When Hope for the Inner City Executive Director Paul Green looks at the city, he sees two separate Chattanoogas.
“There is the most transformed city in the country and then, across the tracks, there’s another Chattanooga,” he said.
The area to which he is referring is East Chattanooga, the location of the ministry and a neighborhood that has been wrought with gang violence over the last several months. This “other Chattanooga” is made up of all the low-income parts of town where gangs thrive, food is hard to come by and hope may be hard to find, according to Green.
These are the areas with an abundance of single-parent homes, where drugs are integral parts of everyday life and people don’t invest in their own lives because they don’t expect them last too long, he said. Yet Green believes there is hope for the inner city and that local churches can be an integral part of decreasing gang involvement and violence across the city.
“Historically, churches have been civic-driven and active in the community,” he said. “The calling of Christ is to be the hands and feet of the gospel, so the challenge is figuring out how to take that from the pew to the community. If each church took a few streets, we could change the situation.”