When New Life Baptist Church Ministries officially opens Mission in the City Park at Sixth and Janes at 6 p.m. Monday, June 3, Pastor Craig Tatum again will take the lead.
Families are invited to make use of:
- A regulation quarter-mile track.
- Courts for basketball and pickleball.
- The eye-catcher you won’t see elsewhere, a giant chess board with life size pieces.
Choices also include shuffleboard, horseshoes, cornhole, ping-pong, jump rope, hopscotch, and yoga. Games include chess, checkers and Uno cards. Hours will continue through the summer, mornings from 7 a.m. to noon (except Sunday morns, of course) and evenings from 5 p.m. to 7:30.
Tatum never dreamed he would return to his hometown, so close to his childhood neighborhood up near 14th and Janes. Before the turn of the millennium, he departed for Battle Creek — joined by wife Dawn and their sons, Trevel and Travon — for two decades as pastor of First Salem Missionary Baptist Church.
The road back to Saginaw began with the 2018 death of his ministerial mentor, Rufus Bradley, founding pastor of New Life and originator of Mission in the City. During the middle 1990s, Tatum had served as a youth pastor and director of Christian education. This placed him years later at the top of the candidates’ list, and at age 55 he accepted.
The two men shared a passion for reaching beyond the church walls. Bradley’s outreach was rooted in the rural South, where as a child he preached to barnyard animals on an Arkansas farm. Tatum is urban North, with an SVSU masters in political science and criminal justice. His pre-Battle Creek experiences in Saginaw included county probation officer and Boysville treatment specialist. He was director of SVSU’s Affirmative Action and Cultural Program, and also for the city schools’ Project SUCCESS.
Upon his return six years ago, he resumed his activism as if he never had departed. He has organized SAAP, Saginaw African American Pastors, with 46 clergy members. Beyond Mission in the City, New Life has obtained other tax-reverted vacant lots for a community garden, and the church will host one of three African Cultural Festival new summer Freedom Schools, along with Bethel AME and Victorious Believers.
The Links Inc. sorority is the sponsor of “positivity benches” with peer counselors on site, and Narcom packages will be distributed in the fight against opioids.
New Birth congregants supervise Mission in the City Park, which bears Rufus Bradley’s name, but Tatum also welcomes volunteers who may serve the community, especially the children, in any way. He was a track and field standout at Bridgeport High, class of 1980, and then earned All-American honors as a sprinter at Saginaw Valley State. He may be contacted through Facebook pages for New Life or for Mission in the City.
