SPUM

 

This is the last of the blogs about the quilt. Twelve t-shirts converted into a beautiful quilt that I keep in my lap all the time I am in my favorite recliner. That includes my writing time because my recliner is also my office.

This shirt is from the St Paul Urban Ministry (SPUM), circa 1994. God’s hand in the development of SPUM is well documented in my books and I won’t repeat all that here. Instead this blog is about the development of the logo.

Mark (#2 son) was the youth minister of the Oxford Church of Christ in Oxford Mississippi. He was instrumental in the development of the urban ministry in several respects. As we were trying to figure out how to start, he called to ask if we could use an intern for the summer. He had a friend, a young man named Richard Palmer who was still a student at Magnolia Bible College where Mark had recently graduated. As it turned out Richard had previously done urban ministry internships in both Atlanta and Nashville. He totally shaped our approach.

During the summer that Richard was with us, Mark called to ask whether we could use a team of Mississippi kids and their parents to do a VBS for us. That was a great time for it and it provided a much needed kick off for the ministry.

At some point in all this I was in Oxford and Mark and I got to talking about a logo for the ministry. Computers were not really all that common yet, but he had access to one in his office and we got to playing around. On the front of this t-shirt is a small logo crafted from clip art. It is a pair of folded hands holding a city skyline. It didn’t make the quilt because the back of the shirt made a better addition to it. The hands and the city were later redone, drawn by hand, by Mike (#1 son).

On the back, the part shown on the quilt, it says “Jesus Loves the West Side.” I took some flack for that one. I got some “Jesus loves everybody” and of course He does, but that misses the point. It’s like Black Lives Matter. Of course, all lives matter, but the point is that it is Black lives that appear not to matter in today’s culture.

The West Side of St Paul is across the river from downtown. It is really south but is called the West Side because to a river boat coming up stream the left side is called “west”, even if as the river twists and turns it is south on the compass. Early on the west side flats became the home of new immigrants from Europe and Russia. More recently it has become largely Hispanic culturally. It is currently home to several well-known Mexican restaurants, gift shops and other such businesses. It was considered a more affordable place to live than St Paul proper. Hence the “Jesus Loves the West Side” reference.

The Urban Ministry, by the way, is still going strong though no longer centered on the West Side.