Storm Water Runoff

 

Our newest adventure: The Roseville Church of Christ will be applying for a grant to mitigate our storm water runoff. 

 

Why would we do such an unusual thing? This falls in the middle of a busy time for Roseville. We are getting ready to see our preacher off on a dangerous, month long mission trip to Nigeria and Cameroon. Richard leaves December 1 and is scheduled to return home December 31. His wife Theresa and their three boys went with him last year but will remain behind this time around. That will increase the church’s responsibility for their welfare while he is gone – not to mention providing fill-ins for Sunday morning sermons, Wednesday night classes and general leadership for the small congregation.

Thursday, we delivered boxes of food to people we knew of who needed it, courtesy of the City of Maplewood. And Richard is overseeing the installation of new security cameras prompted by three auto break-ins at different times during Wednesday night classes. We are not many in number, why would we opt for grant writing?

The opportunity arose from the Rice & Larpenteur Alliance (RLA). If you haven’t seen the very short video we did of the open house the Roseville Church held in conjunction with RLA you can see it here. At the latest RLA meeting there was a presentation of an opportunity to apply for a Stewardship Grant from the Capitol Region Watershed District. The director of the RLA mentioned that the Roseville Church of Christ would be a good candidate because of our large, extremely old parking lot. We followed up with the Watershed District. They are interested in decreasing the runoff from parking lots and buildings that eventually reaches the Mississippi River. To do so they will replace impervious pavement with porous material and will build rain gardens. Our grant application will include photos of the eight downspouts from our roof that dump onto the parking lot and of the lot itself.

The maximum grant is $40,000. We will not need nearly that much. The matching funds is set at 5%, so even if we got the maximum, we would have to lay out only $2,000. If I am figuring this right, we might get a new, modern looking, porous parking lot, surrounded by pretty rain gardens for very little expenditure. And we will be contributing to a cleaner planet, like God instructed Adam in Genesis 2:15.

 

"Social Service Director"

I am becoming a little more likely these days to introduce myself as the “Retired Social Service Director for Ramsey County.” My thought is that such an introduction could start a conversation about disparities - disparities in education, health, income and other important factors in our society(ies). Those disparities play out to their greatest extent between Black and White people, and a little less with other people of color.

Charlene and I are having a family Bible study right now, working our way through Luke. We have been impressed with how hard Jesus pressed against discrimination. There is the story of Him standing up to the religious leaders’ criticism of Him for eating with sinners; the beatitudes’ blessing of those who are hungry, those who weep, those who are shunned by society; His introduction of himself in Nazareth as the predicted one who would bring good news to the poor; and of course, the description of the early church where no one went hungry because everyone chipped in.

This aspect of the Biblical account of history has been bugging me lately. I have pointed out elsewhere that God has always been a God of rescue. On Sunday afternoon, during the Covid isolation, we have been meeting for worship with two women of quite different religious backgrounds, neither of whom is very familiar with some of the old Bible stories. We have been reading about and discussing God’s rescue of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego; of Daniel; of the Jewish people from Egypt. The book is full of rescues - from Cain in Genesis to all of us in Revelation.

Combine that with our new association with The Roseville church, which sits next door to twelve large apartment complexes full of refugees and immigrants and you have a great new adventure waiting for us at the end of the virus.

I have just joined a civic group called the Rice and Larpenteur Alliance. It is similar to neighborhood development groups all over St. Paul and is aimed at improving the living conditions in the neighborhood. You can see the Roseville church building and the apartments next door from the Rice and Larpenteur intersection. The group is just forming, I was assigned to the Neighborhood Livability and Events committee. Sounds like a great fit for a new church member. Should be fun.