This weekend I did a stint as a garbageman.

It came about as a result of meeting the Rev. Dr. John Wallace Jr., the pastor of Bible Center Church of God in Christ in Homewood. Wallace, a Homewood native, spent 17 years at the University of Michigan before returning to Pittsburgh in January 2004 to become pastor of the church after his grandfather, the church's previous pastor, passed away.

Like many Homewood natives who have been away for a while, he remembers the Isaly's, the Belmar and the G.C. Murphy's, and was distressed by the condition of the neighborhood. In September, he and his congregation began taking action, but not in the common ways: They held no community meetings, no marches, no press conferences.

They started picking up garbage.

More specifically, each Saturday morning since Sept. 16, members of Bible Center have gone forth with brooms, dustpans, garbage bags and cans to clean up the blocks in the church's immediate vicinity. Along with acting as sanitation engineers, they introduce themselves to residents, give away the smallest of gifts -- bottles of water, bags of chips -- and ask if there's anything they would like to have prayer for.

Wallace's academic background -- he makes his living as an associate professor at Pitt's School of Social Work -- makes it natural for him to quantify the results of this project, so when we met he presented me with a chart that showed that as of March 18, the project had generated 700 hours of outreach with an economic value of $12,628, during which he and his people had collected 244 bags of garbage and given away 528 gifts.

One need not agree with these folks' entire theology to recognize that picking up trash is an eminently sensible response to the problem of litter. And giving small gifts has a certain heart appeal. So on Saturday morning, I joined them.

It was a chilly morning, but keeping in motion helps one to keep warm. The church is on Bennett Street, between Homewood and Sterrett. Our crew of seven or eight, several wearing sweatshirts with the motto, "The church has left the building" emblazoned on the back, went down to Sterrett, then took Sterrett to Hamilton, and Hamilton nearly to Braddock.

Church member John Scarborough, 63, is a regular. He said, "If I don't come out here on Saturday morning, I feel like I have a disease." But then, he did not begin doing this work in September. He began, he said, three years ago, when he realized that "every entrance to Homewood is preceded by garbage." He has been cleaning up behind the careless and the thoughtless ever since.

There's a definite psychological lift that comes with knowing that one has done one small thing to make a small difference for a little while. The good pastor put it well when he said, laying aside his PhD.-ness to slip into the vernacular: "Just because it's the ghetto, it don't got to look like nobody cares."

If anybody wants a psychological lift this weekend, you can show up at 7236 Bennett St. at 10 a.m. Saturday. No skills required other than the ability to pick up stuff and stuff it into a bag.

I meant to share this story with you folks, because smack dab in the middle of it, Beehive coffeehouse owner Scott Kramer states the exact idea that I believe is behind the Homewood Arts District Committee's work - it's just interesting to hear someone else say it:

"With any economic growth, the artists come in first..."