KCK pastor plays father role to neighborhood

? Tuesday and Thursday nights there’s a whole lot of parenting going on in the gymnasium of Grace Lutheran Church.

Dozens of boys and a few girls from a father-deprived neighborhood in Kansas City, Kan., file into the church gym for a game of basketball and a soda and cookies at halftime.

What they also receive is a dose of fathering from a man who 20 years ago didn’t have much of a dad himself. In the moist, heavy air of the gym, pastor Greg Manning works the bleachers that rim the room.

He parks himself next to a 20-year-old man who’s new to the twice-weekly basketball game known as Prime Time. Manning wastes no time getting personal. How were the young man’s grades in high school? Not great. Does he have a girlfriend? “If you start having sex all over the place you know what’s going to happen,” Manning warns him.

Next, the rev settles down beside an eighth-grader who’s just been suspended from school for fighting.

“I need to start talking to you on a one-on-one basis,” he tells the boy. The boy nods and waits. “What are you doing tomorrow?” Manning asks. “Come to my office at 1:30, and I’ll buy you a pizza.”

Sixteen months ago Greg Manning took over the pulpit at this Kansas City, Kan., church that found itself increasingly isolated and irrelevant as the neighborhood around it turned too rough and tough for the congregation’s comfort level.

He has used it as a springboard for a social revolution. His aims: to steer the neighborhood children into productive lives. To integrate the mostly white congregation with the mostly black and Latino neighbors. To make the church once again a local gathering place.

It’s clearly happening. On basketball nights this place is overrun with kids yelling, “Pastor Greg, Pastor Greg!” Sunday mornings the pews are no longer completely white. Sunday evenings there’s a new third service, translated into Spanish. And when the congregants file from the sanctuary after service, nearly all of them wrap their arms around Pastor Greg on the way out.

‘A shocker’

A black man leading a white congregation in an overwhelmingly white denomination – the Lutheran church Missouri synod – is “a shocker” to many people, Manning said. “They say, ‘You’re pastor of this church?”‘

About 100 of the denomination’s 6,700 ministers, and about 10,000 of its 2.6 million members, are black.

When the Grace Lutheran Church congregation was debating whether to hire Manning after three years without a permanent pastor, he wasn’t universally embraced.

“Some people said, ‘Don’t bring a black minister in here,”‘ recalled Alan Eklund, a church member for nearly 50 years.

After Manning was selected, a few people left the church. The vast majority stayed, however, and there’s no mistaking where they stand.

Manning has helped his church understand that it can, and must, join hands with the neighborhood, even though in recent years it has spawned drug houses and has come to feel worlds apart.

“There’s poverty and crime and a melting pot of people,” said Sandy Linville, the church secretary. “He understands the people, and he’s helping us to understand we’re really not that different.”

Another decades-long member, Lynn Johnson, said, “Past pastors were more concerned with the little flock that came to the church, whereas he’s saying, ‘Look, look at what’s around you.’ He’s forcing us as a congregation to step outside our comfort zone.”

A familiar place

The world beyond the doors of Grace Lutheran Church is much like the world where Manning, 29, grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. He was the second child born to an unmarried teen-ager and had sporadic contact with his biological father. He recalls that the family moved often, living early on in a low-income housing complex and later in lower-middle class neighborhoods.

Home could be a frightening place in the years his mother was in an abusive relationship. His mother, Gail Gorman, remembers that during that time, Greg, then in grade school, was the one who intervened.

Throughout the upheaval and insecurity of his early years, Manning says that aside from his mother, with whom he always shared a close relationship, he consistently drew strength and comfort from one source: the church. He knew he was going to be a minister.

Gorman recalls that the family was sitting in church one day when Greg pointed to the pastor and said, “I wanna do what that man is doing.”

He was 4.

Not slowing down

“It’s kind of strange, but I just felt something in my heart,” Manning said.

He admits that working with adolescents, even those skirting the edge of trouble, is “a great joy.”

“A lot of them don’t have a male influence in their lives, which can cause agitation. Some are longing for that. Some stay very attached to me.”

It’s all very familiar ground.

“These kids are going through hard times just like I did when I was a kid. It hurts me to hear the things they go through. My goal is to empower them, to let them know they can overcome their situations.”

That can entail something as simple, and fundamental, as a handshake. When he started Prime Time, Manning realized the kids had “no concept” of how to shake his hand. Now he requires a handshake and a good-bye as they file out the door at the end evening’s end.

Most of Manning’s days stretch on for 12 or 14 hours.

Like his two brothers, Manning was born with a rare condition known as Leber’s optic atrophy. He has about 4 percent of normal vision. He can’t see faces and can read only if the type is a couple inches from his face. Prescription lenses don’t help, although a magnifying glass does.

Manning is legally blind and hence cannot drive – although he did once, a few months ago, when he went to the Bahamas to attend a wedding. Someone encouraged him to get behind the wheel and drive a car a short hop to the end of a circular driveway. He did.

Then the man said, “Why don’t you just drive us to the hotel? I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘Yes you can.’ “

So Manning did, for about three miles.

The man seated next to him “would hold onto the wheel every now and then, but I did pretty good.”

Day in and day out, Manning depends on his brother and other members of his church to take turns serving as his chauffeur. But much of the time he operates just fine.