photo courtesy | CHELSEA FABER
Faber with Urban Promise students Sammy and Cray.
CRISSA NELSON | features editor

Focus International's missions team focuses nationally as Chelsea Faber and Team Camden experience the need within the borders of the United States.

Chelsea Faber walked down Citrus Avenue toward the APU campus—sunglasses on, Starbucks in hand—as she had thousands of times before. She passed a bus stop where a young boy was sitting as he waited with his mother for the bus. She normally would not have noticed how his feet dangled almost a foot off the ground as he swung them back and forth impatiently, but this time she did. She pushed her hair back as she propped her sunglasses on her head and paused to smile at the boy. He shyly smiled back and ran to his mother, giggling as he peaked out from behind her skirt.

“I have learned just to notice people,” Faber said of her new disposition after returning from an eight-week missions trip to Camden, NJ. “Even just a smile makes a huge difference to a kid.”

But Faber did much more than simply smile during her time in Camden, NJ. After graduating in May with a bachelor’s degree in political science, Faber set off from June 26 to Aug. 15 on a missions trip to Camden, as one of the eight-members on the Focus International team sponsored by the APU Office of World Missions [OWM]. The team lived and worked alongside 38 other interns for Urban Promise, an inner-city after-school and summer camp program.

Faber admitted that this was a different kind of missions trip that many people didn’t understand.

“When people think missions, they think Africa or China,” Faber said. “International missions trips are great, but the reason I think it’s sad that urban missions trips are so overlooked is that it’s an opportunity to build relationships that can really be maintained.”

As one of only two domestic Focus International short-term missions trips and the longest trip OWM sponsors, eight weeks allowed Faber to feel she could really get to know the community, the people and the kids she worked with.

“We now have a permanent family in New Jersey,” Faber said.

A family she plans to visit this winter and again next summer, a family that in the future could become her home.

But even Faber, whose only other missions experience had been to Mexico, never expected to spend her summer in New Jersey. She attended OWM’s fair with the intent to sign up for a missions trip to South Africa. When she saw a photo album filled with the faces of inner-city youth, however, a calling and passion for seeing social justice brought to the streets of America was ignited.

“[Camden] didn’t fit the mold of what OWM does typically but I’m so glad they did it because it gave me a chance to be a part of God’s Kingdom here in America,” Faber said. “I have gained a new appreciation for the city that I live in and a renewed passion for urban ministries.”

Upon changing her destination to Camden, NJ, Faber recalls being told, ‘That’s not a missions trip. You’re just going to another state,’ and ‘That’s just a vacation.’ Yet Faber saw just as much of a need in Camden as in the rest of the world. As one of the top five most dangerous cities in the United States for the past 7 years, it was like going to a third world country in a lot of ways, Faber said.

She recalled the intensity of walking the kids home everyday and being stopped and offered drugs. According to Faber, children as young as 12 are recruited by drug lords, because if they are caught they won’t be prosecuted.

“One girl I knew… her 12-year-old cousin was murdered the third day we were there, simply because he was a drug runner for someone else and was in rival territory,” Faber said.

Her mentor, Cathy Bartholomew, describes Faber as an old soul, with the ability to function well in change and crisis with strong characteristics of servant leadership after having had no way to prepare for the intensity of this experience.

“Servant leaders don’t want the attention. They have no controlling agenda but innately respond to needs other than their own,” Bartholomew said. “Chelsea has the ability to work with many different types of people and many types of people gravitate toward her.”

Bartholomew has seen in Faber a keen sense of compassion for those who struggle and a passion for working with kids over the past three years of their mentor relationship. Yet, Bartholomew recognized that her time in Camden really tapped into this gifting and gave her a confidence in her calling to serve the inner-city youth in the future.

“When we first got there, Chelsea was like ‘I’m a California girl, I couldn’t live here,’ but by the end she contemplated staying and I know she’ll go back,” senior social science major and Team Camden member Danny Kam said. “She has a motherly heart and compassion for those kids.”

Kam and Faber were encouraged by the steps [OWM Focus International] is taking to include domestic missions trip in their program, especially after seeing the poverty and need firsthand.

“You can see the impact of Urban Promise so easily. I want people to understand that Camden is a missions trip too, just as important as any other,” Faber said. “This program keeps them off the streets and gives them an education. I really learned how valuable an education is.”

So valuable in fact, that Faber turned down the opportunity to work full-time for Urban Promise in order to pursue a Master’s Degree in Education at APU.

As Faber passed by the boy at the bus stop, she couldn’t help but imagine Sammy, a young boy from Camden who she became particularly close with, sitting there on Citrus Avenue. She had given Sammy a picture of the two of them, which Sammy’s grandmother said he kissed every night before he went to bed, and every morning before they left for camp.

“It’s easy to see the need in Africa, but in America it’s swept under the rug,” Faber said. “I think as an American citizen it is an obligation for me to take care of my Sammy and the kids here in Los Angeles and in Azusa. There are so many kids here in my hometown that need that kind of love too.”