Homeless ministry's parish is in the streets

St. Louis Post-Dispatch/November 18, 2003
By Bill Smith

Note: This article has been republished with the permission
of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

On his first Sunday in St. Louis, Fredrick Warren sat on a folding chair inside a crowded, second-floor room in the St. Louis Dream Center, looking forward to a hot shower, a change of clothes and a fresh shot at life.

"God had been calling me, but I'd been running," said Warren, just off a Greyhound bus from Chicago. "There's something He wants me to do and, whatever it is, I'm going to do it in a church.

"And this may be the church."

Warren was among dozens of homeless men and women who came to the Joyce Meyer Ministries' Dream Center this year, lured by the promise of doughnuts and a free haircut, and a simple message: "Jesus loves you."

Many visitors brought to the Dream Center are the city's shadow people, whose homes are in the old warehouses and abandoned truck trailers sprinkled throughout the fringes of downtown.

They are men like Frank, who uses a borrowed lawnmower to cut the weeds in front of his riverfront shanty, and JoJo, who stepped sleepily out of the back of a derelict semitrailer one evening last summer to greet a group of Dream Center volunteers.

"I knew it was you," he told them, grinning. "It had to be you."

Richard Jones, who heads the homeless outreach for the Dream Center, said center staff and volunteers go into the streets every weekend, seeking out people with drug and alcohol addictions, mental disabilities and anyone else with too many problems and too little hope. They are people, he said, who "sleep on the dirt," who "urinate on themselves."

"Love," he says, "is a color the devil cannot see. It's a smell the devil cannot smell. As long as your motives are pure, you can do anything you want to do."

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