Before moving to the pulpit to offer his Sunday message, pastor Leonard Dow '87 worships among his family. Eldest Child Carmela, 14, is in foreground.
Leonard Dow ’87 enthusiastically followed the Cinderella story of EMU’s men’s basketball team in 2009-2010 from unranked to one of the best in the nation. He is someone who knows about breaking records.
Leonard, now a Mennonite bishop, remains the all-time record holder for career points at EMU (2,192), career rebounds (1,102), career field goals (872), and points in a season by a freshman (19.8 per game). Leonard is the only EMU player to be selected to the all-conference first team each of his four years. In the Royals Hall of Honor, Dow’s uniform was the first to be retired.
As a junior and senior at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School three decades ago, Leonard was on track to attend a Division I or Division II college on a basketball scholarship when he was injured. Recruiters suddenly stopped calling.
“I was filled with self-pity,” he recalls with a wry tone. He decided to ditch college.
Leonard’s father pressed pants and suits in a Philadelphia garment factory. Dad took his self-pitying teenager to work with him after graduation. Leonard lasted two weeks as a “bundle boy” and then begged to be allowed to go to any college that would accept him.
His mother weighed in: “The Mennonites have done you well in high school” — he came from a family that lived in Philly, where they were active in an African-American Baptist Church (later shifting to a Presbyterian church), but he commuted to classes at Christopher Dock in the far suburbs – “so why not continue with the Mennonites in college?”
Leonard’s one and only pre-admission visit to EMU was almost a disaster. His mother, brother and a male friend drove down from Pennsylvania. They lost their way and arrived so late – after midnight – the admissions representative who was supposed to greet them had assumed they weren’t coming and had gone home.
“Look, let’s be frank – we were three large African American males walking around the campus at one in the morning at a time when Eastern Mennonite didn’t have many people of color.” Two young white women happened by and, to the visitors’ surprise, asked if they needed help.
When these women – who turned out to be undergraduates at EMU – realized that the three guys and the middle-aged woman with them had nowhere to go that night, they opened up their apartment to the group. “They had two bedrooms. They gave Mom one of their bedrooms, they took the other, and we [guys] slept on the floor.”
“They gave us breakfast in the morning, left for class, and I never saw them again until I ran into them my senior year. I still don’t know their names. But what they did for us blew us away.” [Editor: If you are one of these former coeds, let us know at Crossroads@emu.edu; we’d like to print your names in the next issue.]
Leonard said that the hospitality of these two females to strangers of a different race confirmed in his mother’s mind that EMU was “a safe place for my boys.”
It was not an easy place for her boys to be, though. Compared to Philadelphia, Harrisonburg was sleepy. Leonard was popular on campus because he was a basketball star. But there was also a disconnect.
His entire family – mother, father, two brothers and two sisters – sacrificed so that Leonard could be the first in the family to graduate from a four-year college.
Leonard was acutely aware that he didn’t fit the mold of the typical EMU student. “I would go to the financial aid office to deal with an outstanding bill and they would tell me to call Mom and get her credit card to pay it off.” That just wasn’t an option for Leonard.
During his eight years in Mennonite educational institutions, Leonard says he was invited to social events, but was never invited by a Mennonite to a Mennonite church, church-sponsored camp, or religious retreat. To fill the spiritual gap, his brother insisted Leonard go with him to an African-American church in Harrisonburg.
Today Leonard chuckles at the irony: “Despite my best efforts and everybody else’s best efforts, I became a Mennonite pastor.”
Leonard does credit the Mennonite church, though, with supporting his church leadership roles, beginning 10 or 11 years ago: “I know how bad I had to be early on, yet the church stuck with me.”
In a YouTube interview posted at www.emu.edu/crossroads, Leonard talked about focusing almost entirely on basketball as an undergraduate, while neglecting his studies and spiritual life. When asked to speak to athletes today, Leonard refers to the “three-point stance” in basketball, where a player positions himself to either pass, shoot or dribble around someone. “I challenge the young people to have a three-point stance in life – mind, body and spirit.”
Leonard says his coach, Sherman Eberly ’68, “was on me constantly” to perform as well off the court as on the court, but when “you are young and dumb” you don’t always follow smart advice. “What I regret most [at college] is skipping the cross-cultural experience – it interrupted the [basketball] season – but I should have taken it to expand my world view.”
For athletes, Leonard says the “natural gravitation is to taking care of the body,” which is what he himself did by playing basketball two or three hours a day as a college student. Excellence in athletics “gives you a level of confidence in yourself” as well as “a pass” in ways that can be unhealthy. “Being a star on the court can be intoxicating.”
After graduation, however, athletes will discover that they need to rely more on their relationship with God and the use of their minds to find fulfillment and success, Leonard says.
