Josh Dotzler is a spiritual leader, justice advocate, communicator, and CEO of Abide, a non-profit mission focused on revitalizing the inner city of Omaha, one neighborhood at a time. He has used his voice to ignite change on a local and national level and has been a sought-after speaker for more than 15 years. Josh was awarded a $20,000 grant at our recent Shark Tank event for the Lighthouse Project, an innovative approach to transforming inner-city neighborhoods. This is his story.
“Only in the Darkness can we see the stars.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
The Inner City
Red lines and red dots have defined inner cities across the country.
The red lines represent decisions made in the 1950s to keep resources from certain groups of people, specifically the African American population. The red dots represent homicides that not only end human life but also remove criminals from the neighborhood. Entire families and communities are impacted as a result.
The term “inner city” was created a decade after redlining and informs our contemporary definition. An inner city is a place known for poverty, crime, and violence. Inner cities are often void of fathers and leaders. They lack the stability and capacity to be sustainable, and so the saying in inner-city communities is often, “Work hard, get an education, and you too can move out of the ghetto.”
To move up in life means to move out of the neighborhood.
Over 35 years ago, my parents moved our family from the suburbs of Omaha to our city’s inner city. My father was a chemical engineer with a good job but sensed God leading him to a life on mission. He quit his job, sold my parent’s newly built home, and began to discern God’s direction. Their only request was, “Lord, we will go anywhere, but please don’t send us to the inner city.”
My father is a white guy from rural Iowa, and my mother is African American from the Washington, D.C., area. My mom and her family spent most of their life escaping the grips of economic poverty to move out of their inner-city community on the East Coast, and the last place she wanted to move was the inner city. Likewise, my father had no desire to go to a crime-ridden community with gangs and drugs.
The moral of the story is don’t tell God what you won’t do! He uses the least likely people for his work. My parents moved into the inner city and began to see and experience what they had only watched on the evening news. Neighbors were shot, drug dealers lived next door, and the evenings were the most chaotic parts of the day. They decided to start a non-profit called Abide with a heart to see the church in our city “Get out of the seats and into the streets.”
They believed the capacity of the church was far greater than the challenges of the city.
The Lighthouse Project
In 2007, the police redlined our block as one of the most violent in our city. After two decades of ministry and the launch of multiple non-profits, my father began to rethink his approach by asking two important questions: “What does the Kingdom of God look like in a neighborhood?” and “If the church in our city and community was gone, would the city miss us?”
This led to a grassroots strategy to simply focus on the neighborhood we were living in. Several years after we began this new strategy, the police approached us with new data and spoke of the incredible transformation that was happening. Our neighborhood had flipped from one of the worst in our city to one of the best. We began to work with local law enforcement to multiply this approach to other crime-ridden areas in our city and called it The Lighthouse Project. The word ABIDE forms the acrostic for this new strategy.
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Adopt neighborhoods – We began by identifying the 735 most challenging blocks in our community and used that as our strategic approach to investing in those neighborhoods.
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Build homes – We find homes that are vacant or abandoned, a dark spot in the community, where there are broken windows and increased crime.
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Invest in neighbors – We invest in neighborhoods by mobilizing volunteers to clean up the streets and providing practical resources. People don’t care what we know until they know we care.
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Develop relationships – We develop relationships through community events like Block Parties and other fun, interactive experiences. We intentionally cultivate the soil for families to provide a long-term presence in the neighborhood.
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Empower leaders – We then empower a family or individual to be a Lighthouse Leader who moves into the neighborhood and commits to living purposefully and loving their neighbors. One lighthouse serves three blocks.
The Results
Abide means “to dwell,” and our lighthouse leaders provide the power of presence. The Message version of John 1:14 states, “Jesus moved into the neighborhood.” He didn’t wait for us to come to him. He came to us, and therein lies the power of the gospel. When the people of God carry the presence of God into places of need, the Kingdom of God becomes a reality. When the world is darkest, the church has the potential to shine the brightest.
The inner city provides an incredible context for the unchurched to see God’s people be his hands and feet. Local police estimate that where there is a lighthouse presence with ongoing activity, crime decreases by roughly 75%. The power of presence changes a neighborhood. Over the last 15 years, we have now empowered almost 50 lighthouses, and our prayer is to empower 50 more over the next four years.
Our dream is that Omaha would no longer have an inner city. Our prayer is that the red lines and red dots would be removed and replaced with a Kingdom culture. We believe this lighthouse model is more than simply a local effort in Omaha, Nebraska. We believe it is a model for every Christian in every community to follow Jesus and love our neighbors in practical ways.
As author and pastor Mark Batterson says in his book Chase the Lion, “Don’t live as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death… chase the lion.” We are God’s vehicle to change the world. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Only in the darkness can we see the stars.”
