Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

Posts By This Author

Take a Walk on 9/11

by Bart Campolo 09-07-2011

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, many of us are wondering how best to honor the many victims of that tragedy and its aftermath.

Here in Cincinnati, my wife Marty's answer is inviting some of our friends to join us on a walk with some Muslim and Jewish families she invited by simply calling their congregations. She got the idea from my friends and me at Abraham's Path, who are sponsoring www.911walks.org to help people find or pull together their own 9/11 Walks all over the USA and around the world. The goal of these walks is simple: to help people honor all the victims of 9/11 by walking and talking kindly with neighbors and strangers, in celebration of our common humanity and in defiance of fear, misunderstanding, and hatred.

Nothing But Faith

by Bart Campolo 01-18-2010
The jobs that pay my bills -- speaking and managing EAPE -- often carry me far from the jobs that don't: writing and loving my neighbors here in Walnut Hills.

Bedbugs: A Modern-Day Leprosy. Seriously.

by Bart Campolo 11-30-2009
Stanley is a dirty old man, and by that I don't just mean he talks about younger women in inappropriate ways. He smells bad, too. Really bad.

Redemptive Poetry on a Night of Violence

by Bart Campolo 10-27-2009
It is Sunday night, and I am suddenly awake at the crack of too-close gunfire.

When Grace Backfires

by Bart Campolo 09-08-2009
In 1958 the Teddy Bears released the song "To know him is to love him," which might as well have been called "To know, know, know, him is to love, love, love, him," since that's the way everybody r

What is Wrong With Me, When Seeing Babies is Depressing?

by Bart Campolo 07-31-2009
I've heard from many of you who liked last month's post, or were at least relieved by its more positive

Kids Need All the Positive Words They Can Get

by Bart Campolo 07-17-2009
Recently a bunch of people e-mailed me the same New York Times column, which cited a variety of scientific research s

Are We Offering Grace, or Just Another Program?

by Bart Campolo 05-13-2009
I really like Marlena, but that doesn't mean she is a good person. She is smart and easy to talk to, but only if you are talking about her stuff.

A Good Story: 'I'm Going to Kill You'

by Bart Campolo 04-15-2009
I often tell people not to ask me for statistics because in this work all the statistics are bad. Ask me for stories instead, I say, because even in the worst of times I always have a good story.

Miracle Shots: On the Court and on the Street

by Bart Campolo 03-16-2009
I stayed up way too late in a Buffalo hotel room the other night, eating string cheese and Oscar Mayer salami from the convenience store across the parking lot, watching the tail end of the Connect

My Hope is not Entirely Dead

by Bart Campolo 02-02-2009
I want to be hopeful these days, what with Barack Obama just being inaugurated as our nation's 44th president, but Tanya

Readings on War, Happiness, and Cultural Amnesia

by Bart Campolo 01-23-2009
Need a good book? Check out some of these titles:

Addicted to the Streets

by Bart Campolo 11-19-2008
Twelve years ago our dear friend Julia took a badly neglected baby boy away from his crackhead mother and made him her own.

Not Voting is Irresponsible, Not Less Responsible

by Bart Campolo 10-31-2008
Dear Shane,

A Generational Thing?

by Bart Campolo 10-09-2008
Good stuff from both of you, Ryan and Jimmy!

Bad News and Good News for a Dream Deferred

by Bart Campolo 10-01-2008
Remember Bobbie Williams, the tough but hopeful friend we sent to truck-driving school back in May?

Dealing With Rejection

by Bart Campolo 09-09-2008

The other day Marty invited some neighborhood kids over to help with a mailing she brought home from work. Before they got started, she sent 12-year-old Heather across the street to fetch 13-year-old Jasmine, who has been part of our fellowship from the very beginning. Heather returned a few minutes later, alone and puzzled.

"They were in there, but they wouldn't open the door" she told Marty. "Jasmine's mother said you need to call her."

You [...]

Fear and Fun on a Fellowship Field Trip

by Bart Campolo 08-15-2008

I've been on lots of roads trips, but none of them compare to The Walnut Hills Fellowship's weekend journey to Chicago. Start to finish, it was a thing of rare beauty. We had been talking about it for months, of course, but I think most of our neighborhood friends still didn't really believe it was going to happen. After all, people around here are always talking about things they don't really intend to do. [...]

Hard-to-Learn Love

by Bart Campolo 06-18-2008

I won't even try to describe all of the maddening details of finding a HUD apartment for a homeless, no-income family that consists of a mother, five kids under the age of nine, and a nurturing father. It suffices to say that after three weeks of slogging through that kind of absurdity and ugliness, I began to understand why the mother, our friend Jaleena, tried to kill herself when her original building got condemned. Even with all that, we barely managed an awful apartment, and by the time [...]

Small-Time Ministry, Big-Time Dreams

by Bart Campolo 05-09-2008

There are plenty of times I miss running a legitimate ministry organization like Mission Year.