Inside Story
Hope for the “Hopeless”
Now Connie Milton Is on a Crusade to Help Others Find HopeBy Rebecca K. Grosenbach
If you were to meet gentle, soft-spoken Connie Milton, you would be surprised to learn that police arrested him 300 times as a youth and 70 times as an adult. “I just couldn’t keep myself from getting into trouble,” Connie says.
Today, this “hopeless case” is a living, breathing example that with God no one is beyond hope. Connie works alongside Navigator ministries in inner-city Chicago to help down-and-out men and women come to know the freedom in Christ he found behind bars.
As a boy growing up in Chicago, Connie attended church with his grandmother and dreamed of being a preacher. Yet abuse and neglect from others at home destroyed that dream.
So as a teenager Connie left home, left school, and turned to drugs and crime to support his habit. “Narcotics were killing me,” Connie recalls. “I saw my life eaten away before my eyes. I was on the street, sleeping under viaducts and eating out of dumpsters.”
But Connie always sensed God trying to reach him. He made countless promises to God, saying he’d clean up his life if only he could have another chance. One day, in his thirties, he cried out to God not to let him die a “dope fiend.” That prayer led him to a drug rehab program—after being sent to prison for burglary.
There he began to
see a ray of hope, the answer to his prayer to God for help. Connie
left prison a transformed man, committed to Jesus. “I became faithful
to God in a prison uniform,” he says. After his release, Connie started attending Valid Concerns, a program led by Navigator Jeff Dennis. Valid Concerns is part of a larger Navigator outreach called Breaking Ground, which offers job training by building houses in Chicago’s neighborhoods. In fall 2006, when Breaking Ground leaders decided to start the Discipleship House, Jeff knew Connie would be a “natural” to work with men in the transition to a new, Christ-centered life. Today Connie is the co-director, working with Peter Payne, the Navigator who directs the project.
Discipleship House dovetails with the job-training program by providing spiritual and biblical training for men who are serious about living their lives for God. Typically, men live at Discipleship House for 18 months. “It’s not a rehab center or a half-way house,” Peter says. “Students must be individuals who are clean [drug free] and working.”
Peter has developed a discipleship program called Life Institute. “It is Bible-based training that will help an individual grow to become what God had intended for him to become in the beginning,” Peter says. The Institute covers such topics as letting God heal the inside, knowing God as Father, finding joy, and resisting sin. The men also learn behavioral skills to help them reestablish relationships with their families.
But Discipleship House is more than a training facility. It’s a community, a place of caring and belonging. “Discipleship House enables the transformation of men, training and growing them in trust, character, life skills, and leadership,” Peter says. “It’s a place where brothers actively encourage and strengthen each other in community, a place where it’s okay to be broken, because then we can heal.”
“We apply the Word of God to everyday
life,” Connie adds. “We help men face their bitterness, resentment, and
anger. We walk with them until they get to a place in their lives where
they are able to go back and walk with somebody else.” Connie realizes his childhood dream of being a preacher has come true. He’s a preacher of hope to men who struggle with crime and substance addictions. His pulpit more often than not is a regular visit to the local jail, where he often shares his story.
“When they hear my story,” Connie says, “they know they have a chance.”
They have more than a chance. They have genuine hope—hope for a transformed life through the power of Jesus Christ.
To find out more about Breaking Ground, visit www.breakingground.net.
