God’s Beggars My Adventures

Discovering God In The Inner City

By Juan Galloway

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Dedication: I dedicate this book to my wife, Tracy Galloway. For 17 years she has inspired me and has been a driving force in everything I have ever done. Her dynamic gifts of leadership, vision and faith have allowed us to succeed in ministry. She has been the best partner any man could ever wish for. She is an incredible woman and wonderful mother to our kids -- River, Hailey, Corban and Connor. I have had the freedom and courage to follow God to the fullest because I have had Tracy’s love, respect and support and I look forward to growing old and grey together with her. Special Thanks: I would like to thank everyone involved in the writing of this book, because without their input in my life, their partnership with me in ministry and their direct contribution to this book it would have been but a shadow of what it has become. Thanks to my parents Richard and Dixie Galloway, my brother Michael Galloway, my sister Rachel Martinez, The Relief Bus staff: Bill Hoffman, Anne Jones, Austin Bonds, Anthony Mallamaci, Steve Pastor, Jim Berry and Caitlin Stiefel. You guys are all the best! God’s Beggars Copyright 2006, by Juan Galloway 2nd Edition, Copyright 2010 by Juan Galloway

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Foreword Everywhere I go, people ask the question, “What is God doing, and where are the most cutting-edge ministries you’re aware of, Jack?” They ask this because of the exposures I have, speaking to and interacting with more than 20,000 pastors annually. They presume I get around enough to have a feel for where the Church may be achieving the two most basic things that distinguish “the real thing” from merely “a church thing.”

1. The ministry is “doing what Jesus does,” as the leader(s) work is reaching to and penetrating usually neglected places where human need and hurt need more than good will gestures; where the leaders bury themselves in service that brings healing, hope and wholeness at every dimension -- spiritually, physically, domestically, emotionally and economically.

2. The leader(s) is “like Jesus” in

character, commitment, effectiveness and clarity of focus on people. Programs aren’t “an end in themselves;” being targeted on serving people—lifting

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them beyond the “helping-but-not-transforming” limits of agencies reticent to or resistant of the will or ability to introduce God’s power and grace to those they seek to reach.

So, in that light, I want to invite you to read about a true “cutting edge ministry”—meet Juan Galloway. His credentials answer to the two qualifiers above. Really. I met Juan two years ago, discovering one of the best surprises I’ve had over recent years. He’s the real deal—“cutting edge” for better reasons than merely being “cool.” Juan has a big heart for people—one ignited by the love of God, and always kept warm by the Holy Spirit of compassion that wills to give your life at the front-line of today’s human need. Jack W. Hayford Chancellor, The King’s College and Seminary President, International Foursquare Church Founding Pastor, The Church On The Way

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God ’s Beggars “A Christian is just one beggar showing other beggars where to find bread.” D.T. Niles, Sri Lankan Theologian

Preface

My good friend Pastor Bill Hoffman paraphrased a quote by Sri Lankan theologian D.T. Niles to me when he said, “We’re just beggars, showing other beggars where to find the bread.” It speaks of us being on the same level of desperate dependence as anyone else. All of our souls are starving for food we cannot earn, create or grow. Unless we take a handout from God, we will starve to death. This place of humility levels the playing field and puts life in proper perspective. We are grateful to receive this bread of life so that we can live and now are obligated to tell others where they can get what they need to survive as well. Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel,

“The Good News of the gospel cries out: we are all, equally privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God’s mercy!”

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The very idea of being a beggar offends us and stings our ego, because it smacks of being dependent, acting irresponsibly, being damaged, lacking self-respect, and maybe even of being pathetic. Yes, it’s true. When you get to the point of begging, you’ve probably hit bottom. The act of asking someone to give you something because you can’t or won’t provide it for yourself is humiliating. When we come to the end of ourselves and realize that we really aren’t the be all and end all of life, it can be a huge disappointment. How many people having achieved everything they ever wanted in life, ended up feeling totally empty? Some have even taken their own lives because checking out was more attractive than facing the prospect of coping with their own inner poverty. What about the beatitude where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? How can being poor in spirit be a blessing? D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones explains in Studies in the Sermon on the Mount,

“It means a complete absence of pride, a complete absence of self-assurance and self-reliance. It means a consciousness that we are nothing in the presence of God. It is nothing, then, that we can produce; it is nothing that we can do in ourselves. It is just this tremendous awareness of our utter nothingness as we come face to face with God. That is to be poor in spirit.”

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Mark A. Noll, Professor of History at Wheaton College writes in First Things,

“-It says, in Luther's last written words, "We are beggars, and that's the truth." These are words that Americans need to hear. They need to hear them in church, but they also need to hear them in the universities, in the boardrooms of corporations, in the halls of Congress, in the military, in homes and schools and shopping malls and on athletic fields and the factory floor-in every place where the restless hearts of men and women search for meaning, forgiveness, truth, and the hope of life. They are words for Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but also for those who do not recognize their need of God.”

Bottoming out could be the best thing that ever happened to you, because then you might finally recognize how famished you are and that it’s time to eat. I welcome you to the feast. This book is a true account of my life sprinkled throughout with “Soap Box Moments”. You’ll know you’ve reached one when you see the graphic below.

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These are discoveries, thoughts and lessons I have learned in my life that have seriously challenged me. I am challenged by how I am responding to the life of Jesus. I want my lifestyle to emulate and imitate his, yet many times I am blind to my own shortcomings. As my eyes are being opened I hope that yours will be too, and we will both get closer to reaching the goal of being good beggars. In my travels I have visited a location in London, England called Speaker’s Corner. It is an open air spot located in Hyde Park and is the place where people actually stand on soap boxes, or something similar, and speak their minds publicly. It has become quite a tourist attraction because this practice has been going on for hundreds of years. Supposedly Speaker’s Corner came about because by British law there were certain things you were not allowed to say while standing on British soil. How did they get around this law to voice dissension or opposing views? They stepped off of British soil and up onto their soap box! To this day people stand on these soap boxes and give oratories on everything from religion to politics. Many come to hear the speakers, but many come just to heckle the speakers for fun. Though I didn’t have a soap box with me, I had the privilege of speaking at Speaker’s Corner and being heckled as well. Some of the very things I shared there are in this book. Whether your reason for reading this book is to learn from me or to heckle me, I hope you are challenged in your thinking and will enjoy the ride.

