A train whistle cuts through the summer Saturday morning, a shrill blast that startles seagulls from their rooftop perches. It’s a call to adventure, to journey to new places, and as the sound grows in volume, doors open in houses up and down the street.

It’s a Heaventrain morning, and children in Cleveland’s King Kennedy neighborhood run out into the sunshine, tugging at their parents’ hands as they hurry to the playground.

Heaventrain is not a train in the traditional sense. It’s a custom-made bus, bright as a blue jay with murals painted on its sides, built to serve as a mobile Sunday school classroom for Cleveland’s central area housing projects.

The bus sweeps down the street with the song “Heaven Is a Wonderful Place” blaring out of the loudspeakers, whistle blasting, announcing its arrival in the neighborhood. As the bus makes a second pass, two girls clamber over a chain-link fence and pound down the sidewalk, racing to sign up as Kristen Batten, a Heaventrain volunteer, begins to take names.

Vickie Walker, who brings six children to Heaventrain most Saturdays, said when they hear the whistle, they know it’s time to go.

“If they’re asleep, they wake up in a hurry,” Walker said as they lined up for their turn on the bus.

By third pass, kids crowd into line, some holding younger siblings on their hips. A few moms push strollers into the line, toddlers squinting in the sunlight, but many children come alone. The helpers work the line, writing names on the windblown yellow paper on their clipboards.

Members of Brunswick Church of the Nazarene’s youth group unload hula hoops, a jump rope and boxes of thick sidewalk chalk. They kneel down with neighborhood kids to create drawings on the sidewalks or twirl the ends of the jump rope as small girls skip easily in and out of the loops.

The Rev. Philip Batten, known to most as Pastor Phil, founded Heaventrain 27 years ago. It’s a ministry of Lighthouse Inc., a nonprofit organization of the Nazarene Church.

While serving as a pastor in Dresden, Ohio, Batten said he began asking God what his life work in the church should be.

“I have one life, and I wanted to invest it, to do it right,” he said, watching the kids play under the trees while they waited to board the bus. “I didn’t want to look back and think I’d wasted it.”

His answer came “almost like an actual voice that told him to ‘Go to Cleveland.’ ” He joked a little: “Do you have another choice, God?” But within a month, he interviewed at Willo-lake Church in Willoughby. It was there he started to imagine Heaventrain.

“The congregation had a heart for it,” he said. The church itself grew rapidly, but so did Batten’s passion for Heaventrain, and he resigned from the church in 1984 to focus his efforts on outreach.

A lot of churches used to have bus ministries, transporting people to the church, he explained. Now the average church has no buses. Batten said restrictions and regulations are tougher and insurance is higher. It’s no longer financially feasible to keep a bus running. Heaventrain — taking the Gospel to children instead of taking the children to church to hear the Gospel — does what it would take about 50 buses to do on Sunday morning.

The ministry is on its fourth bus, a far cry from the stripped-down 1962 GMC bus they started with. The only things that worked on the original Heaventrain were the brakes and the engine, Batten said. Children sat cross-legged on the floor.

The current bus, fitted with air conditioning, has snazzy maroon seats that can accommodate 85 kids. It was purchased with money raised through tithes and offerings from a number of churches that contribute to the program and make Heaventrain a reality.

“The need is so great, no one group can meet it,” Batten said, adding the program has inspired similar ministries throughout the United States and abroad, including Russia, Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico and Canada.

Batten said it took almost 10 years to gain the trust of the those living in the neighborhoods they serve — King Kennedy, Woodhill, Garden Valley, Cedar and Outhwaite.

“I was suspect, I was the wrong color coming in — why should they trust me?” He shrugged, watching more kids running to the playground. “We had to show them there was no secondary motive, no political motivation. The kids can smell a fake a mile away.”

Now they do about 15 services each Saturday, with an average weekly attendance of 1,200 children and parents. The bus comes almost every Saturday, April through December, starting in mid-April and stopping two weeks before Christmas, when it gets too cold for the kids to wait in line.

Once the doors swing open, the kids hop up the steps and stream down the aisle, jostling into seats as the bus hums beneath their feet.

One recent Saturday, kids from Marion First Church of the Nazarene lip-synced to gospel with a hip-hop flavor, a rap version of “Lean on Me,” and other songs as a special service, but most often it’s Pastor Phil preaching a short message.

Each session starts with music, Batten keeps sermons short and to the point, and he’s not shy about using a prop or two occasionally. The kids stared when he once whipped out a shofar — a ram’s horn instrument that harks back to the Old Testament — and gave a short blast before launching into the message.

Each child receives a ticket for a snack as they disembark, and the fourth Saturday of the month they hit the jackpot with a kid’s meal from fast-food restaurants.

“I bring my cousins so they can have fun,” said Holly Henderson, 12½, shepherding her young charges under the trees as they rip open their snack bags of Cheetos. And, she added quietly, “We come to learn about God and Jesus.”

As one group of kids played ball in the field, Jerry “Duckman” Stewart, a member of Brunswick Church of the Nazarene, grabbed one little boy in a bear hug and swung him around in a circle. Stewart sported a Donald Duck voice, a hard hat topped with a duck, shoes spray-painted orange and a duck puppet to complete his ensemble. Despite working an 80-hour week, he usually manages to hop aboard the Heaventrain on Saturday.

The kids giggle as Duckman spins them around.

“My goal is to give 100 ‘duck hugs’ every Saturday,” he said, breathless from the whirl. “I like to see kids smile. When I come up here, I forget about any troubles I might have. The kids really give back, and they really do pay attention. You know, Pastor Phil won’t use the word ‘hell’ in his sermons because these kids think they already live in hell. I didn’t realize the need there was, until I got here. There are a lot of single-parent homes.”

The volunteers come from all over Ohio, with plenty of repeaters like Johnny Edler, who started volunteering for Heaventrain as a teen. Today, as pastor of children’s ministries at Marion First Church of the Nazarene, he brings kids from his church.

“I wanted kids to experience Heaventrain, to serve and meet the needs of the inner-city children,” Edler said. “God has seeds for us to plant in life.”

“Service is something they (the kids) need to learn.” said Mae Belle Kelley, preschool director at Marion. “This is teaching them to serve everyone.”

Ken Sifford, a member of Grace Baptist Church in Brunswick, is in his fourth year as a volunteer.

“We’re hoping and praying more people will get involved, that more churches get involved, so we can touch more lives,” he said.

“Some of the people we serve will never read the Bible, but they’ll read our lives,” Batten said. “In serving these children, we’re serving Christ.”

As Heaventrain geared up to leave, one little girl bounced up to Duckman and Kristen Batten, Philip Batten’s daughter-in-law who serves on the Heaventrain staff, and offered them each a Cheeto from her bag. It was a moment akin to Communion.

And then the bus was off to the next neighborhood. The ministry team doesn’t stop for lunch, and by the end of the day they’re tired and hungry. But although their stomachs are empty, their hearts are full.

When the whistle blows, some people still wonder what a train is doing in downtown Cleveland, but people like Lotania Carter, 27, who grew up with Heaventrain, know. She now brings her children, Rayjohn Brown, 7, and Johnesha Brown, 5, to have some fun.

“They get excited; they watch for it,” she said. “This is awesome. God is good.”

In order to comment, you must agree to our user agreement and discussion guidelines.
You must be registered and logged in to post a comment. If you aren't already registered, click here.
If you are registered, click here to log in.
Need help? Email Us.