After eleven years in Patterson, Tony was asked by the Roseland Christian Ministries Center in Chicago to consider the job of "missionary director" for the fledgling organization. The location, a building in Roseland, had been vacated by the CRWRC and Back To God Hour in the 1970s when the surrounding neighborhood underwent a radical demographic transition.
"Roseland itself experienced white flight more dramatically possibly than any place in the country," Tony says. "It went pretty much from white to black within a ten year period - including not only about 100,000 people, but in terms of the CRC, they took with them the Back to God Hour, CRWRC, and eight congregations, most within a two year period."
Tony is somewhat cautious about describing these events. He doesn't want to sound too judgmental. But the facts speak for themselves.
After leaving the area, the CRC formed a feasibility study committee to try to decide whether the building could still be used for some kind of ministry. "There was this swirl of anger on the one hand, and guilt on the other hand. I think people thought, yeah, maybe it wouldn't be good for us, having lived there for 100 years, to just walk away and not look back."
The Van Zantens moved to Roseland in the summer of 1976 and have poured themselves into ministry there for almost three decades.
"For three or four months mostly what I did was walk around the neighborhood, talk to residents, meet kids," Tony said. He put a basketball hoop outside the big warehouse-type building in which the ministry is located. He also spent time talking to the business community and people from supporting churches, asking them what they thought might be good to put in the big, empty building.
"I got about 100,000 different answers," he says wryly, "and I began to pull out my hair. How are we going to be able to make sense of being Reformed and Christian and true to the neighborhood here?"
He says God directed him to Philippians 1:1-11, and from there he took the theme of service, worship, and training. "If you want to have a Reformed and Christian ministry, you have to have the servant character; your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. I also interpreted that as a call to train - how can we be like Jesus if we don't know what Jesus is like?"
These three concepts, Tony said, became "pegs on the wall on which we ought to be able to hang everything we do and say."
Soon it became clear that a church was also needed, and Tony became the pastor. He explains the need: "I'd been around long enough to know that the tendency for Christian social service agencies to become, after a while, only social service projects. On the other hand, churches often saw themselves as just a place to worship but not to take on the ministry of the kingdom.
"From the beginning we decided to work not only at meeting needs but to invite people to participate in meeting those needs. That has felt pretty comfortable over the years."
For the last six years, every single morning, Tony and others have gathered at the church for morning prayers. Participation ranges from 20 to 40 people, and usually half of the people are homeless. "This is a whole development of community and caring and praying and love put in a place you might least expect it," Tony says. "It has been extraordinary."
"This has been a magnificent calling and we are humbled to have spent over 27 years here," he says in a letter to the congregation.
