Since 1991 a map of Omaha, Nebraska, has hung in the office of Abide, a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing the inner city. The map is covered in red dots, each one signifying someone who had lost their life to violence. The dots are conspicuously clustered in one particular area north of downtown, where over 75% of the homicides have occurred in the past 35-plus years.
To call this section of the city challenging would be an understatement. But Josh Dotzler, CEO of Abide, has spent his life in the midst of that challenge, and has seen the power that’s unleashed when God’s people join together to impact the city.
He is fond of pointing out that the Japanese word for “crisis” is made up of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” Dotzler sees a great opportunity awaiting churches that are willing to answer the call to go to places many would consider too dangerous.
“God’s heart is that the church would be in the middle of the crisis in our world,” he says. “We have the opportunity to shine brightest when things are darkest.”
The story of Abide began when Dotzler’s parents answered the call to live in the middle of that crisis and serve as a lighthouse of Christ’s love to their inner-city neighbors.
Much Afraid
In the mid-’80s, Ron Dotzler, Josh’s father, made the radical decision to quit his job as a chemical engineer in order to become an overseas missionary with his wife, Twany, and their five young children. Looking for a temporary place to rent while they prepared to go abroad, a friend offered the family a property he owned in inner-city North Omaha rent-free if they would clean it up.
When the Dotzlers moved in, they came face-to-face with the poverty, drugs, theft and violence that had taken root in that neighborhood. At different points, Ron discipled a drug dealer who was on house arrest in the Dotzlers’ basement, and another neighbor who was in and out of trouble, who also spent time living in their basement.
Overwhelmed, and worried about raising their children in such an environment, the couple initially wanted to leave. But over time, God gave them a heart of compassion for their neighbors, and they decided to stay and try to be part of a solution. So, in 1989, Ron and Twany founded Abide (at the time an acronym for “A Bible In Daily Experience”) with the goal of getting churches in the suburbs of Omaha to put their faith into action through volunteer service projects and leadership development in the inner city.
Their kids—ultimately, they would have 14—were right in the thick of the ministry with their parents. Josh, the youngest at the time, remembers loading and unloading a 15-passenger van and trailer to set up for Abide’s block parties.
“I loved what my parents did,” he says, “but what I didn’t love was living in a neighborhood where consistently at night there were helicopters overhead and plenty of experiences of coming home and you’ve got police with shotguns running through your neighborhood chasing somebody … and hearing shots. All of those experiences really filled me with fear.”
When Dotzler was 10 years old, his family moved to a building that had been built at the turn of the 20th century to be a horse-and-buggy fire station. By 1993, it had sat vacant for 15 years and was a hub for drugs and gang activity. The city of Omaha was ready to tear it down when Ron drove by it and thought, This building could be used for something good.
Abide bought the property for almost nothing, and over the next three years, with a group of volunteers and donated materials, the Dotzlers renovated it, converting it into their family home and a new ministry center for Abide. They didn’t know it at the time, but years later this model of purchasing and renovating houses would be the key to transforming some of the most troubled and dangerous neighborhoods in Omaha.
110%
In Josh’s junior and senior years at Bellevue West High School, he led his team to back-to-back basketball state championships and was named Nebraska Player of the Year by the Omaha World-Herald both years. In 2005, he was offered a scholarship to play at Creighton, three-and-a-half miles from home.
For years, the nagging fear had been growing in the back of his mind that he would be trapped raising a family in the tumultuous neighborhood where he grew up. Like so many other aspiring athletes, he saw basketball, or at the very least a college degree, as his ticket out.
In his freshman year at Creighton, he started 20 games and earned a spot on the Missouri Valley Conference All-Freshman Team. By all appearances, his star was on the rise.
Looking back on that time, Dotzler describes himself as a part-time Christian. “I would pray part-time, read my Bible part-time, but I was really pursuing all the things of the world.”
Then during a game in 2006, he partially tore his PCL, prematurely ending his freshman season.
“Once I got hurt, the thing I loved was really taken away from me,” Dotzler says. “I remember being in my dorm room one night and God reminding me of Revelation 3:16 where it says either you’re hot or you’re cold. If you’re lukewarm I’ll spit you out of my mouth. It felt like God said, Josh, either serve me 110% or don’t serve me at all. That was a defining moment in my faith where I said, God, I want to serve you 110%.”
When Dotzler rejoined the team for his sophomore season, he returned with a renewed focus on his faith.
The Lighthouse Project
As Dotzler was establishing himself in the college basketball world, his parents were over 15 years into ministry with Abide. Ron had started or helped start over two dozen nonprofits, raised up a group of homegrown leaders from the community, and mobilized suburban churches for service projects. Despite these efforts, the violence and the murders in the area persisted. In July 2007, the Omaha World-Herald reported that the city had experienced 31 gun assaults in 31 days1—a majority of them in the area where the Dotzlers lived.
Around that time, the couple met with a team preparing to plant Bridge Church, where Ron would serve as founding pastor. Ron was praying the Lord’s Prayer and when he got to “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” they asked themselves a simple question that would serve as a significant turning point: What does heaven look like in the neighborhood?
Their first thought was it would look like a cleaner neighborhood. In response, Abide began to mobilize volunteers to do neighborhood cleanups; mow the lawns of neglected houses; host huge block parties (at times drawing nearly 2,000 people); and, most importantly, renovate abandoned buildings.
