Sowing Seeds of Change
Ron Copeland Is Putting His Beliefs Into Action

By Martin Cizmar
Used with permission from the Daily News-Record

Ron Copeland is preparing for the newest chapter of his life as he takes a leave from The Little Grill Collective to devote himself to Our Community Place. He will spend the next six months working on finishing the renovations there. He also plans to start a Mennonite church there, although it won’t be affiliated with the center.
Photo by Thomas J. Turney

One minute, he’s getting a glass of water for someone. The next, he’s politely pushing through a crowd to bring a box of buns into the kitchen. A few moments later he’s over the sink, carefully draining a pot of hot dogs.

There’s no rest for Ron Copeland on Mondays, when Our Community Place hosts its weekly soup kitchen at the Little Grill Collective. Here, he’s a cook, waiter, porter and emcee.

Copeland is also the driving force behind OCP, an organization working to open a community center on Main Street at the north end of downtown.

Walking through the assembled, he greets the homeless and handicapped along with tie-wearing professionals and university types.

Brian Farrell, an OCP board member who Copeland calls his spiritual mentor, says this is where his longtime friend shines.

Copeland doesn’t just give the people who gather here a meal; he gives them camaraderie.

"He has a gift to minister to the most needy and broken, especially to befriend them," he said. "Institutions can get food and shelter for them … but what most of these people really don’t have is friendship."

Farrell, who is also working with Copeland to set up a Mennonite church that will meet in the community center but isn’t affiliated with it, says he’s a natural leader.

"He’s very, very encouraging," he said. "He tries to see where people’s talents are and tries to make openings for them to use their gifts."

Farrell, who’s known Copeland since the early 1990s, says he’s always been this way.

"He was still warm, friendly, caring, and talented — able to speak to crowds," he said. "But he was less focused, for sure, that’s the biggest difference.

"He’s just really ready for a whole new burst of growth and a whole new dimension."

An Irrational Love

On a sunny Friday afternoon Copeland sits on a picnic table outside OCP, shelling peas from the center’s community garden with Farrell.

Copeland sports a bushy beard and off-brand sneakers tied with mismatched laces. He periodically utters phrases like "far out" without irony.

At 39, he’s a little too young to be a hippie, but you wouldn’t guess it to hear him talk about Buddhist communes, Rainbow Gatherings and Grateful Dead shows.

Copeland is originally from Virginia Beach, where he grew up in a lower middle-class, devoutly Pentecostal family. He came to Harrisonburg in 1986 to attend James Madison University.

It was here that he came across one of the great passions in life: the Little Grill.

"Ever since I first walked into the Little Grill I had an irrational love of the place," he said. "I always thought I couldn’t possibly work there, that I wasn’t cool enough."

During his senior year at JMU, Copeland finally got a job at the Grill. He stayed on after he graduated in 1990.

Copeland was happy working at the Grill, but he got fired for hitting a waitress during a scuffle brought on by his harassment.

Copeland isn’t proud of who he was back then.

"I was kind of a mean-spirited person, I used a sharp wit to be cruel," he said. "I had friends and people thought I was funny but I was not a very nice guy."

Things started to change for Copeland after he got fired.

"I couldn’t bear to live in Harrisonburg without working at the Little Grill," he said.

So he moved to Memphis, where a friend told him he could live on $70 a month.

In Memphis, Copeland started hanging around a vegetarian restaurant. He eventually started a relationship with the owner, a young woman from a wealthy Southern family, who introduced him to Tibetan Buddhism and the hippie lifestyle.

Copeland looks back on her as someone who helped him find the right path.

"This girl, she got me interested in something other than myself," he said. "I started to be aware."

In his searching, he set aside Christianity, much to the disappointment of his Pentecostal parents.

"My father made me promise, in the midst of all this, that I would never take the Bible off my shelf," Copeland said. "Rather than fighting him I did, I promised.

"I was into all kinds of stuff. I think [my parents’] prayers carried me through that."

Back To Harrisonburg

Copeland was living in Seattle with the Buddhist woman when he got a call from Harrisonburg. The guy who owned the Grill, the guy who’d fired him, wanted out.

"He called me up and said ‘I know that girl’s got money, come buy this place.’ "

Copeland wasn’t interested, so the guy hit him where it hurt, telling him another buyer was looking to turn it into a Mexican restaurant.

"I still don’t know if he was playing me or not," Copeland said. "I said ‘You can’t do that to the Grill!’ I saw myself as a protector of Grill culture.

"To this day I see it as a really important place, which probably makes me mentally ill. It’s really a little restaurant in a little town."

The Buddhist woman had decided to move to Oregon and live at a commune with her guru, but she agreed to loan Copeland half the money he needed to buy the Grill.

So he came back to Harrisonburg in 1992 — 24 years old and "the smartest person on earth."

He was quickly humbled.

As he was made more modest, Copeland started wanting to help others. The eye-opening experiences he’d had in Memphis led him to start a soup kitchen at the Grill.

Farrell, who knew him at the time, says Copeland was on the right path, but something was missing.

"He was always very compassionate," he said. "You have the nature to be that way, but the added drive wasn’t there."

Christ was the missing piece, Copeland says. Though he wasn’t a practicing Christian at the time, he’d always been attracted to it.

