After his son died in 2013, Chris Jenkins needed something to do to cope with his grief.
He knew his hometown of Kinston, North Carolina, had a huge inventory of dilapidated and boarded-up homes. Though he had little experience in construction, Jenkins was handy and mechanically inclined. He decided to buy a vacant home for $8,000 and repair it on his days off from Sharon United Methodist Church, where he was serving as a pastor.
As soon as he signed the contract, Jenkins heard from church friends about two men recovering from addiction and in need of jobs. He hired the two to work alongside him rehabbing the structure.
They gutted the place, installed new windows, new siding, a new roof.
The neighbors, who said they had seen the house used for drug dealing and prostitution, stopped by to cheer them on.
“God must have sent y’all here,” one woman told the men.
In eight weeks’ time, the renovation was done. Jenkins found a renter and decided to buy another home just a few blocks away.
But soon he realized he had a problem.
“On the one hand, everything I was doing with these rental houses was good,” Jenkins said. “It was good for me. It was good for those two guys. It was good for the community. It was good for the tenant family that ended up moving in. But at the same time, the burden of it became so big that I couldn’t be a pastor anymore.”
It was Jenkins’ life coach, provided by the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, who posed the obvious question: Have you ever thought of making it a ministry?
With that insight, Hope Restorations was born.
Now nearly 10 years old with an annual budget of $1 million and a full-time staff of 13, the ministry is a recovery and reentry program for people overcoming addiction, coming out of prison or both.
If faced with a choice between developing a business or establishing a ministry, how would you decide?
The men repair broken-down homes; the women work in a consignment shop in downtown Kinston. (Few women want to work on mostly male construction crews, Jenkins said.) The heart of the program is job training, but the ministry has recently expanded to include transitional housing for up to 18 months. Its women’s home has a 20-bed capacity and its men’s facility 35 — though at any time, less than 50% of the beds are being used as the ministry seeks additional funding for more clients.
The focus is on preparing people to rebuild their lives.
What ministries have you supported over the last 10 years? How much have they changed?
“We help them with job skills — how to get up and go to work on time, how to clock in, how to talk to your boss, how to interact with the people that are at work with you, customer service and that kind of thing,” said Norma Barnes, Hope Restorations’ vice president of administration and women’s programming.
The focus is not so much on the construction trade or on retail sales as it is on relationships.
“The power of what we were doing is hidden in the day-to-day workplace environment,” said Jenkins, 58, who is the executive director of Hope Restorations. “We’re rubbing elbows, building relationships. It put us in a unique position once we earned the trust of the people on our crew to then be their mentor and their counselor, their coach, their cheerleader, helping them identify and overcome their own unique barriers to success.”
The road to recovery is a long one, and not everyone makes it. But people who have completed the program say there’s something about this program that works.
“First you see a lot of people fighting it,” said Monique Kinzler, a recovering drug user who now manages Restored Hope, the ministry’s consignment shop. “They’re still on the fence; they don’t know sobriety and whether living without drugs is for them. But it’s like, one day [it] just clicks, and they want it. It’s magical.”
In your community, where are people working to support each other through difficulty?
The barriers to work
On a recent workday, a dozen men in the Hope Restorations program installed vinyl plank flooring in an old house in East Kinston.
After tearing out the existing carpeting, one group measured, cut and rolled out pieces of a thin material called underlayment. Outside, another team assembled a circular saw on the house’s front lawn and cut the planks to size.
A project manager circulated among them, supervising the work and offering advice.
Kinston, located 80 miles southeast of Raleigh, the state capital, has been a town in decline. Textile manufacturing and tobacco farming, two of its mainstays, shriveled in the 1990s and early 2000s, and its population, now at 19,000, has been dropping for years.
That has left a huge stock of deteriorating housing properties, especially on the east side of town.
Recovering clients in Hope Restorations have worked on dozens of those homes, donated to the ministry or bought with the help of grant money. The ministry now owns 40 homes in the area, most of which it rents at 20% below the housing authority’s fair market rent standard. Jenkins said he would love to sell some of them, but few families are able or willing to invest in home ownership. Lenoir County’s poverty rate is 23%, double the national average.
Still, the people helped by the ministry say it gives them work they might not otherwise have.
“It feels good to actually be productive, compared to being a nuisance,” said Brian McCormick, 32, one of the men in the program.