In criminology there’s a concept called the “broken windows theory” that essentially says where there are broken windows, that space becomes a hub for graffiti, drugs and crime. Drawing on their previous renovation experience, in the summer of 2008 Abide purchased two such houses on Fowler and Larimore Avenues respectively. They spent the next two years renovating them with an army of volunteers and moving missional families from Bridge Church into those houses. The families would then commit themselves to being good neighbors: advocating for and intentionally loving their neighbors consistently in practical ways.
According to the police, within those two years, those streets went from being a couple of the worst in the city to being a couple of the best. Realizing that what was working on Fowler and Larimore could work on other streets, the Abide team identified around 735 blocks deemed to be the most challenging in the city. They made plans to purchase and renovate houses and install missional families on each of those blocks. What would later come to be known as the Lighthouse Project was born.
Coming Home
During Dotzler’s junior year at college, a kid who grew up across the street from his family was gunned down in their neighborhood. Returning home for the funeral, Dotzler was overcome with emotion as he paid his respects. He could sense God asking him two questions: How can you be a part of the solution? What could you do so that more young people don’t end up in this situation?
He felt called to do something, but he didn’t yet know what that something was.
Then, when he and his wife, Jen, graduated from Creighton and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, respectively, they moved in with his parents. They figured it would be a temporary situation while they waited for their next steps.
“Truthfully, for the first year, two years, five years, I told people we were there out of obedience. We truly felt like this is where God had us,” Dotzler says. “We prayed many times for other doors to open up. They never did.”
At the time, Ron was discipling a parolee named Myron Pierce, who lived in the basement with his wife. [For more of Pierce’s story, go to OutreachMagazine.com/myron-pierce.] Living in such close quarters, Dotzler and Pierce became fast friends, and between 2009 and 2010, Ron empowered them to lead Bridge Church as Josh became CEO of Abide.
“Myron always wanted to be a pastor. I didn’t want to be a pastor, coming from where I was coming, but I loved doing ministry with Myron,” Dotzler explains. “We would often say, who would have thought an ex-convict and an ex-Creighton player would be co-leading a church together.”
When Pierce left in 2012 to plant a church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Josh and Jen continued to lead the church.
A Faithful Presence
As Dotzler took over as CEO of Abide, the organization was in the midst of a transformation. Driven by the early success of the Lighthouse Project, which coincided with Bridge Church being planted, Abide took on more of a holistic community development and neighborhood revitalization approach, serving as a bridge between the church and the community. To reflect this change, Dotzler updated the meaning of the Abide acronym to Adopting neighborhoods, Bridge churches, Invest in leaders, Diversity, Engage partners.
“Today, we talk about the power of presence—which has been the theme of our organization the entire time. I mean, ultimately, if we’re gonna live out our faith, it happens because we’re present in places of need,” Dotzler notes. “The Lighthouse program is really centered on people who carry the presence of God, and who are present specifically in places of need, of challenge—even though we think it can happen anywhere. And that presence starts to permeate that neighborhood and that community.”
When Abide and Bridge Church first took on this new neighborhood focus, starting with the community beautification days, they were often met with neighbors who were incredulous that someone would care enough to mow vacant lots and clean up the streets. Dotzler remembers one neighbor coming out of her house four different times to watch. When they said they were from a church and just wanted to love their neighbors and neighborhood, she responded, “I didn’t know churches did anything.”
“There’s such a perception that churches hold worship services, churches teach the Bible, but in her mind, and I would say in the neighborhood as a whole, there wasn’t this perception that churches are actually willing to get their hands dirty and practically do things that impact the community,” Dotzler explains. “We definitely have a passion to see the church be the church and get out of the seats, into the streets, and really impact their local communities.”
Making an Impact
To date, Abide has planted 63 lighthouses and plans to get to 100 in the next four years. In 2016, they purchased the 24-acre former campus of the Nebraska School for the Deaf to serve as their new center of operations. The campus offers a plethora of services including a gym and fitness center, small business space and a daycare. Some 18 to 20 organizations are housed on campus at any given time.2
Dotzler also tapped into his connections in the community to amplify the impact of Abide. For example, the organization partners with the Creighton basketball team each year for community projects as well as an annual Better Together Blue Out game to bring awareness to the work Abide is doing and recruit volunteers.
Most importantly, Abide partners with churches that represent over 40,000 Christians.
“We believe the capacity within the church is greater than the challenges in our community,” Dotzler says. “When every Christian leverages what God has given in their time, their talent, their treasures, and prayer—when we all use what we have—we think the greatest challenges of our city can be changed.”
North Omaha, once one of the most dangerous and seemingly hopeless areas of the city, is beginning to show signs of renewal—or renovation, if you will. Abide, the organization that started with a single act of radical obedience, has grown deep roots in the community, equipping indigenous leaders and multiplying lighthouses that make once dark places begin to shine with the light of Christ’s love.
In many ways, Dotzler’s story mirrors that of his parents, and he can now see all the ways God was planting seeds and bearing fruit in his family along the way.
“It’s been one of those journeys for us where there’s been a lot of challenges. Many times we’ve said, God, we’d love to go somewhere else. We’d love to go to a different context, maybe an easier context. But ultimately, we always try to say, God, not our will, but yours be done,” Dotzler says. “I can sit here today and say we wouldn’t be the people we are, we wouldn’t have seen God do what he’s done, if he hadn’t helped us stay in the game for this long.”