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Sometimes when lessons are given too pointedly we turn away from them because they sting too much. I have walked a fine line in challenging the body of Christ to discover God’s passion for the poor. I truly hope that I have not crossed over the line into accusation or condemnation, because that truly is not the spirit in which I have written this book. Conviction, however, is a good thing, and I feel more convicted than ever to obey God and to love his people. My very limited knowledge and experience are finite and the true foundation of truth is the Word of God. Take special note of the Scriptures included, because unlike my writings, they are absolutely infallible and eternal. Please take this book as a gentle challenge and, I hope, as an inspiration to find your place among the wretched and accept your role as a beggar. Together we must come humbly before God asking him to change our hearts in order to please him. We all fall short, yet his grace covers us as we walk down the long path of obedience and servitude.

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Contents Preface Chapter 1 Strange Beginnings The Streets Sanctified Noise Homeless Ministry

Soap Box Moment: Outcast Nation Street Church

Chapter 2 The Vision The Move Soap Box Moment: Resign Your Judgeship Chapter 3 The Welcome Wagon Tha Tribe Is Alive! The Core Community Soap Box Moment: Enter the Rejected Chapter 4 Busload of Philosophy How We Do It

Kids Ministry and The Art of Improvisation Greg

Freddy

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Chapter 5 Soap Box Moment: The Cry of The Poor Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

Soap Box Moment: Food For Thought And Thought For Food

Chapter 6 Marlyn Creativity

Learning By Doing Chapter 7 Soap Box Moment: Party With The Poor From Hillbilly Hell Raiser To Servant On The Streets A Walk On The Wild Side Chapter 8 Freedom Escape From Shame

Kevin Soap Box Moment: Trash or Treasure? Christine Finds True Love Passing the Torch Chapter 9 Soap Box Moment: The Challenge of

The Poor Beach Baptism Chapter 10 Soap Box Moment: The Tsunami of Self Motivations and Expectations Sheila Finds Freedom Jimmy Ponytail

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Chapter 11 The Cost Chapter 12 Soap Box Moment: Bucks Enabling See My Faith? Chapter 13 Soap Box Final Chapter:

Come Alive! My Crumbs? The Harvest The First Step

Bonus Chapter Compassion Revival Epilogue: DON’T WALK BY Rocks The City Big Changes Socially Networked Relief Bus, The Next Generation The Road To Relief Relief Bus: Mission, Method, Motto, Mandate

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Chapter 1 Strange Beginnings I was born in 1970 in San Francisco California as one Juan Carlos Ricardo Galloway. I am not Hispanic, but ironically five years later, my younger brother was adopted from Guadalajara, Mexico. His name is Michael James Galloway! When I was born my parents, Richard and Dixie, ran a 7-11 convenience store in Pacifica, California. As an infant I was raised behind the counter in a shopping cart parked right next to the Slurpee® machine. I am sure to this day that the constant spinning of the Slurpee® machine permanently affected my brain waves. Did I forget to mention that I was actually born on the date of 7-11? These strange beginnings were the precursor to a strange life and to the assignment that I find myself in today. A year after I was born my family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It is there that my family began their own chain of convenience stores called Happy Foods. There I continued my steady diet of hot links and Slurpees®. My parents built up one store into twenty stores and were soon rolling in the dough. We lived in a twenty-two-room, three-story, seven bathroom home that was a replica of an English manor. It was a small castle called Redrock Manor. There was an elevator in it that I liked to hang out in and read comic books. My room was on the third floor called the tower room because it was round and looked like a tower. In the back of my closet was a door that led to a secret passage leading up to the attic. The house was on thirteen wooded acres and had a creek where I would

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swing across on vines like Tarzan. I would run around this property as a kid with our pack of dogs and have all kinds of adventures. My dad liked cars and had eight Porsches, three Rolls Royce’s, a Jaguar, and many other models in his collection. The family owned boats, vacation homes, airplanes and lots of other stuff. Basically they worked all the time, and when they weren’t working they were partying. We would have enormous Christmas and Halloween parties with hundreds of guests. On the weekends my parents would go out and live it up. Living it up meant drinking a lot and getting high. Marijuana use was regular, and as time went on the use of other drugs increased as well. Along with this “swinging” lifestyle was adultery and sexual promiscuity.

Me at 10 years old. Looking smooth!

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By the time I was ten-years-old my father was snorting up thousands of dollars of cocaine on the weekends and drinking a quart of tequila a day. My parents were fighting a lot and generally I think you could call our family dysfunctional. It was around this time that my parents also adopted my younger sister Rachel. I remember this sad time period, and I remember feeling quite lonely. I would wake up in this big house and get myself ready for school, fix myself breakfast, walk to the bus, come home after school, and was alone a lot. Our family didn’t eat dinner together very often or spend much quality time together. It concerned me that my parents were using drugs, and I remember praying that they would quit. Although materially our family was quite wealthy, we were morally and spiritually bankrupt. My young faith was not fully developed, but I believed in God and was frequently taken to Sunday School at a Baptist church by my grandmother. At one point I attended a Sunday School near my home by myself. Even while hung over, my father would get up Sunday morning and drive me there to drop me off. My father got to the point that his drug and alcohol abuse was causing him to fall apart. He was using drugs in front of us kids, began to slur his words and was slipping deeper into the abyss of his addictions. My mother was feeling convicted about their hedonistic lifestyle and how it was affecting me, my brother, Michael and sister, Rachel. She confronted my father and told him that he would have to leave. Not long before that, she had begun to read a white, leather-bound Bible, which she had received as a

