Home, Street Home: Today’s Homeless Are a Lot like Us, and Urban Missions Are Adapting to a New Range of Needy People

BETH SPRINGA contributing editor to this magazine, Beth Spring lives in McLean, Virginia.

One afternoon, director Stephen Burger answered the telephone at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle. “Do you have a bed available tonight?” asked the voice on the other end of the line. “Yes,” said Burger, “who’s calling?” The call was from a mental health center 100 miles away, preparing to release a patient.” Greyhound therapy,” Burger calls it. “When we said we had a bed available, they listed him as having found housing. Then they put him on the bus to Seattle.”

Eleven hundred miles down the coast, an up-and-coming maitre d’ at a Los Angeles hotel got hooked on cocaine. Within months, he lost everything he owned to support his habit. Twenty-two years old, he landed at the Los Angeles Mission and entered a year-long rehabilitation program that left him drug free. Today he manages the mission’s food service, supervising 18 employees.

Several states away, a community of “tent people” living on a Denver river bank became home for Cindy Webb after she separated from her husband. Three months pregnant, with her husband, Bud, and their eight-year-old son, Keith, still in Portland, Cindy finally sought help from the Denver Rescue Mission. The mission placed her in a studio apartment and paid the rent. Just before Christmas, Bud and Keith joined Cindy in Denver. The mission has continued to help the Webbs by finding a larger apartment, offering family counseling, and buying food while Bud found work.

Whatever their circumstances, today’s homeless bear little resemblance to the stereotypical skid-row bum. Instead, they are beginning to look a lot like our next-door neighbors. And not only are their faces changing, their numbers are growing. Estimates of the number of homeless people on America’s streets range from a conservative 350,000 to three million. Even more chilling are projections that today’s “nearly homeless” may swell the ranks of street people to more than 18 million by the turn of the century.

In the face of this growing crisis, urban ministries, and rescue missions in particular, are being stretched as never before. Not all of the homeless turn to the missions for help, of course: Some are turned off by required chapel attendance and rigid Bible programs. And many find help from the private and public shelters springing up across the nation’s urban landscape (see “ ‘We Don’t Have Any Homeless Here,’ ” p. 18). But the ones who find their way to the doorsteps of city missions often discover significant, and sometimes dramatic, changes there.

Missions more and more defy the stereotype of the storefront operation, heralded by a neon “Jesus Saves” sign, dispensing hot soup and a warm bed for those who will attend a gospel service. And the clients are not just grizzled, wrinkled alcoholics with no place else to go.

The Stereotype Of The Future

Rescue missions today face vastly changed conditions. Burger, who heads the Seattle mission as well as the 240-member International Union of Gospel Missions, sees several ways in which the homeless are different now. To begin with, he says, “the crowd gets younger and younger. The fuzzy-faced kid is the stereotype of the future.” Some of these young people are “throwaways,” teenagers pushed out of broken homes and relying on prostitution and drug dealing to make a go of it. The burgeoning ministry of Fr. Bruce Ritter’s well-known Covenant House in New York and elsewhere attests to swelling numbers of homeless youth.

And there are more women, often with children. On a typical night in Seattle, Burger’s mission sleeps 120 women and children. Fifteen years ago, the nightly average was 7. When people like Cindy Webb seek help from a mission, their needs stretch the resources and creativity of the people on staff. Del Maxfield, who runs the Denver Rescue Mission, points out that serving women and infants means planning more nourishing meals, keeping diapers and formula on hand, and becoming knowledgeable about prenatal care and child development. “The days of being able to wing itin this business are gone,” Maxfield says. “We have to think and we have to plan.”

The homeless are hometown people, as well. There are fewer hitchhikers, vagrants, and transients, according to Burger. The U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that 22 percent of the homeless held full-or part-time jobs in 1987. “We are seeing more and more people who are close to the line economically,” Burger observes. “Even people living out in the suburbs are often just one or two paychecks away from disaster.” Frequently Burger greets a visitor at the mission who looks as if he or she is there to make a donation. Instead, the person asks for something to eat.

Drug addiction and aids also present rescue missions with new challenges. At the Peniel Mission in Oakland, California, director Mike Pounds says most of the women seeking food and shelter there are victims of abuse and addicted to crack cocaine. “The problem with crack is that it is so cheap to buy,” Pounds points out. “For $5 or $10, a person can buy some rock, smoke it, and get an instant high. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, and it’s hard to convince them to kick the habit.” Pounds is seeing more and more AIDS patients come his way as well. “In five years, we’ll have an AIDS hospice in this building,” he predicts.

