While Anglicans worshipped in Newark from the late 1600s, the city's relationship with what is now the Episcopal Church has roots in a theological and agricultural dispute. On a fall Sunday in 1733, Newark native Josiah Ogden harvested his wheat to save it from drenching rains, thus violating a prohibition against working on Sundays. First Presbyterian Church of Newark disciplined him, and he left the congregation. Ogden reportedly connected with Anglican missionaries and helped found a church.

That group in 1742 laid the cornerstone to the building in Military Park, defying and infuriating the Puritan religious establishment. Parts of that first church building are incorporated in the current cathedral (the nave was damaged by British troops during the Revolution and was torn down and rebuilt in 1810).

Directly across the street from the cathedral is the Robert Treat Hotel, opened in 1916 and named after the Puritan patriarch who founded Newark in 1666. Directly behind the Robert Treat is the building housing the diocese's offices. To the left, across Sarah Vaughan Boulevard, is the New Jersey Performing Art Center (NJPAC), a sign of hope and commitment to the city when it opened in 1998. Diocese of Newark Bishop Mark Beckwith, who spoke passionately before his election about his commitment to the city, was ordained and consecrated in NJPAC's Prudential Hall on January 27, 2007.

'Witness for peace'
"I think that the church's witness for peace, reconciliation and hope are vital to the health and development of the city," Beckwith told Episcopal Life. "I think church communities both stabilize and empower neighborhoods, and assist in building networks and partnerships."

To the right, looming over the intervening buildings with its flashing 4,800-square-foot LED television screen, is the Prudential Center. The long-contested $375 million sports arena opened in October to house the New Jersey Devils National Hockey League team and other local sports teams and to host other entertainment. It is envisioned as part of a longed-for downtown revitalization, although city and state residents strenuously debated the plan to invest money in such a project at a time when Newark's unemployment rate hovered around 5 percent, one-third of its children lived in poverty, its median income was half the state average and the police department had a list of about 3,600 suspected gang members, most younger than 25.

"It's a story of contrasts, and it's a story of where our priorities were for a long time," said Sandy Accomando, chief executive officer of Apostles' House, which provides social services to homeless and at-risk families, mostly headed by women. The arena has employed some Newarkers, and nonprofit agencies run its concession stands for a share of the proceeds, she added.

Changing fortunes
Once a sophisticated industrial and banking giant that rivaled New York, Newark hit the bottom of a downward spiral in July 1967, when a rumor that police had beaten cabdriver John Smith to death sparked five days of riots and looting that left 26 people dead and $10 million in damage.

Scholars have come to view the 1960s civil disturbances as the result of more than 100 years of local, state and national policy decisions about urban planning, housing and transportation that devastated inner cities, the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper wrote in July 2007.

The newspaper called the riots "the inevitable conclusion to a long series of choices by those who were in power and the frustration it created among those who weren't."

Add to this a heavy layer of political corruption that distracts attention and money, and Newark's problems can seem insurmountable. Yet those who work with the diocese's two major social-service agencies, Apostles' House and Episcopal Community Development Corp (ECD), have found focus.

ECD, in operation for 16 years, rehabilitates existing housing stock, builds new houses and apartments, helps people learn how to become and remain homeowners, and works in community organizing and neighborhood planning.

Much of the new construction is done in partnership with YouthBuild Newark, part of a nationwide program in which low-income 16- to 24-year-olds work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas while learning job skills by building affordable housing for homeless and low income people.

Apostles' House, founded by urban and suburban Episcopal congregations 25 years ago, offers an emergency shelter for families, transitional housing, housing relocation, a rooming house for men, multi-generational teen-mother housing, a food pantry, a food-security advocacy program, family-preservation programs and case-management services.

Housing is critical
"You can really boil it down to housing," Accomando said. Combine a home-ownership rate that hovers in the low 20 percent range with the fact that less than half of Newark's high-school students graduate and "it's not a formula for success," said Jackie Ross, the diocese's development director.

Accomando agreed. Children without a good, safe place to live "feel vulnerable, they're scared -- and it's hard to learn when you're scared," she said.

The diocese has provided 400 units of affordable housing in Newark in the last 15 years, Ross said. When possible, the homes come two to a building, with the owner occupying one unit and earning income from renting the other.

However, "it's not just the numbers," Ross said; it's the way homes change people's lives. Ross described how a man ran down Newark's Mapes Avenue to thank the diocese for rehabilitating an eyesore of a home and thus improving the whole neighborhood. She recalled a single mother and her daughter who never had taken a bath because their previous homes only had showers. The way the two maintained their new home made it "just exude warmth and self-respect," she said, adding that neighbors improved their homes in response.

Projects such as ECD's Samaritan Housing Program, which guts and rehabs dilapidated homes for sale to first-time homebuyers, yield a "many-fold benefit," said Executive Director Gerard Haizel. The buildings return to usefulness, the physical fabric of neighborhoods is restored, and the stock of affordable housing increases.

Yet providing housing and helping people buy it is becoming harder and harder, Haizel said. ECD's biggest challenge is that the housing boom in Newark has made affordable lots and buildings "very expensive and very scarce," as is money to subsidize buyers, he said.

That crunch and the city's push for market-rate housing to bring people back to Newark puts pressure on the poor, Accomando said. "They're pricing people out. I like to say that my ladies are all dressed up with no place to go." These women have worked to overcome addictions and mental-health issues, and some even have part-time jobs, but "they can't find an apartment they can afford," she said.

Dwindling financial resources for housing and all social services and the need for coordination prompted Bishop Beckwith to help pull four groups founded by Episcopalians under one umbrella -- Newark Episcopal Ministries. Apostles' House and ECD will partner with the Newark School of Theology (an accredited and ecumenical school) and St. Philip's Academy, an independent K-8 school founded in 1988 by Dillard Robinson, then dean of the cathedral, to give children in Newark access to excellent education.

Other ministries may come under the umbrella, Beckwith said. Together with Newark's five Episcopal congregations, he said, "we intend to make an important -- and abiding -- witness."

-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as in the dioceses of Province II. She is based in Neptune, New Jersey.