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wedding present many years before. She would just read the red words spoken by Jesus. Her final word of advice to my father was, “You’ve tried everything else, why don’t you try God?” My dad details the account, “It was terrifying to feel emotions I had never felt before. All of a sudden it was coming to an end. The sum total of my best efforts was worthless. What I owned wasn't valuable to me. I had always managed my life to satisfy myself. Now, all I had was myself. I was exposed. I knew if I left, I could die." Both my parents had grown up in church, my father in the Pentecostal Foursquare tradition and my mother in the Southern Baptist tradition. Both had found little use for the Church and up until this time didn’t talk a lot about God. My father, being at the end of his rope, actually took my mother’s advice and prayed, “God, I don’t know if You will, and if you will I don’t know why You will, but I’m asking You to please help me.” Instantly my dad felt something happen. He felt all the garbage inside of him leave and felt something wonderful come inside to take its place. That night he fell asleep like a baby without smoking a big joint or drinking a big glass of Scotch to help him pass out. He woke up the next morning and went to the store to buy a book about God, so he could find out what had happened. It was so early that the store hadn’t opened yet, so he waited. When it opened he went inside and bought a book about God. He was amazed at what he read. He read for three straight days

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digging out answers and hope. The book he bought that day was simply a Bible. I came home from school one day to discover my dad doing something amazing. He was filling up huge garbage bags with booze bottles, drug paraphernalia and pornography. He then proceeded to throw these garbage bags into our dumpster. I was dumbfounded and grinning from ear to ear. This was mind blowing for me, as this was a radical lifestyle change for me to witness firsthand. This was the beginning of our new life. It wasn’t long before my parents sold the family business, our house and cars. They felt that they had a higher calling than selling gas, cigarettes and beer. We picked up and moved to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. There we became a family for the first time. It’s hard to put into words how much of a life transformation we made and how good it felt. We ate together, had family Bible studies and went to the beach a lot. My folks started a Bible study group in our home that grew so large it had to be relocated to a hotel. By the time we left several years later it had become a full-fledged church and is still operating to this day as V.I. Christian Ministries and Church On The Rock under the leadership of pastors Adelle and Audain Brown. From there we moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico where we lived for several more years. You’ve got to love moving to a city with the same name as you! While living there my mom and dad partnered with other ministries to build the first Christian television station in Puerto Rico. Millions of Puerto Ricans now hear the Gospel on the airwaves,

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many of whom are impoverished (44.8% live below the poverty line). In 1986 we moved to Dallas, Texas where I finished up high school. During my senior year I had an incredible experience while in a service at my church. An evangelist named David Albritton was speaking about how to introduce people to Jesus Christ. He didn’t just speak one night. He spoke for five nights in a row on the subject, and told story after story about people he had led to Jesus. It was during one of those meetings that I felt the Holy Spirit touching me and started crying my eyes out. It was a good kind of crying which was an overflow of what God was doing in my heart. I felt immersed in spiritual power as God’s presence washed over me like a wave. His love and concern for me was so tangible at that moment. I had been wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life, but suddenly I knew: I was supposed to tell people about Jesus. It was a profound revelation for me because it was my life calling. This was great, but my main problem with that was I was really chicken. I was afraid to talk to people about God. The Streets I took to the streets with a teenage guy I knew from my youth group named Tim who was zealous and fearless in telling people about Jesus. I figured that if I went out with him to do some street ministry, I might learn a thing or two. We went to downtown Dallas one day and my heart was pounding and my stomach was churning. I was terrified at what might happen if I talked to a stranger on the street about God. My buddy took the lead, and the response was so warm

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that I suddenly felt inspired to share myself. People were open to talk to me and hear what I had to say. I actually started having fun! This life-changing experience launched me into regular street ministry. For the next year I went out weekly by myself and visited all the bus stops downtown, talking to people and sharing the story of what God had done in my life. Basically I would just walk up to people, smile and say, “How are you doing?” They would smile back and respond, “Fine, how are you?” After chatting for a while and getting to know them a little bit, I would dig a little into their heart. With warm eyes and sincerity I would ask, “Let me ask you a question. Do you know where you would go if you died today? If you got hit by a bus or something, where do you think you would go?” Because of my kindness in mannerism they usually answered very honestly that they had questions and fears about eternity. I shared how Jesus had changed my life and rescued my family and how grateful I was. I offered to pray with them to meet Jesus the way that I had and many times they responded favorably to the offer. I was naive enough to think that people might listen and, amazingly, they usually did. For those who prayed to receive Christ into their lives I took names, addresses and phone numbers and mailed them a brochure about what it means to become a follower of Christ as well as some info about the services at my church so that they could get plugged in. I remember talking to a young woman at a bus stop one day, and I asked her how she was doing. She told me that she had just gotten out of jail. I asked

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what it was that had landed her in jail and she replied, “Because I cut up my boyfriend.” I was taken aback by this statement and was sorry I had asked, but began to talk to her about the love of Jesus. She began to cry, and we held hands together as she prayed to give her life to Jesus. Every time I went out, people would pray to receive salvation. To my amazement, one day I led 12 people to Christ in just 2 hours! It was an awesome time of personal revival in my life. Ironically, the church in which I had this life changing experience and grew so much spiritually was Word of Faith Family Church, led by the now infamous, Pastor Robert Tilton. Tilton’s focus in his preaching at church and on his national television show, Success-N-Life, was prosperity -- why we should have it and how we can get it. Mostly his strategy consisted of encouraging people to give to his ministry while having faith that God would give them the things that they desire. His marriage and ministry eventually fell apart, but he has now returned to the airwaves with his third wife, preaching the same message and promoting his book How to Get Rich and Have Everything You Want. I say that it is ironic because however doctrinally flawed his ministry was, I grew closer to Jesus while attending there and got direction from God there which I am following still to this day. His ministry of “prosperity” played a part in my eventual involvement in ministering to the poor and choosing a life of urban missionary work that requires me to live on a much lower income then I might have otherwise. It was also at this church that a thirteen-year-old girl named Tracy Lucia chose to give her life

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to Jesus. I fell in love with that girl and married her six years later. Many people choose to condemn Robert Tilton as a charlatan. I see him as a man who lost his way and needs God’s help to find his way back home. His message is diametrically opposed to mine -- his being that you should trust God to get rich, mine being that you should deny yourself materially and lay down your life so that others may prosper. I pray for the man and for those more anointed than I who have fallen along the way.