Finally, there are mentally impaired people like the one headed toward Seattle on a bus from a mental institution. This is one of the largest groups of homeless that urban ministries encounter today, and the one they are least equipped to help. Burger explains what has happened. A federal law, passed in 1963, mandated the release of mental patients from institutions into “community treatment.” Unfortunately, say mission workers, “community treatment” never materialized.

Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in his book Nowhere to Go (Harper & Row), points out that the community mental health centers that have emerged concentrate their efforts on the “worried well” instead: people with relatively minor counseling needs and deep pockets. “People assumed that [mental patients] would rush out to accept this helping hand,” Burger says of the 1963 plan. “It doesn’t work that way. Many people who have mental problems are sure that they are okay; it’s the rest of us who are fouled up.” Adding to the problem are court decisions, forced by some civil libertarians, saying no mentally ill street person can be forced into treatment against his or her will.

Deinstitutionalization did not cause homelessness, observers agree, but it contributed mightily to a growing problem. Approximately one-third of the homeless are mentally impaired, formerly institutionalized persons.

Beyond Soup, Soap, And Shelter

Confronting these new challenges continues to be a daunting task. Even the best-equipped rescue missions have had to adapt. Some are becoming multifaceted urban centers of ministry. Others target special needs in their communities. And many are beginning to examine root causes and long-termsolutions, becoming politically active on behalf of the homeless.

The Syracuse Rescue Mission in Syracuse, New York, is a case in point. It recently opened a transitional living program for the mentally ill. Called Crossroads, the program provides individual rooms for 19 men, financed with a five-year federal grant of $773,700 and matching funds from mission supporters. Mentally impaired people who seek help at Crossroads enter an 18-month program in a highly structured environment. The goal is to move them into independent living arrangements.

The Syracuse mission still runs a traditional 48-bed emergency shelter for men, and two chaplains offer Bible studies, counseling, and chapel services; but the scope of the mission’s work has broadened. Operating out of six program sites in the city as well as two mobile-outreach vans, the mission offers alcohol recovery; a drop-in center for counseling, referrals, and activities; clothing distribution; youth activities; two community centers and a summer day camp for inner-city children; and a long-term, residential rehabilitation program for women.

Like other urban missions, Syracuse has experienced a massive increase in demand for its services. In 1984, the mission served 39,079 meals to the homeless; in 1987, it served 85,363, marking an increase of 118 percent.

One of the roughest communities for the homeless is Los Angeles. There, an urban mission’s inadequacies can at times overwhelm even the most committed director. Mark Holsinger, at Los Angeles Mission, told of a woman who came for help. She and her boyfriend had been sleeping on the sidewalk when someone awakened them. Without warning, the intruder shot her boyfriend through the head.

“When she came here, all we could offer her was clothing, soap, and a shower,” Holsinger says. “It was ridiculous.” The problems of women on the street are so devastating, Holsinger says, that the mission bought a six-bed house for women. “We have volunteer psychologists on staff who go out to the home a couple nights a week. When a woman like this gets straightened out emotionally, then we help her get a job,” Holsinger explains.

The Los Angeles Mission is in the process of building a much larger facility, scheduled to open in September. Along with shelter and rehabilitation, it will offer high-school equivalency courses taught at 31 computer stations.

Education is another increasingly important factor in urban rescue ministry. It is a key component of the work of the Nashville Union Mission where executive director Carl Resener sees more and more homeless people who “lack modern-day work skills.” Transitions from smokestack industries to service and high-tech jobs leave thousands of laborers without jobs. Along with high-school equivalency courses, Nashville’s mission offers courses in welding, electrical work, plumbing, and culinary arts.

In Omaha, at the Open Door Mission, physicians teach residents enrolled in a nine-month New Life Program about contagious diseases, and a nurse trains new mothers. Residents attend Bible classes twice a day, complete a series of 137 personal Bible studies, and work at least five hours per day. Finally, they learn to prepare resumes and are expected to find full-time work outside the mission. Executive director Robert Timberlake is a graduate of a Canadian Bible institute as well as Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He and his wife are former missionaries to Bangladesh.

“The old skid-row convert who takes over a mission is a dying breed,” Timberlake says. “He doesn’t have what it takes.” Timberlake proposed the nation’s first college-degree program in rescue ministries, now being offered at Grace College of the Bible in Omaha (see “The Art and Science of Rescue,” page 20).

Always Looking for an Inn

When the Good Samaritan in Luke’s gospel found the robbery victim by the side of the road, he took him to an inn. Today, when the staff at Seattle’s New Horizons Ministers pull homeless kids off the street, they try to put them in a church. But that can be harder than finding an inn.

