About

The Columbia Street Project

The Reentry Christian Fellowship is a ministry of the Columbia Street Project, a non profit organization founded by the Columbia Street Baptist Church.  

Path Forward

The Past:

We live and practice our faith in a population suffering from deep spiritual brokenness in which
the Church has been complicit with its avoidance of costly discipleship. There are the poor
among us. There is the pressing need for the Church to rise up in support of former prisoners in
desperate need of hope. Our families and neighbors have been broken by divorce, financial
setback, substance abuse and sexual addiction. The confessing Church in our culture finds itself
in need of renewal in order to address these needs and others with integrity.

Columbia Street Project (CSP), birthed through the vision and support of its parent, CSBC, is
poised, by virtue of its separate non-profit status, to become a public voice for hope. Outside the
constrictions of traditional worship culture, its mandate is to extend a helping hand to those in
need in the fashion of the servant/healer example of Jesus Christ, past, present, and future. Both
CSBC and CSP have barely scratched the surface in becoming a public voice for hope and are in
need of a more robust plan to employ its 26,000 ft 2 of prime space as a place for healing and
renewal.

The Present:

CSP has a mission that has, despite a number of valiant attempts at an interesting variety of
partnerships with other non-profit social service agencies, barely reached beyond its stated
purpose in 2015. It stands as a resource center for broken lives seeking a foundation upon which
to build a holistic lifestyle – physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is time for a jump-start into a
sustainable program.

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As Dr. Stan Moody has often declared, “While the applied Gospel of Jesus Christ remains
consistent and unchanged, its delivery demands a connection point beyond a simple list of
services”. From Matt. 25:34-40, we are well aware that what we do unconsciously for the least
among us we do for the Lord, Himself. The mission of CSP is to be the arms and legs of the
CSBC heart for the broken, the forgotten, and those nudged out the back door of our houses of
worship.

Through the use of videos, social media, podcasts, web, and online seminars, CSP seeks to
position CSBC to reach the broken – rich, poor, or middleclass – and disciple them in sacrificial
love.

The Broken; the Reentering Prisoner; the Poor:

While having the resources to survive a setback can insulate many of us from the visible effects
of failure, brokenness is not limited to the poor. A neighbor can be broken without notice or
visible scars. Jesus made it clear that the appearance of a faithful, charitable, self-assured spirit in
any of us is no measure of rightness before God. The prerequisite of rightness is, in fact,
brokenness before God, leading to vulnerability to each other.

The mission of CSP is, at its deepest level, to touch the lives of the hurt, the wounded, and the
disenfranchised from the culture of the Church at large. Through meaningful content creation,
helpful seminars, and online group gatherings, CSP, and CSBC by inference, could become a
forum whereby people on the sidelines can get into the journey of Life. The Adopt-a-Block
program, the Penobscot County Day Reporting Program of jail diversion, R4R (Ready for
Reentry), and Columbia Street Press are examples of emerging programs within CSP intended to
reach those who find themselves without sustaining faith and the physical and emotional
resources to walk through this life in victory. The following goals are anticipated:

• Expanding prisoner reentry mentor services…

• Becoming a public voice for truth in the context of Matt 25 by challenging the Church to

       assume its mandate of touching lives at all economic and societal levels

•  Recruiting and training volunteers to assist with the various partnerships…