Juan and Tracy hanging out before a Sanctified Noise Concert

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Sanctified Noise I decided to go to Bible college and signed up at Christ For The Nations Institute. I chose to do this because I just wanted to get closer to God. One thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to go into full-time ministry. While attending school there I continued to do street outreach and came in contact with another subculture that I was also very drawn to -- punk rockers. I was leading many people to the Lord on the streets, but was hitting a brick wall when it came to these young kids sporting Mohawks and Doc Martens. I prayed and felt led, along with some friends to start an outreach band to reach this people group. These buddies of mine, Steve Grabosch, Craig Sandifer and Jamie Fawcus, were basically skaters and punk rockers who got a hold of God. We certainly stood out like sore thumbs in our conservative Bible school in the Bible belt. We named the band Sanctified Noise. For three years our Christian punk rock band played all over Texas in Christian coffee houses, on the streets, in bars, clubs and one time even in a surfboard factory. I remember the concerts we played in an empty lot behind our favorite Christian coffeehouse called The Prophet or the Christian club called Theatre Gallery, both of which were located in the center of the club/underground community known as Deep Ellum. Deep Ellum was a very funky, artsy area covered with strange graffiti. There were odd shops filled with second hand clothes, hard to find records and bizarre art. Young people who were roaming the streets at night would wander over when they heard our music

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and end up staying to enjoy the show. We had an outlandish stage show that consisted of smashing things such as tv’s, eight-track players, pumpkins or whatever, throwing toast into the audience and wrapping our bodies in cellophane. We now had Mohawks, freaky clothes, and Doc Martens, of course. Our goal was to become “all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22). Deep Ellum was our mission field and it was our hangout. We typically hung out on the streets there every weekend until about three in the morning talking to freaks, skinheads and your average party animal. Everywhere we went we performed our hearts out and people loved it. One of the punk rock clubs that was a real dive was called Slipped Disc. It was a bare, dimly lit room with nothing more than concrete floors and a wooden stage. It was filled with teenagers high on drugs and disenchanted with their parents and society in general. They were really just hurting kids who for the most part had been neglected by their parents. When we cranked up the music and pounded out our songs, the kids went wild. They would dance and mosh around the room as we threw huge wads of confetti in the air (shredded documents scavenged from office dumpsters). In the middle of each show we would stop the music and share who Jesus was in our lives. Responses were varied and I have memories of drugged up kids yelling out things like “F--- you!” or dropping their pants in rebellious response. This was definitely “awkward moment” time when we played at secular venues, but I think people also found it oddly fascinating. I know I did.

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After our spiel, we’d launch back into the rest of our set, sending the crowd into another frenzy of fun. After the shows we always spent time talking to people and getting to know them while looking for opportunities to share Christ. Several members of the band ended up starting a Bible study in an old house located near the club district where we played. This group was a place to gather all of our weirdo friends and get closer to God. Although we had no clue what we were doing, the group quickly grew to around thirty and sometimes even forty people. People came as they were, with or without shoes. We took turns sharing, singing and praying for each other. As I look back on it, it really became a fun little church. Erwin Raphael McManus, pastor of Mosaic church in Los Angeles, California talks in his book The Barbarian Way about Christianity becoming too civilized and tamed, safe within it’s own subculture. He writes,

“Christianity over the past two thousand years has moved from a tribe of renegades to a religion of conformists. Those who choose to follow Jesus become participants in an insurrection. To claim we believe is simply not enough. The call of Jesus is one that demands action. Jesus began His public ministry with a simple invitation: “Come, follow Me.” His closing instructions to His disciples can be summarized in one word, “Go!” A quick survey of the modern church would lead you to

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believe His invitation was “Come, and listen,”…… The invitation of Jesus is a revolutionary call to fight for the heart of humanity. “Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity. We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go. If Jesus has come to dwell within you, you are no longer suited for a normal life. You are a jungle where the Spirit roams wild and free in your life. You are the recipient of the God who cannot be tamed and of a faith that must not be tamed. God is not a sedative that keeps you calm and under control by dulling your senses. He does quite the opposite. He awakens your spirit to be truly alive.”

This describes the transformation that was happening in my life. My raw faith was ready to be unleashed upon a dying world. I specifically remember praying,

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“God send me to the darkest places, where no one else will go, so that I can lead them to Jesus.” I had no idea of the extent to which God would end up answering that prayer. Into the hovels of the poor, Into the dark streets where the homeless groan, God speaks: "I've had enough; I'm on my way To heal the ache in the heart of the wretched." Psalm 12:5 (The Message)

Homeless Ministry While still in Bible college, my father suggested I go visit the Street Ministers Conference led by Scott Hinkle (now called A Passion For Souls). While there I heard a speaker share something quite revelatory. He said, “You want to start a feeding ministry? Go buy some food at the store, give it to someone who is hungry and now you have a feeding ministry.” This sounded too simple and I had to give it a try. I went to the store and bought two big loaves of Wonderbread®, some bologna and some cheese. I made up some sandwiches and hit the streets. I wandered around downtown Dallas not knowing where to find any hungry people and then I found the library. Evidently with the Texas heat, an air-conditioned library was a cool place to hang out. People were sitting on the sidewalks there and laying out in the park across the street. They were glad to

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get the sandwiches and very open to receiving prayer. It was so much fun that I ended up returning week after week. People at my Bible college found out I was going and wanted to come along. Soon people were offering me money, food and even a refrigerator to store food in my dorm room. Each week we made our way through the streets spreading love and food. Strangely enough, although people were agreeable to receiving prayer, hardly any wanted to actually receive salvation. The “success” I had experienced at the bus stops was not being duplicated. The success we were having was not in the way of numbers of people committing their lives to Christ, but in hearts touched and love extended. In the natural it seemed like we weren’t accomplishing much, but all I knew was that I was experiencing God’s heart and was on the right track. SOAP BOX MOMENT Outcast Nation The poor have become the modern day lepers of society. They are outcasts shunned by a culture that is striving for success and has no time for failures or slackers. They are stepped over, stepped around, ignored and become part of the scenery like a mailbox or a tree. Scriptures like “The last will be first” and “Blessed are the poor” don’t seem to have much meaning in America. The homeless are used as a

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political issue and a commentary on our society, but they are people just like you and me. Who are the poor and why do they matter? If you don’t know the poor then you don’t fully know Jesus. Isn’t that what Matthew 25:31-46 is talking about? In as much as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to Me.