Homeless youth cannot walk into a new life in just one day, say New Horizons workers. Director Ruth Nussli tells of one boy who knew the New Horizons chaplain, John Vendelin, for over a year before accepting Christ and moving in with John. “After living in John’s home for several months, the boy asked, ‘How come you never hit your kids?’ In all that time it hadn’t occurred to him that John’s love for the Lord precluded his beating his wife and kids: he’d never lived in a situation like that.”

Nussli estimates that 80 percent of Seattle’s street kids have been sexually or physically abused in their homes. On the street they learn new ways to survive. Often that means drug dealing, stealing, and prostitution. “We see boys who shave all their body hair to be more appealing to middle-aged pedophiles,” Nussli says. Counselor Ron Ruthruff adds that many are coerced into providing sex without condoms, exacerbating the risk of AIDS and other diseases.

Still, there are success stories. Kids do come to know the Lord, get involved in a church, and leave the street behind, say staff workers. It is a long process that requires both church and kid to adapt and reorder priorities. “We try to be the Good Samaritan,” says Nussli,” and we’re always looking for an inn. That’s a lot of what we do. We go to the churches and train them to be the inn.”

By Stefan Ulstein chairman of the English department, Bellevue (Wash.) Christian School.

Pioneers In The Movement

Current leaders in rescue missions look to a nineteenth-century skid-row convert, Jerry McCauley, as the forerunner of rescue missions work in the U.S. McCauley, born in Ireland and arrested in New York City for robbery, served time in Sing Sing prison, then was led to Christ. He was profoundly touched by John 3:16, so in 1872 he opened a meeting hall at 316 Water Street in New York’s Bowery. McCauley’s Water Street Mission gained worldwide acclaim, and other missions like it began occupying hostile urban territory.

Similar evangelistic rescue work had begun in England in the 1860s when Salvation Army founder William Booth pioneered a work in the worst slums of London’s East End. Later, his work spread to Europe, Australia, and the U.S. in an approach to urban ministry that would parallel that of the more independent rescue missions.

The ministries of evangelists D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday provided impetus to the work of American rescue missions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The rescue movement’s model in the 1920s was Billy Sunday, who was converted at the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. Fiery and evangelistic, he also showed concern for the down-and-out.

The forerunner of today’s Syracuse mission opened in 1887, situated right in the midst of the town’s saloons, gambling rooms, and brothels. On its opening evening, according to a centennial history of the mission, “a rough, drunken fellow pushed his way through, saying, ‘What in hell is this?’

“ ‘This is to keep people out of hell,’ said a young man at the door, extending him an invitation: ‘Come in and have a song.’ “From that night on, a gospel service took place every evening at the mission. After five years, more than 243,000 people had attended the services.

“We Don’t Have Any Homeless Here”

In 1984, when seminary student Bob Lynn and a handful of church leaders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston began noticing homeless people in the community, they banded together to respond. They first formed the Center for Public Ministry (CPM), and then launched a campaign to alert Evanston churches and city officials to the problem.

“We don’t have homeless people in Evanston,” city officials protested. Even when CPM began housing the homeless in the basement of Evanston’s First Baptist Church, civic leaders voiced fears that the shelter would attract even more homeless from nearby Chicago and blight Evanston’s affluent neighborihoods.

After a year and a half, a truce was reached. A blue-ribbon committee After a year and a half, a truce was reached. A blue-ribbon committee After a year and a half, a truce was reached. A blue-ribbon committee of church representatives and City aldermen worked out guidelines for maximum occupancy, as well as the assumption of some financial responsibility by the city. The shelter now operates on. an annual budget of $125 000, with money drawn from federal, state, and city sources, as well as contributions from over a dozen local churches. Four staff members run the shelter, along with a rotating group of volunteers.

Homeless person can come unannounced at 10 P.M and stay through breakfast the following morning A full-time case worker from a local hospital helps guests assess their needs and determine how CPM can help.

Homeless families represent a special problem for the shelter. CPM has leased two apartments for homeless families and borrows addition guest space from local church members when necessary. “Evanston’s not really on the beaten path for most transient homeless people,” says shelter director Hilda Carper, “so we most often get local people who have been evicted or have suffered some other catastrophe.”

The shelter does more than offer a warm bed and meal. Once guest finds a job, workers allow him to stay until a couple paychecks come in and he can find permanent housing. And support group for former guests has been formed to help them off the street—for good.

By Dave Jackson an editor and free-lance writer living in Evanston, Illinois.

Sophisticated, But Not Sold Out

The founder of the Syracuse mission, Henry Burton Gibbud, was a street preacher from the Bowery. Today’s executive director, Clarence Jordan, writes grant proposals and quotes Shakespeare in his annual report. He is a former Evangelical Free Church youth pastor and music minister.

