and his ministry. “Those are all adults making a check just like I am,” he said. “We’re going to get our money and we’re going to go. This hits harder for me. They’re like my family members.”
On Wednesday nights after dinner, the kids come in around seven. Bynum starts with something familiar, then something fun. The Sunday school classic “Father Abraham” is a reliable way to get them moving, help get the wiggles out, he says. Then, mid-song, he stops.
“Stop. Who is Father Abraham? We sing about Jesus. Why are we singing about this Father Abraham guy?”
“You get a lot of weird answers,” he says, laughing. “God’s other son. Jesus’s brother.” So they open the Bible and find out. “We break it down and it goes deep.”
Bynum uses the lyrics to give kids language for praise and gratitude, which is sometimes missing from their lives. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and enter his courts with praise. That’s my structure of prayer right there,” he says. “If they learn nothing else, they know how to pray.”
The proof came the Wednesday after VBS, when every kid from that week turned up at church. They sang, and a little boy got up to close them out. He started the way Bynum taught him, “Dear God, thank you for the food we ate.” Then he said, “I’m not afraid of the kids who pick on me or treat me wrong in school, because you are my shield, Father.”
“This kid’s four years old. He can barely talk,” Bynum said, “and he said that.”
Full circle
Sherry Scott and her husband were looking for a preschool for their son Alex around 2003. They drove past Community Covenant and saw a banner for the nursery school—the program dating back to 1966. They enrolled Alex, and before long the family was attending services on Sundays.
The family of six were living in a two-bedroom apartment when the church’s parsonage became available. “The church saw what our need was,” Alex says now, “so we moved in.” His family arrived the week before he began second grade and lived there through his high school years.
“Living in the parsonage, I think we kind of felt like we had a debt to repay,” Alex said. “If someone needed help for something, it was always like, ‘Call the Scotts’ house. Alex will come over and help you.’”
After graduation, he needed a change of scenery. He pursued odd jobs and worked at a Bible camp. Then Sherry asked him to help run games at VBS. After that, Swanson asked whether Alex would consider working with the youth. Initially he said no, wanting to serve somewhere else. But the next year his mom asked again, and this time there were kids in the room he’d never seen before. “I could really see the need for a youth director,” he said.
He has held the job three years, and as a benefit, he and his wife now live in the parsonage. “It’s really kind of weird,” he said. “But it’s been such a blessing for us.”
The pattern has repeated itself throughout the church’s history. In 1962 a young woman named Hazel Rand, who had grown up in the church, returned to Community Covenant as a parish worker. She had attended at thirteen, drifted away, and was invited back by a persistent friend. Community Covenant has been growing its own staff for sixty years.
After that first week of VBS, the church invited two neighborhood families to join them on Sunday for worship. They didn’t come.
But days later, they showed up unannounced while Swanson was in the office. Alex thinks they saw a bunch of cars in the lot and figured something was happening.
They were right. The church ordered pizza and sat with them. Wednesday night gatherings grew out of that, and they still start with a meal. Now the night includes Bible study, twelve-step recovery, children’s worship, and youth group.
Bynum’s advice to any church who wants the same thing is to start with love and patience. When parents apologize for a child acting up, he waves it off. “Let them act out. Because when I put them up to sing in front of the parents in church, they get all shy and quiet.” Some of the youngest arrive, cursing at grown women; two years on, those kids tell the newcomers to cut out such behavior. Bynum grew up getting whipped with a switch. He wants the opposite for these children. “Get it right,” he says, “and the relationship changes. They don’t call me Mr. Ryan anymore. They call me Uncle Ryan.”
Alex says, “It really for us has been as simple as creating a safe space where people can gather and make memories.”
“Tell the stories of Jesus, and they happen again,” Swanson said.
The kids eat pizza, learn to sing, and are transformed. Those who are bound are set free.
In North Minneapolis, Unique’s prayer remains true. The church is open.
Historical background is drawn from Jon Kramka, “The Making of an Urban Church: Community Covenant–Minneapolis” (2005).