Matthew 25:40 When you meet someone who is smelly, dirty, has rotting teeth, matted hair, needle tracks on their arms and alcohol on their breath, you’re meeting Jesus. Does Jesus want you to help them? Obviously. Does Jesus want the poor to help you understand HIS heart? Absolutely. Many of my friends on the streets are homeless, jobless, addicted, and basically poor. At The Relief Bus we don’t call them our clients. They’re our friends. We attempt to genuinely portray ourselves as “not having it all together” and struggling along by faith. Both Christians and non-Christians, rich or poor, black or white feel equally comfortable at the bus. We recognize that we all equally need God’s help. Not all poor people are homeless, drug addicts or scruffy, but they do have unmet needs, needs that they can’t meet on their own. The reality is that we ALL have needs that cannot be met on our own. That is one of the key truths that the poor can help us to see- WE’RE POOR! We are totally and utterly

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dependent upon Jesus to provide every physical, emotional and spiritual need. The Bible says that the poor will always be with us. Many people figure that means we don’t have any obligation to get involved with the poor, but they aren’t a problem to be solved, they are a people to be loved. They don’t fit neatly into most church programs and dealing with them can be messy and unpredictable. “What if they say a curse word during our small group discussion?!” Horrors. I think where we miss the boat in general is trying to fit them into a very narrow box called American “Churchianity.” People need space to disagree with us, be argumentative, question our doctrine and voice their own opinion. Is our opinion the only one that matters? Take this simple test taken from Matthew 25 to see how you rate as to having God’s heart for the poor. If your answer to any of these questions is, “I gave money to a charity/church/mercy ministry”, then your answer is “no” to that question.

1. Have you ever fed someone who is hungry? Did you eat with them?

2. Have you ever given a person a drink who looked thirsty?

3. Have you ever taken in a stranger to stay with you?

4. Have you ever given clothes to someone who obviously didn’t have enough?

5. Have you ever gone to take care of someone who is sick?

6. Have you ever visited someone in prison?

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The bottom line is: If you don’t know the poor, then you don’t really know Jesus. More importantly, He doesn’t know you. Craig Gross writes in The Gutter-Where Life Is Meant To Be Lived,

“Reading the Gospels now, I see a Jesus who is different from the one I knew during childhood. This Jesus is willing to take risks by loving all the outcasts- the people others avoided. He’s most effectively embraced by the hurting, broken and pretty-much-jacked-up who gather around Him. He doesn’t turn them off or repel them; He draws those who have emotional, physical or spiritual needs. The only ones who detest Jesus are the ones who believe they have it figured out, that they’re immune to the streets, to the gutter. Jesus spends most of His time in with the people, not with the Pharisees. He’s in the streets, not in the synagogues. He goes to the gutter. “In Luke 14:23, Jesus instructs His disciples to “go out into the highways and byways and compel them to come in.” He challenged them to go to the people in need. In a new millennium, Jesus might say it this way: “Go into the

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gutters of the city and love people so they will love Me.” “Instead of demanding that the lost come to the place where religion was being peddled, Jesus went to the gutter and found them. Then He mastered the unlikely: He learned things about them. He found things in common with them. He loved them.”

The army that God is raising up may not look like a bunch of white, middle-class, protestant, conservative professionals. In fact the people God is raising up to serve Him may look something like what Micah described: “In that day,” says the Lord, “I will assemble the lame, I will gather the outcast And those whom I have afflicted; I will make the lame a remnant, And the outcast a strong nation;”

Micah 4:6, 7

The people who seem like a mess: disorganized, unsuccessful and broken down, these are the people we need on our team as we serve God together. The mentality of trying to fix everybody has got to change to “my brother”. Why withhold our approval, our acceptance and our love? Are there really second class Christians? Do we need to wait until people clean up their act and say all

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the right things before we can validate their worth? Why not just struggle along with the poor, eat with them, hang out with them, serve with them and hurt with them. Isn’t that what Jesus did? Street Church Something else strange happened on the streets. I kept coming in contact with young gang members. They were teenage Mexican kids who were decked out in a big white t-shirts, khaki Dickies® pants, black and white gangster Nikes and ball caps which usually had their gang name stitched on the side. I don’t know why, but I felt strangely drawn to this subculture and the people involved in it. I felt compelled to reach out to them and was constantly having “divine appointments” (Christianeze term for “God set me up to help someone experience God.”) One day I was in an arcade and a young gangster walked up to me and asked if I would like to fight. He was obviously intoxicated. I laughed and told him I wasn’t interested in fighting and began to share about Jesus. I ended up praying with him and even gave him a ride home. Another day I was on the street and ended up leading a young man to the Lord named Joker. I found myself in a dilemma because I wanted to disciple these young gang members, but had no idea where to take them to church. I went to an eight-thousand-member mega-church that was a pretty glossy, success-oriented institution. I didn’t think it was the right fit for the street crowd. I wanted to take them someplace where they could feel comfortable and enjoy themselves.

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Through hearing an ad on the radio and reading a magazine article, I found a place called Street Church. It was a small storefront church located in a very seedy area on the east side of Dallas. I walked in the door and immediately felt the love of God. I had found a new church not just for gang members, but for myself as well. Street Church had a gang intervention program that tutored and counseled kids who were on probation for drive-by shootings, drug dealing and violence. The founders were Demi and Cookie Rodriguez. Their son Danny was one of the tutors for the program, and everyone loved him. His enthusiasm for life was contagious. He was also one of the first Christian rappers, known as D-Boy. D-Boy put out several albums and had the incredible offer to tour with Petra. Petra was probably the most popular Christian band in existence at the time. This was an amazing opportunity to boost his music career, but D-Boy felt that his place was amongst the youth he was helping and declined the offer. It was during this time period when he decided to stay home that he was murdered by someone who was maybe trying to steal his car. The killer has not been found to this day. At the funeral for D-Boy I made an offer to his mother, Cookie, to come and help at the program. I had recently graduated from Bible college. For the next year, I tutored and discipled these young gang members (13 to 17 years old). It was the hardest job I had ever had in my life. Everyone was still reeling from D-Boy’s death. The teens were angry and their lives were out of control. I had the difficult task of filling in for someone everyone loved and missed and I was no substitute. Add to the fact that I was a super