New sophistication is evident at many urban missions. Del Maxfield, at the Denver Rescue Mission, spent 24 years in aerospace administration before getting his M.Div. at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Fuller. The sheer number of homeless people and their diversity is “forcing us to be professionals,” Maxfield says.

To critics who question stepped-up programs that appear to leave gospel preaching in the dust, Maxfield has a ready answer. “If we aren’t creative and don’t use our talents to put together programs for these people—if we don’t stay on the cutting edge—we won’t have anyone here to preach the gospel to.”

Part of rescue missions’ new sophistication involves donor development by the prestigious Russ Reid advertising agency in Pasadena. Working in cooperation with Stephen Burger and the International Union of Gospel Missions, the Reid company put together a new donor development program (CT, Nov. 18, 1988, p. 52). For Maxfield in Denver, participating in the program meant running newspaper ads and sending follow-up letters to new contributors in the same way large entities such as World Vision or Prison Fellowship raise funds.

It also brought an astounding increase in the number of Denver’s contributors—from a mailing list of 600 to a total of 22,000 in one-and-a-half years. At the Los Angeles Mission, where the program was road tested, the budget grew from $125,000 to $8 million in six years. Program improvements and expansion at the Syracuse mission are largely due to increased contributions brought in by the program.

Gifford Claiborne, a Russ Reid vice-president, says 32 missions are participating in the new-donor development, and another 22 are on contract independently with Russ Reid for similar services. The onslaught of donations catches some ministries by surprise. Stephen Burger’s Seattle mission signed a contract with Russ Reid in March 1988. In less than a year, they added 20,000 new donors to their mailing list as well as $1 million in additional income—an 80 percent increase in one year.

In February, Burger was still lugging home 1,000 thank-you letters to sign every night. But the benefits of added income far outweighed the inconvenience of more paperwork. Burger says, “We purchased a building next door to our main downtown men’s mission, we’ve added ten people to our staff and bought a former Carmelite nunnery to use as a drop-in and residential care center for street kids.”

More staff and more space “allows us to do more Christian ministry than we can manage when we’re packing people in just to feed and house them,” Burger says. “Sometimes it seems as if we’re going to run out of room for eternal things.”

The donor-development program, for all its promise, does not suit every mission. Some, such as Bob Rich at Union Gospel Mission in Washington, D.C., wanted a better sense of personal control and input into communications with donors. Claiborne says the wariness of some mission directors is understandable. “There is no question that the influx of a donor base will dramatically change the face of rescue ministries. But my goal and my commitment is to see it happen.”

Understanding Causes And Solutions

New sophistication among urban rescue missions extends to political awareness as well as fund-raising know-how, especially as urban rescue workers become aware of the national shortage of affordable housing. Low-rent, multifamily units are being torn down or converted to luxury condominiums. And they are not being replaced.

Observers cite a number of factors as explanation. According to Jonathan Kozol, author of Rachel’s Children (Crown), rent allowances covered by welfare were frozen for ten years at their 1975 levels. Meanwhile, rents in New York City nearly doubled.

During the same period, federal funds for building or rehabilitating low-income housing dropped from $32 billion to $9 billion nationwide. As demand grew, landlords raised their rents. In 1983 in New York City, Kozol writes, “there were almost half a million legal actions for eviction,” primarily against people on welfare. The result is painfully evident on every sidewalk in the city. In 1978, 900 families were given shelter on an average night; by 1984, the number had grown to 2,900. That figure was projected to double by the end of 1988. And this excludes the homeless who do not find shelter, as well as individuals who are homeless.

Some researchers blame rent control. A report by the Heritage Foundation points out, “Young couples who could once purchase a home are now forced to seek rental accommodations in the city. This in turn puts pressure on rents and forces up prices for the poor. The market would respond to this by building more apartments, but many cities block growth and instead impose rent control.” The result, says the report: “Housing does not ‘trickle down’ to the less affluent end of the market.”

Once a poor family has been thrust out the door, it is extraordinarily difficult for them to gain a new foothold even in a modestly priced apartment. Stephen Burger has seen the evidence in Seattle. He tells of a homeless woman and her husband who found a place to live and had saved $800 toward rent. But the landlord wanted $1,500 to cover their first month, last month, and deposit. “The husband was active in a Bible study in downtown Seattle,” Burger recalls. “He was a businessman.”

The most sobering aspect of homelessness in America, however, has little to do with today’s statistics. Studies indicate that there could be more than six times as many homeless Americans by the turn of the century. Figures such as these help explain why President George Bush and his secretary of housing and urban development, Jack Kemp, are talking so much about solutions.

