There are a variety of ways to react to a need. Some stay on the sidelines, hoping someone will step up to address it. Others see a need and begin asking questions, waiting for more information before taking action. But a few — like senior pastor Charles Lyons and the members of Armitage Baptist Church in inner-city Chicago — see a need, roll their sleeves up, and immediately get to work.

“The alphabet of human need is pounding on the door of our church constantly,” Charles Lyons says from his church, a 4,500-worshiper multi-ethnic church deep within Chicago’s inner city. “We can’t afford to wait until the annual fiscal meeting to form a committee to see if we can help people. The issues are too pressing, too in-your-face.” Every day, his church deals with real human heartache, with poverty, violence, and despair. Every day, Lyons and Armitage have multiple opportunities to make an impact of a community that’s desperately in need of the Gospel.

Armitage was a storefront congregation in Humboldt Park when it called Lyons as its full-time pastor in 1974. It had 25 members at the time. By 1978, the church had grown out of that building and begun renting a Lutheran church — along with additional neighboring buildings — to contain its growing membership. “There were plenty of opportunities to purchase church buildings in the suburbs,” Lyons says. “But we thought it was God’s will that we minister in the inner city of Chicago.”

So when the chance came to purchase the decaying Logan Square Masonic Temple on North Kedzie Boulevard in 1982, Armitage jumped at it. According to Lyons, the purchase of this 54,000 square-foot building was a tremendous risk to the congregation. Logan Square had a long-standing reputation for being dangerous and overrun by crime and gang activity.

“When we moved onto this block, the local street gang was running the show,” Lyons says. Not only was the disco down the street known to be a regular gang hangout, but the corner where the church building was situated had developed into the de facto gang headquarters. Across the street was a seedy liquor store. Next door was a little grocery that sold more booze than food.

None of those negatives deterred the church. “Instead of seeing this as a reason to leave,” Lyons says, “we decided it was reason to stay. Instead of trying to push the gang members off the corner they’d claimed, we made friends with them. We prayed for them, we visited them in the hospital, took care of their children. We just loved them… and things started to happen.”

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