McCormick said he started taking opioids when he was 14, dropped out of school, and has been in and out of prison for most of his life. He’s been clean for 11 months now and, like many others in the program, is using medication-assisted treatment — sometimes called MAT — to reduce cravings and avoid the side effects of dope sickness.
He figures construction is one of the few job fields that might employ him.
“Most places don’t wanna hire a convicted felon,” he said.
And most people in recovery have criminal records. Among the most common charges: possession, larceny, shoplifting, driving while impaired.
When formerly incarcerated people try to reintegrate into society, myriad laws and regulations often shut them out from employment and housing.
Those with felony records can’t get loans from banks or leases from landlords. The few jobs that are available don’t pay a living wage or don’t offer health care.
Seth Williams, 33, another crew member, said being in the program offers him hope. Already, he said, things have changed for the better.
Williams, who began using heroin and synthetic opioids when he was 14, said he tried to leave several times after entering the program. One time he did leave. But he called Hope Restorations the next day, realizing he didn’t want to go back to the life he had been living.
“They actually took me right back without a problem; they gave me another chance,” Williams said. “Now I wanna be here. They actually care about you. They’re trying to help you.”
What work do you do that can be accomplished in a way that rebuilds lives?
“People look at me different,” he said. “They’re proud of me. My family accepts me again. I’m happy with myself for the first time in a long time, and I actually have goals and things I want to accomplish that I feel I can now because of being here.”
Fighting the stigma
That acceptance from a community is the kind of outcome Jenkins wishes his son had had.
Tate Jenkins died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound Nov. 6, 2013. Tate was 17 and had suffered from addiction since age 13.
There were few resources to help. Jenkins found that many of his Christian friends wanted nothing to do with his family.
People with drug abuse disorders suffer from significant stigma, in society generally but also in the church.
“I’ve had it said to me, ‘We need programs [for drug addicts], but not in my neighborhood,’” Jenkins said. “Lots of Christian business owners and departmental managers will say, ‘I can’t find enough good help, but I ain’t hiring nobody who’s been to jail.’”
Still, in 2015, little more than a year after Tate’s death, Jenkins was able to find a few Christian friends — pastors and laypeople — as dedicated as he was to ministering to people in recovery. They met at a local pizzeria and resolved to start Hope Restorations.
Soon, they began applying for grants. The Duke Endowment supported the launch with a $65,000 grant in 2015 and has since contributed well over $1 million. Hope Restorations now partners with counseling services, vocational rehabilitation programs and county drug courts.
The ministry is motivated by its Christian faith, but it does not preach to people. It encourages people in recovery to go to church, and some congregations provide transportation from its two transitional homes on Sunday mornings. But no one is required to go.
“Our core value is that we believe that every human being is of sacred worth,” said Jenkins. “And that if provided the right resources, encouragement and coaching, that every individual would flourish.”
Whom do you know that is willing to go against the norms and give someone a chance at a better life? How can you support this effort?
Recently, the ministry has begun exploring other workplace skills beyond remodeling and construction. Over the past couple of years, home values in Kinston have risen, and so has the price of materials, making it cost prohibitive to buy deteriorating homes. In addition, not all Hope Restorations clients are interested in construction work.
The ministry is looking into opening a furniture store. It has recently entered a partnership with the owner of a sign and graphics company who is retiring and willing to teach others his skill. And Jenkins — who had owned an auto repair shop in nearby Greenville before becoming a licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church — dreams of eventually offering a car repair shop.
The ministry’s real gift, Jenkins believes, is not so much the specific workplace skills as it is just being there for people.
“The real ministry,” Jenkins said, “is in the interruptions — when you finally get that chance to talk. When they say, ‘I’m ready. Help me.’ Then you know this is the moment that we put the tools down. We take our bucket and turn it upside down and use it as a stool, and we sit there and just have a conversation. What are your gifts and talents? If you can answer that question, you’re probably on the verge of answering who God created you to be.”
Questions to consider
- If faced with a choice between developing a business or establishing a ministry, how would you decide?
- What ministries have you supported over the last 10 years? How much have they changed?
- What work do you do that can be accomplished in a way that rebuilds lives?
- In your community, where are people working to support each other through difficulty?
- Whom do you know that is willing to go against the norms and give someone a chance at a better life? How can you support this effort?