Carl Resener, of the Nashville Union Mission, mirrors this concern for long-range solutions in his new book, Crisis in the Streets (Broadman). He warns against “institutionalizing” the homeless to the streets—feeding them, clothing them, and fully expecting them to live out the remainder of their lives on the street. “Homelessness is not overcome simply by softening the conditions the homeless live in,” Resener writes. “The causes must be eliminated.”

Resener details in his book federal programs and pending legislation and prescribes approaches tailored to each specific group of today’s homeless. Above all, he insists that the church in America, working with rescue missions, offers the homeless their best shot at regaining their footing in society. “The homeless as a whole, especially the ‘new poor,’ the newly displaced persons, need spiritual help to offset deep remorse, as well as resentment of their lot,” he insists.

Remembering That Jesus Saves

Resener says the right approach to the homeless reflects the way Jesus treated the blind beggar, Bartimaeus. “Instead of giving Bartimaeus food, water, and blankets to keep him comfortable on the streets, Jesus restored his sight, thus eliminating the cause of having to live on the streets.” Resener’s thoughts on the importance of ministering to the homeless typify the theological rationale behind much of urban missions.

There may be more programs, more donors, and more trained professionals on board in recent years, but the spiritual roots of mission work reach back as far as Jerry McCauley—and further, mission workers argue. Del Maxfield, in Denver, points out that the needs of the homeless are much more than just physical. “Jesus is the only hope that people on the bottom have,” Maxfield says. “I feel a great need to get the spiritual component to these people.”

There is little reason to believe that gospel preaching and Bible programs will be abandoned as urban missions reach out to new faces and meet new needs. “The world has never figured out what to do with the drunk and the convict,” Burger notes, but the church has specific instructions to follow. In rescue missions, activity is quickened by Jesus’ stark words about supplying food, clothing, companionship, and care to “the least of these brothers of mine” (Matt. 25:35–40).

Becoming occupied with poverty or homelessness does not lead to shelving spiritual concerns, say rescue mission leaders. Quite the contrary; Del Maxfield says he sees the Psalms come alive on the street—the psalms that speak of despair, abandonment, and oppression. He feels the primary task of the mission, through all its programs, is “to reassure people who are Christians that God has not abandoned them.” For people who do not profess to know Christ, Maxfield says the mission introduces the good news clearly and simply.

Bud and Cindy Webb say the people at Denver Rescue Mission are “easy to talk to, and they care.” When Bud and the couple’s son, Keith, rejoined Cindy just before Christmas, the mission supplied a fully cooked turkey with all the trimmings for Christmas dinner. Before their baby was born in late January, the mission held a shower for Cindy. And a mission Bible program has sparked family discussions, especially when Keith raises questions about “how the Earth got started and where man came from,” Bud says. “I’m not from a religious family,” Bud explains, “but we’re planning to have the baby baptized here, and Keith and me also. I feel this would be the place to do it.”

The tangible love of Christ gave the Webbs a foothold in the community and something more: a spiritual foundation for rebuilding a broken marriage and reuniting their family. It is happening for thousands of others like them. And if the work of rescue missions continues to prosper, it will happen for countless more.

The Art and Science of Rescue

The growing sophistication of today’s urban rescue work requires skills and know-how unheard of in earlier years. Mission directors often have college degrees and sometimes even postgraduate training. In a few years, some may Last fall Grace College of the Bible in Omaha began offering the four-year degree program. The college expects a dozen rescue-ministry majors by this fall.

Planned in cooperation with the 240-member International Union of Gospel Missons in Seattle, the program includes a year of internship with selected urban missions. Cheryl Matson, Grace’s director of recruitment and admissions, says, “We realized that many of the homeless are not as uneducated as uneducated as uneducated as they once were. Rescue ministries are in desperate need of staff people with training in administration and pastoral skills.”

The program was first envisioned by Robert Timberlake, executive director of Omaha’s Open Door Mission, who realized that the needs of today’s homeless sometimes present bewildering challenges to mission workers. “Our need to excel and to serve these people cries out for us to have college graduates” on staff, Timberlake says. “We need to be better educated to make referrals and deal with social workers.” Timberlake worries, however, that academic expertise apart from spiritual instruction might threaten the original mandate of mission work. “The tail can wag the dog, and we can forget we’re here to preach the gospel.”

The Grace College program emphasizes Bible instruction, theology, and general courses. Majors learn the history and philosophy of rescue work, find out how to administer a rescue program tailored to the varying needs of the homeless, take six hours of counseling electives, and acquire public-relations skills necessary for building a base of community support.

By Beth Spring.

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