Oxford Circle's new $3.5 million complex in northeast Philadelphia houses their church, an MCC office, a day care center and many community activities.
Until he was in his late 20s, Leonard climbed the ladder of success in the banking world, starting as a teller and ending up as a vice president. Since he grew up in a situation of tight finances, Leonard wanted to make money. He had season tickets to the Sixers, family health insurance through his employer, and a spacious house in Philadelphia. He was preparing to welcome his first child into a world of middle-class comfort and was putting his wife, Rosalie Rolón-Dow ’89, through graduate school.
(Leonard and Rosalie met when he was an upper classman working in the cafeteria line at EMU; she came through the line as a first-year student, the daughter of a Puerto Rican Mennonite pastor. She now has a PhD in education and is an education professor at the University of Delaware.)
But Leonard felt himself more energized when doing his volunteer church work than when working in the bank. When his then 35-member church, Oxford Circle Mennnonite in northeast Philadelphia, went looking for (in Leonard’s words) “a pastor to be paid half-time to do full-time work,” nobody nibbled. Church members urged Leonard to consider being the pastor himself. He would be serving a diverse, low-income urban neighborhood not populated by ethnic Mennonites.
Leonard wanted to respond to the call, but Rosalie hesitated at first: “She was concerned about the security of our family. She had married a banker, not the man I was becoming. I was changing the rules on her. She thought I was having a mid-life crisis.”
Ironically, it was Rosalie who had “dragged” Leonard “kicking and screaming into the Mennonite Church,” he says. “I got to choose the city where we live, and she got to choose the church.”
Professor Rosalie Rolón-Dow '89, with her husband, Leonard.
Today Rosalie whole-heartedly supports Leonard’s ministry and accepts that part of that ministry is his receiving a salary that is lower than what he was earning in the banking business back in 1999.
“Our congregation consists of many people at the poverty level of income or just above the poverty level,” says Leonard. “They give generously, but they can only do so much. If my wife was not a college professor on her way to getting tenure, I would not be able to pastor.” Leonard and Rosalie have three children – 14-year-old Carmela, 10-year-old Marcela, and 5-year-old Lorenzo.
Leonard says that the majority of the 140 people who attend his church these days come to Oxford Circle because they like what they find there – a caring community of people who are trying to live “the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of hope.” They don’t necessarily associate the church with being part of the larger Mennonite world, he adds. They just naturally gravitate to living and teaching in simple, passionate, mutually supportive ways that resemble the persecuted, but evangelical, Anabaptists of centuries ago.
In 2009, several years after Oxford Circle had clearly outgrown its original 3,000 square-foot church, the congregation found a way to buy a 40,000-square-foot office-type building in an industrial park for $3.5 million. Under the mantle of a non-profit corporation called Oxford Circle Christian Community Development Association, the church uses 8,000 square feet and much of the remaining space is rented out.
A number of Mennonite churches in Franconia, Lancaster and Harrisonburg have hugely supported this endeavor. EMU grads helped to make the project possible, including accountant Jim Rittenhouse ’84 (a fellow starter on the Royals team in Leonard’s era), lawyers Jeff Landis ’91 and Charlotte Hunsberger ’91, and businessman Ken Rush ’91. Professor Karen Ann Jantzi ’78 is on the leadership team, and medical doctor Tim Leaman ’93 chairs the church council.
By renting unneeded space to several tenants, including a day care center and the Mennonite Central Committee’s East Coast regional office, Leonard’s church is able to meet its mortgage payments, while opening its doors to addresss needs in the surrounding community.
The church sponsors an after-school tutoring program and a summer arts program for children aged 6 to 12. Oxford Circle participates with other churches in feeding the homeless. Alcoholics Anonymous meets on the premises and so does a Friday afternoon program aimed at so-called “bad kids” in the adjacent junior high school.
Plans are underway for an English-as-a-Second-Language program and a mentoring program. Leonard hopes to follow some of the kids through high school, maybe even sponsoring them into college or into vocational training to be, say, an electrician.
The majority of the folks at Oxford Circle on Sunday mornings first encountered the church through one of its outreach programs. Two young women from the immediate neighborhood have followed Dow’s footsteps to EMU: Courtney Walker is graduating this spring (2010), and Bianca Prunes will be a first-year student in the fall of 2010.
How much of this bold vision, this willingness to take risks to achieve desired outcomes, can be traced back to the lessons Leonard learned on the basketball court?
“The skills I learned in my team do transfer to the larger world. You learn what skills you have and what you don’t have, and you learn to work as a team member to reach common goals. That’s true throughout life.”
Leonard inspired thousands at the 2009 Mennonite Church youth convention.
