REBA PLACE HISTORY

When Reba Place Fellowship was founded in 1957, the first members decided it was more economical to purchase the house at 727 Reba Place in Evanston, Ill., than to rent it. Over the years, more people became interested in the fellowship and living in communion with other Christians, making decisions based on shared principles and donating all of their income to the common good, so by the mid-1960s, another house, at 714 Reba Place, was purchased.

More residences were bought to house the expanding fellowship. In the 1970s, the charismatic movement drew even more people to the community. “It continued like that and got bigger and bigger between 1957 and 1980 and by the end of the ’70s, there were 156 people in the common treasury,” said Allan Howe, a fellowship member for 45 years.

In the ’70s, members of the fellowship seeking a more rural lifestyle founded Plow Creek, a settlement 137 miles southwest of Reba Place, near Princeton, Ill. A few years later, though, Reba Place Fellowship began to suffer under the strain of increasingly large households. Not only were these families hard on the common purse, the large numbers also made it hard to reach a consensus in daily operations.

One solution was to form an adjunct church that did not use a common purse. “A number of people, quite a few, moved out of the common treasury arrangement of Reba Place Fellowship and became part of the non-communal sharing part of Reba Place Church. And then other people joined either the fellowship or the church, and you know, by the mid-’80s or so, you had more than 200 people. Maybe half were in the fellowship and half were in the church,” Howe said.

In 1988, a group from the fellowship felt called to move to the nearby Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago and reach out to new members there. In 1995, Living Water Church was founded, with a younger and more international membership than the original church.

The new church shared much in common with the old, though it didn’t employ a common purse. “It’s really just a different group of people, but a lot of the things that are important are the same,” said Sally Youngquist, a retired Living Water minister.

To date, there are about 40 members of the fellowship and many more involved in Reba Place and Living Water churches. Combined property of the three interests have increased so that the fellowship now owns about 180 housing units, which are mostly apartment buildings. In fact, Reba Place Fellowship is the largest affordable housing operation in Evanston.

“We have more space than we need for the members of our place, and so we do a lot of fixing up of apartments and figuring out how to charge rents that are low. We work with a lot of agencies, refugees and people that are coming out of homelessness and different things,” Howe said.

To tend to its holdings, the fellowship established the Reba Place Development Corp. in 1995. It also started Reunion Property Management to help with maintenance and management needs, as well as several other businesses to employ community residents and benefit the works of the fellowship.

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Ariana Gainer, 15, Laura Mangan, 16, Sarah Zabel, 17.
REPORTER: Libby Bowling, 11.

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