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skinny white kid from the suburbs with long hair that was bleached white, and I was really a fish out of water. Each morning I drove through the barrio picking up kids for our gang intervention program. The buildings were covered with gang graffiti and the young toughs would constantly “mad dog” me. “Mad dogging” was staring at someone with a cold hard look on your face that challenged you to fight them. I always just smiled and said, “Hey guys, how are you doing?” That always took them off guard and defused the tough guy routine. Many of these teens would sniff toluene, a paint thinner, to get high. It did get them very high and burned out their brain cells as well. Whenever a gang member was shot and killed, Cookie Rodriguez would go to minister to the family and attempt to call a truce between rival gangs so that they would not continue to retaliate. It was a surreal experience to show up on the scene where there were cars full of bullet holes and blood on the sidewalk. One day we visited a recreation center that had been shot up from a drive-by shooting. The big picture windows were shot out and tensions were high in the neighborhood. I was standing around out front when a young man high on toluene starting screaming at me, “Hey white boy, what are you doing here? You want to fight?” The guy was enraged. One of our crew of reformed gang members named Auggie wrapped his arms around the young man so that he couldn’t get at me. Auggie was a big guy, and he held the teen in a bear hug while he ranted and raved. He was obviously out of

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his mind. Auggie just smiled as if this was an every day occurrence and said, “Dawg, you better head back to church now.” I agreed and got out of there. Events like this made me realize what kind of danger I was surrounded by daily. If that young man had a gun on him, he would have had no reservations in “busting some caps” (shooting) on me, even though he had no idea who I was. He was young, angry and felt hopeless. I felt nothing but love and compassion for him. These experiences were part of a baptism of fire that I was passing through to pierce my heart and shape my character. Even though I didn’t understand everything that was going on around me, I felt God and knew that if I were to die doing this work, it would be a job worth dieing for because I was doing something important to God. Pleasing God became more important than my own personal safety.

Dixie and Richard Galloway (Mom & Dad), founders of New York City Relief

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After a year of working at Street Church I felt God calling me strongly into youth ministry, for which I felt totally inadequate and insecure. I moved up to New Jersey where my parents had relocated. They were the founders and directors of New York City Relief, an organization that helps the homeless and poor on the streets of the New York Metro area. This ministry is carried out primarily through The Relief Bus, a mobile outreach unit that travels to different locations in New York City. The busses are used to feed people, give out clothes and connect them to vital help such as drug and alcohol rehab, shelter, job training and more. My parents started this organization twenty years ago. To this date four million servings of food and beverages have been distributed, and one hundred and forty thousand people have been connected to resources and real help through The Relief Bus. Over forty thousand volunteers have come to get their hands dirty serving the poor on The Relief Bus. (You can too. Check out www.reliefbus.org) I looked feverishly for a job as a youth pastor and got nowhere, because I had no idea what I was doing and had no public speaking experience whatsoever. While I was job hunting, my girlfriend; Tracy, whom I had been dating for four years at the time, moved up to work with my parent’s ministry. We got engaged and soon after were married. Since there were no doors opening up for us on the East coast we packed up our stuff and moved to California. We had no friends there, no jobs, no contacts, no nothing. Within several months though, we were offered a job as youth pastors at an Assemblies of God Church in Redwood City, California called New Life Church. Working with

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our youth group, The Blast, was a time of learning how to preach, make disciples and love teens. I started another band called Echoplex during this season and played all around the San Francisco bay area. The most important thing that happened during this time was that my two daughters River and Hailey were born.

Me doing my singer/songwriter/evangelist thing

After a wonderful four-and-a-half year stint in San Francisco we moved to Sacramento and traveled as evangelists. We preached, performed concerts, taught drama workshops and learned how hard it is to support a family living as a traveling evangelist. After a year of that life we looked for God’s next step for us and connected with a Foursquare church in Hackettstown, New Jersey called The Gathering Place. We were hired as youth pastors there and served for five years. During these years as youth pastors we got to take lots of incredible mission trips with our teens to Mexico, England, Ireland, Wales,

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Uganda, Ethiopia and Colombia. While serving there in New Jersey, my two sons Corban and Connor were born. Interesting trivia: Corban’s name is found in Mark 7:11.

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Chapter 2 The Vision In the fall of 2002, after working as youth pastors for ten years in what I would call “normal church ministry” (but what church ministry is really normal?), my wife Tracy and I were approached by my parents with the idea of starting a school of urban ministry with their organization, New York City Relief in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At the time Tracy and I were living in a beautiful home in the country in northwest New Jersey. It was a pretty tough sell to consider leaving our peaceful, serene surroundings to enter into the inner city with all of its challenges. We daily had deer strolling through our front lawn, rabbits hopping about, wild turkeys waddling by and even a bear or two now and then. To trade this in for the ghetto was a stretch of the imagination at best. The other part of this challenge was leaving a steady paycheck and starting a job where I would have to raise my own support as an urban missionary to survive. There was nothing appealing about this. The entire staff at New York City Relief, including my parents, were raising their own financial support. My parents had run out of the money they had made from the sale of their convenience store business by the time they started New York City Relief and pretty much pioneered the effort by faith and sheer guts. Basically, we responded to their proposal with much skepticism and doubtfulness. I thought the whole idea was pretty nuts. After several more conversations on

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the subject, Tracy and I decided to actually pray about the situation and see what God had in mind. This was a dangerous thing to do, because the more I prayed the more I got vision for not just a school of urban ministry, but a church that would be like no other. I got a picture of a church that would be a training ground for our students and a place where they could learn to disciple the community. After approaching our pastors (at the church where we worked) with the idea and receiving a strong show of support, we began to prepare ourselves for the work ahead. Unfortunately, there was no way we could have possibly prepared ourselves for what was ahead. Luckily, we were joining a ministry where the founder claimed he didn’t know what he was doing either, so we fit right in.

