“Do You Want To Be Made Whole?”
The Harvest Center’s Christ-centered approach is helping to restore one of Charlotte’s toughest neighborhoods
It’s one of the strangest passages in Scripture. A crippled man waits at the Pool of Bethesda for someone to put him in the pool’s healing waters. When Jesus arrives there, he doesn’t immediately put the man in the pool, but asks him what might seem an impertinent question: “Do you want to be made whole?” 
This story means a great deal to Colin Pinkney, who runs The Harvest Center on west side of Charlotte, N.C. In fact, he’s adopted the question as the motto for his organization.
“’Whole’ to us means that when you get the help you need, you’re going to be able to help somebody else,” Pinkney said. “That you’ve been crippled all these years, but now you’re going to be able to walk. When you’re able to walk, then you can go to work. You can give back. You can serve in the community. You can be involved in the church. You can give your life away, just like we give our lives away.”
It’s a model that seems to be working. The Harvest Center began more than 30 years ago as a “feeding ministry” in the most violent neighborhoods in Charlotte. The west-side neighborhood was widely-known as an open drug markets, and an area plagued by poverty and homelessness.
But merely handing out free food, while admirable and sometimes vitally necessary, was not interrupting the cycle of brokenness in the neighborhood. That’s why The Harvest Center, under Pinkney’s leadership, now provides clothing, groceries, transitional housing, and support to after school programs. In 2011, The Harvest Center began offering job-readiness and life skills classes, to assist adults with making the transition to self-sufficiency. The transitional housing program now serves 20 to 30 individuals a year, and a new rent subsidy program will help 50 to 60 individuals move from homelessness to full self-sufficiency. In all, more than 4,000 people take advantage of one or more of Harvest Center’s services each year.
A key to understanding the success of The Harvest Center is to understand Pinkney’s belief that restoring families and helping fathers “step up” are key.
“Fatherhood is the the silver bullet, if there is one,” Pinkney said. He has learned that because of “what I’ve lived out in my life — personally, professionally, even in ministry.” Pinkney is the seventh of nine children, and his father abandoned his family when he was nine years old.
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“When I look at the things that continually plague us,” he said, “the communities that we serve, the high-poverty populations, the homeless population, the single-parent household population. It’s clear to me there is a fathering issue in our nation. I believe that is the big opportunity for ministries like ours, and churches, to understand and appreciate the value of fathers in our communities.”
Pinkney himself is the father of six, and the bookshelf in his office is filled with books on fathering. When he served as the president of the PTA at his children’s school, he led a seminar on effective fathering. More than 100 people showed up, and the superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools asked him to conduct the seminar at other schools in the area.
As remarkable a leader as Colin Pinkney is, he is quick acknowledge that he doesn’t do the work of The Harvest Center alone. He leads a full-time staff of 12, overseas a budget of about $850,000, and saw about 600 volunteers pass through the doors of The Harvest Center last year, mostly from local churches pass through his doors in the most recent year.
But one form of help The Harvest Center won’t accept is government money. “Zero,” Pinkney said emphatically. The Harvest Center’s funds come from individuals, churches, and a surprising number of corporate sponsors, including the Movement Foundation, a foundation that channels the corporate profits of Charlotte-based Movement Mortgage into Christ-centered organizations. (More on Movement Mortgage and its founder, former NFL player Casey Crawford, in a future “Restoring All Things” column.)
In addition to fathering books, Colin Pinkney also collects books on leadership and on effective charitable giving. Two favorites are Bob Lupton’s Toxic Charity and When Helping Hurts, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. Those books teach that for help to be truly helpful it must challenge the people you’re helping to play an active role in their own restoration. Secondly, it’s got to be temporary. The goal of helping people is not to give them stuff to make them dependent on that stuff, but to allow them to become self-sufficient so they are no longer dependent on charity or the social welfare system. Thirdly and most important, helping that truly helps must have a spiritual component. It must acknowledge that material brokenness is a symptom of spiritual brokenness. That if you don’t work on the underlying spiritual issues, you’ll never permanently solve the material financial issues.
Most organizations fail in their work with the poor. Not because they don’t have enough money, but because they forget one or more of these components. They forget that services must be delivered in a context of relationships. Everyone is different. To put it in theological terms, we’re all fallen, we’re all broken, but we’re all broken in different ways. One size truly does not fit all. That I discovered was one of the things that made The Harvest Center different from a social service organization. It took these individual needs into account.
That’s why, Pinkney said, “We’ve actually eliminated certain ministries as a result of getting informed by those ideas. We realized that if we aren’t empowering people, then we aren’t helping people. We’ve gotten away from entitlement-modeled ministry, and every chance we get, we’re looking to really boost empowerment through all of our ministries.”
Pinkney brings our conversation back to the story of Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda. “I always think of that story as we evaluate our work,” he said. “We’re asking tough questions. We’re having to reeducate this community to a better way than what they’ve been receiving in the past. Questions like, ‘What’s the best, and right way to do this?’ ‘Are we doing Christ-centered work, or are we just doing social services work, but not really changing lives? Just passing people along?’”
He concluded: “We want to be not in the housing or the feeding business, but in the transformation business.”
