Bypassed by The Rescue

Not much of Washington’s $2 trillion has reached Cleveland’s predominantly Black neighborhoods

- By Shawn Donnan, with Jason Grotto, Wei Lu, and Laura Davison

Everywhere Miriam Scott looks, she sees an unrelenting crisis closing in on her church and her flock.

Her First Love Outreach Ministries has been regularly handing out 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of food at its Saturday distributions, just shy of what it once would have done in an entire year. She’s counseled members of her congregation on Cleveland’s impoverished East Side whose relatives have been struck down by Covid-19 and those who’ve lost jobs and are struggling to pay rent. She’s worried she’s falling out of touch with the parade of vulnerable men who head straight from prison to the homeless shelter and used to fill her pews for Sunday services now held on Facebook. She’s not quite sure how she’s going to pay for the new boiler and roof her church needs. Or the past-due electric bill.

Every time she flicks the light switch, she says a little prayer that there will be light.

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between shifts as corrections officers. And, more important, that losing the church will leave those who rely on it searching for a new spiritual home as the nation deals with its own epochal predicaments.