The Galloway Family:

Juan, Tracy, Corban, Hailey, River and Connor

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This became a battle cry and a personal motto for me in the days ahead. “We don’t know what we are doing” was a simple way to say we’re not masterminding some brilliant new ministry, we’re just trusting God and stumbling blindly forward while He holds our hand. It’s actually quite freeing to acknowledge that you’re not an expert and that your life has become a kind of divine experiment. This is the reality of most of our lives, but we have been conditioned by society to “fake it ‘til you make it,” and just pretend we have it all together when we know we really don’t. The vision we got for this new church was a place where people could make deep friendships with one another. It was a place where non-Christians could bond with Christians instead of just a sermon, and have a safe place to ask questions. I was pretty much sick of church programs which I found for the most part to be religious exercises in boredom. The core of who I was wanted intimacy with other people, to be able to be real and not put on any pretensions. It would be a place that I wanted to hang out, not one I felt obligated to go to. I had been frustrated by the surface level relationships that exist with most people in church for only a few minutes before and after a long service. This is how the core concept of our church motto, “Keeping It Real”, came to life because this is what we all want really. It’s too easy to wear a plastic smile and say, “Praise the Lord”, when we are struggling and even dying inside. This new church had to be a place where we all could let our hair down and be ourselves, warts and all.

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Elizabeth, here we come!

The Move After an extended process of saying farewell to our old church and finishing up our season there, we got ready to go. Then we had to hurry up and wait because for the next eight months our house did not sell. We showed it to more people then I can remember as I commuted almost two hours in heavy traffic to Elizabeth each day. During this time I mainly tried to figure out how to start and run a school of urban ministry, but we wouldn’t start officially until the fall of 2003. One of first things that happened as we started working at New York City Relief, was that the hubcaps were stolen on our minivan. This actually happened on Tracy’s first day of work! That was just a precursor to what would lie ahead. During this time of starting new ministries, I also started a new hairdo. Although I had looked fairly conservative during my years of suburban youth ministry, I now had the opportunity to express myself, so I grew some dreadlocks. Most people think that I

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did this to connect with homeless people, because it made me look like I might be homeless! Actually I just changed my hairstyle because I thought it was fun to be weird. I think that it’s just part of my artistic nature. I joked that all my supernatural strength was in my hair like Samson and could never be cut! It did give me a look that endeared me to folks on the streets because they appreciated someone who’s different and not stuffy, but I didn’t plan it that way. Much of my time in the beginning was spent going out on The Relief Bus which was the mobile outreach ministry of New York City Relief. I traveled to many locations around New York City including Harlem and the Bronx and also to a location in Elizabeth, New Jersey serving soup, giving out clothes and praying for many. I got to know some of the homeless people on the streets and hear firsthand what challenges they were facing every day. I thought I was there to help them, but little did I know how much they would end up helping me.

Meetings for this meetings for that. I hate them! You’ve worn me out! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion….

Learn to do good. Work for justice. Help the down-and-out. Stand up for the homeless. Go to bat for the defenseless.

Isaiah 1:13,17 (The Message)

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A man sleeping across the street

from the New York City Relief base SOAP BOX MOMENT Resign Your Judgeship Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world”

James 1:26, 27 (The Message) What kind of corruption is James talking about? He’s speaking of the way we perceive the value of the poor as opposed to the rich. Another version of the Bible

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says that “pure and undefiled religion is to visit orphans and widows in their trouble”(James 1:27). Not just give them a couple bucks, but visit them and spend time with them. The Book of James continues: My dear friends, don’t let public opinion influence how you live out our glorious, Christ-originated faith. If a man enters your church wearing an expensive suit, and a street person wearing rags comes in right after him, and you say to the man in the suit, “Sit here, sir; this is the best seat in the house!” and either ignore the street person or say, “Better sit here in the back row,” haven’t you segregated God’s children and proved that you are judges who can’t be trusted?

James 2:1-4 (The Message) The world tends to judge those who are poor as being lazy, unambitious, and even hopeless. God doesn’t want us as Christians to take on this worldly view. Many wonder why the poor don’t just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and overcome hardship. The problem with pointing a finger is that there are always three fingers pointing back at you (try it). Would we be where we are without the people who have invested in us, encouraged us and supported us? I seriously doubt it. Somewhere along the way someone

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believed in us, saw potential in us and lent us a helping hand. Now comes our turn because, “To whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12:48). Craig Gross writes in The Gutter - Where Life Is Meant To Be Lived,

“I’ve found that usually people respond to situations like Yo-Yo’s (a homeless woman in San Francisco) by finding a way to criticize the situation rather than deliver hope to it. Our minds have mastered this deceptive method, and it usually plays out like this: If I denounce this awkward situation as a social ill that is not my responsibility, then I can walk away with less guilt for not doing the right thing. Really. The more I bash the gutter, regardless of what that gutter looks like, the easier it is for me to ignore it. Conscience begins to negotiate us away from the problem. Phrases like ‘get a job’ or ‘they’ll spend it on drugs’ flood our minds and silence the conviction of Christlike compassion. Compassion moves us toward the pain. We empathize. We embrace. We encourage. We equip. That’s what Jesus did in the gutter, and we too must discover a way to provide a practical solution. To say ‘get a job’ is to isolate the hurting person and make

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Christianity, and therefore Christ’s claims, more unbelievable. “Jesus met physical needs before He asserted a spiritual answer, and if we are supposed to think and act like Christ, we will ask, ‘What is the best way for me to address the needs of this person God has allowed to cross my path?’

When we see people who are making wrong moral choices and are openly choosing sin such as drugs, alcohol, crime, or sexual promiscuity, we may feel justified in not doing anything to aid them because they brought their misery upon themselves and are getting what they deserve. Mart De Hann, President of RBC Ministries writes in one of his newsletters,

“We can make gods out of biblical accuracy, doctrinal soundness, and moral absolutes. To my deep regret, I have often been more concerned about being right than in showing the compassion of Christ to those who know how wrong they’ve been.”

The Book of James goes on to say: Listen, dear friends. Isn’t it clear by now that God operates quite differently? He chose the world’s down-and-out as the

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kingdom’s first citizens, with full rights and privileges. This kingdom is promised to anyone who loves God. And here you are abusing these same citizens! Isn’t it the high and mighty who exploit you, who use the courts to rob you blind?

