Jeff Anderson haunts Carey and James and Sargeant streets. He tugs nervously at his bluejeans and tennis shoes, exchanges pleasantries with drug dealers, and recruits children to a growing local enterprise. Young and tired, his hair close-cropped, he looks like another Southwest Baltimore boy.
The collar gives him away.
Anderson, 29, is pastor of the Power House, a 4-year-old Christian congregation so successful that, with little notice, it is taking a step that Baltimore zoning officials say is unusual. It is building a brand new church in one of Baltimore's oldest neighborhoods.
Adding to the challenge of the project is its location: a trash-strewn lot, once the site of a glass factory, on one of the poorest blocks in all of Pigtown.
"We have so many board-ups that a new building is very unusual in Pigtown," says Doc Godwin, president of the Hearts of Pigtown, a local community association. The last new construction in Pigtown was the expansion five years ago of a Washington Boulevard theater that failed.
"Around here," adds Godwin, "usually they're only tearing things down."
But by summer, a brown, wood-frame, 1 1/2-story, prefabricated building is supposed to be in place at 1352 James St., with four off-street parking spaces in back. The new structure, highlighted by a lighted, 20-foot beacon, represents the culmination of a story that began four years ago when a minister from California and an executive from New York drove down Carey Street, felt God's presence, and immediately ducked into the nearest bar.
The minister, Tim Carnahan, and the executive, Rhonda Radliff, had spent four monthsdriving around Baltimore on behalf of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), an Independence, Mo.-based church which split from the Mormon Church 150 years ago.
In recent years, the church had been successful at expanding in the Third World, but its U.S. congregations were graying. RLDS officials decided on a strategy of "planting" new, small churches in inner cities, says spokesman Larry Tyree. The RLDS congregation in Towson expressed eagerness to provide volunteers -- plus money from its own building fund -- for an inner-city church here.
Carnahan, a shaggy, easygoing man with a Newport Beach accent, was dispatched, and Radliff, a church member from New York, joined him. "As soon as we saw Pigtown, it was a sense of knowing God's call," says Radliff. She told Carnahan to stop the car, and they went into Sid's Tavern to ask the patrons if there was any space they could rent for a church.