"It would kind of burn in me," he said. "I’d see some street preacher and my friends would be making fun of him and I would be drawn."

One night, he ended up in a cemetery, praying in front of a statue of Jesus.

The statute had scripture on it, Matthew 11-28: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

When Copeland read that, it comforted him.

"I was working all the time in the restaurant," he said. "I thought: ‘Man, rest — I can’t imagine that.’ "

Copeland started to rediscover his Christian faith, but it wasn’t a quick process.

"It just seemed completely irrational to me, I just couldn’t swallow it," he said. "I wanted to be a rational person and it didn’t make sense."

Eventually, he says, a series of things fell into place and he made the decision to believe.

"I had to come back to the Grill and be like, ‘So, I’m like a Christian now,’ " he laughed.

Copeland still wasn’t ready for church though, so he started reading and praying on his own.

"I kinda had a chip on my shoulder about the church," he said.

A Servant of The Living God

Church found Copeland in 2000.

He was praying on top of the hill at Eastern Mennonite University when he felt his body pulling toward the seminary building.

A message appeared in his head, he says: Go down the hall and in a room to the left you’ll find a guy with a gray beard at the desk, ask him for an application.

"So I went in and the guy was there and I asked him for an application," Copeland said. "He said, ‘What denomination are you?’ and I said ‘I’m a servant of the living God’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s the main thing.’ "

On the application, Copeland wrote: "I’m not Mennonite and I don’t go to church but I think God wants me to go to your school."

Copeland decided he was going to sell the Grill and go to seminary.

His wife, with whom he has three daughters, ages 13, 10 and 6, was completely supportive, much to his surprise: "She was like ‘Fine, sell your popular little business that pays for our house and our minivan and go to school, and not make any money.’ "

As an aficionado of Little Grill culture, he didn’t just want to sell it. So he came up with the idea to make it a collective. It took him a year of research to figure out how to make the arrangement work.

Copeland sold the business to a group of worker-owners. The workers share the responsibilities of running the restaurant and share the proceeds. Copeland continued his involvement with the Grill as a worker-owner.

Around the same time he started thinking about what would become Our Community Place: A building across the street from the Grill that could serve as the center for community events in the depressed neighborhood north of downtown.

Copeland started pitching the community center idea around town, and soon had a group of people who were interested in helping out.

In 1999, it was incorporated as Our Community Place and members started raising money to buy the building.

But before too long, philosophical differences split the group.

Copeland’s vision of the center was inspired by his faith, he said, while another faction was opposed to the religious aspect.

"There were folks who had a vision of more of a political organization that would be kind of … counter-culture," he said.

Kim Grove was involved with the OCP in the beginning but left because she saw it growing into too much of a traditional, hierarchical organization.

Copeland is dynamic, she says, and people are drawn to his leadership. Too often, that meant meetings where everyone was looking to him for answers, instead of making decisions by consensus.

"Ron’s a dynamo," she said. "With people with those type of personalities it just tends to happen."

Grove was also turned off by what she saw as increasingly religious overtones.

"He was definitely moving toward more of a Christian model, which I can’t groove with," she said.

Copeland takes the blame for not being more upfront about his religious convictions.

"I never told anybody I was hearing voices from God," he said. "I kind of downplayed my Christianity."

When the split happened, things got ugly. Copeland takes the blame for that too.

"I’m yelling at people on the phone and threatening to take people to court," he said. "It was pretty nasty and I was the nastiest one."

Eventually, Copeland decided to stop being angry and start praying. Things calmed down, he says, and he’s rebuilt most of the bridges that were burned. After five years, he’s also getting close to refurbishing the building the group bought.

Grove is now part of another community organization, Rocktown Infoshop and Free Space.

"As a person, I really love Ron," she said. "Once I got away from OCP I loved Ron even more."

By Thanksgiving Day

Copeland can be a pretty strong-willed guy, says Mike Klein, who has been working with him for four years at OCP.

"He’s a good guy and he knows what he wants but he’s afraid to ask for help a lot of times and he thinks there’s only one way to do something but there’s not," he said.

Colleen Gorman, president of the Little Grill collective, says Copeland is someone who makes things happen.

"He knows that when he’s in a room full of people and we need to sit down he’s the one who says, ‘Alright now, it’s time to sit down,’ " she said.

For Copeland, who is always seeking to empower others, that personality can be both a blessing and a curse.

On the plus side, he can energize any project, Gorman said.

On the down side: "He definitely can be a dominant presence, just because of his personality," he added.

The next six months, when Copeland will be taking a sabbatical from the Little Grill to focus on Our Community Place, should be "interesting," Gorman said.

"We’ve become accustomed to his voice as leadership," she said.

Copeland is looking forward to the time spent away from the Grill.

"I used to sit across the street at the Grill and think about how great it would be to be at the OCP full-time," he said.

For now, friends and donors are supporting Copeland financially while he works at OCP.

The goal is to get the center up and running by the end of November. So far they’ve removed the asbestos, rewired the electricity, put on a new roof and poured new cement floors.

There’s a lot of work yet to be done, but determination has never been Copeland’s weak spot.

Contact Martin Cizmar at 574-6277 or mcizmar@dnronline.com

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