James 2:5,6 (The Message) God doesn’t disqualify the poor so we shouldn’t either. Inside, that person who dropped out of high school could be a great leader. Inside, that drug addict could be an incredible pastor. Inside, that homeless man could be an incredible peacemaker and agent of healing. Why not take the time to find out? If we will stop judging and labeling, the scales will fall off of our eyes and we begin to see all people, rich and poor, the way that God sees them - full of potential and precious in his sight. In fact, maybe they can teach us a thing or two about being “rich in faith” (James 2:5).

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Chapter 3 “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.”

Mother Teresa

Our home in Elizabeth

The Welcome Wagon After finally selling our house, we looked at a lot of houses around Elizabeth to buy. Some of them were

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downright scary to visit, much less think about living in. Finally we decided on a one-hundred-year-old house in Elizabeth just four blocks from downtown and the New York City Relief base. For four months we lived in my parent’s house while renovations were done to our “new” house. I decided that it was a good idea to get a security system for our new home, and I was right. The same day that I had someone take a look at the house to give me an estimate, someone broke in at night and stole almost everything we owned that was of any value. Our things were all being stored in the house while we were waiting for the renovation to be completed. My most precious losses were my bass guitar I had played for the last sixteen years, a fretless bass, my effects gear and my Fender Stratocaster I had played for the last ten years. This was a real blow emotionally to our family and we felt very violated. Before we even had a chance to move in, someone had invaded our space and pawed through our personal things. The insurance money covered the items stolen but, not the fear and concern we had concerning future break-ins. After we finally did move into our house, someone else tried to break in one night and the alarm went off, scaring away the perpetrator.

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My beautiful wife Tracy

Tracy describes some of these freaky events: “Sunday night, late, Juan is unloading his guitar amplifier out of the car to bring in our house. I heard a man talking outside in our driveway to him. Knowing that no one in this neighborhood would approach and talk to anyone without wanting something, I felt he may be in trouble. I walked outside on the front porch to make the presence of a 2nd person known. The man was a homeless guy who rides a bike and yells out on the street a lot as well as pretending to know me even though he doesn’t. ‘You know me’, is the 1st thing he yells out, ‘I see you driving in your car in and out of your driveway all the time.’ He is overly friendly, loud and invading our space to the max. He then grabs Juan’s super heavy guitar amplifier and starts to head toward the house. ‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’, Juan says as the stranger continues onto our front porch. (Still a little Oklahoma in that boy!) “Oh, I am just going to help you out here and carry this into your

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house for you” the homeless man says as he plows forward, headed toward our front door. I sidestepped in front of him one foot in front of the door and said with the most authoritative voice I could, ‘You can set that down right here.’ He backed down immediately. Something in my face and voice said I was a mama bear with cubs inside and one more inch would have been big trouble from the big mama! He kept talking his talk for a bit and asked us for some money. I offered him food instead. Not interested in food, he headed down the street talking to himself. I really believe he would have run away with the amp if he hadn’t realized upon picking it up that it weighed a ton! This is an account of incident number 1 of 3 this week here on the home front. “Incident number 2 was at 5:40 in the morning. Still dark, the wailing alarm of our home security system yanks us out of bed in combat mode. Juan runs to the 2nd floor hall to check the system to see where the break-in occurred and if the motion sensors are detecting movement in the house. I am answering the phone with the security company assuring me the police are on their way. Juan heads downstairs with a baseball bat to the living room because the security system tells us the living room window had been jimmied open. The police arrived within minutes. “3rd incident, we had a training meeting on how to lead small groups in our living room at 4:00pm Sunday afternoon. Twelve of our new church leaders listened to Juan teach as I cared for the children on the 3rd floor in River’s room. Two women who don’t speak English enter the front door and say to the

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group, ‘Tracciiieee? Tracciiee?’ The women were directed upstairs to me. Well, on the 3rd floor I saw someone peeking through the crack of River’s door so I opened it and it was an unfamiliar face standing in my hallway. ‘Crissstieeeee? Tracccciieeee?’ I couldn’t understand, 3C? Ahhhhh, I got it. ‘Oh no’, I said, ‘this is not a boarding house, there is no 3C. This is my home and you have to go now.’ I led her downstairs with the children in tow. The other woman was in our playroom looking around on the 2nd floor. It took a few minutes to make them understand but finally they did and were very embarrassed for barging into a private home and looking in all the rooms for 3C. I wonder if they were for real or checking out the house for a future robbery. So, it is hard to sleep at night sometimes. Jumping at every sound, and there are plenty around here. So please, please pray for our safety, our home, and my sleep! “

Tracy :)

This was an extremely difficult time. On either side of our block were bridges under which many homeless people lived and one block down were several abandoned buildings where more homeless people squatted. Most of them went on to attend our church. Surrounding our home were boarding houses where many prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts lived. Tracy couldn’t sleep at night and was jumping out of bed at every little noise. We lived on a very busy street with all kinds of people walking through our front yard sometimes yelling and cursing. Sirens blared and cars flew by, so there were lots of noises throughout the night. Sometimes we would hear

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gunshots. Tracy would battle fears of people breaking into our house and killing us for some time. For several months before the actual birth date of the church we were to start (CityTribe), Tracy, Anthony Mallamaci (a staff member at New York City Relief and friend), and I met and prayed for the church to come. We brainstormed, dreamed, prayed and ate lots of pizza during these meetings. We first planned on having the church meet in our house, but the more I met our potential churchgoers, the more I could see that was a bad idea. Having people who were addicted to alcohol, cocaine or heroin milling about my house where my small children lived didn’t seem wise. The facts were that many of our target audience were criminals, ex-cons and prostitutes. We decided to hold our meetings down at the New York City Relief base, formerly known as The Hope Center. The Hope Center was the headquarters for The Relief Bus, but there was much ministry that went on there weekly that greatly impacted the community. Throughout the week people come in to get placement in a detox, or a drug or alcohol rehabilitation program. Every Saturday, a food pantry, known as Matthew’s House, gave out groceries to struggling families. Christian 12-step meetings met there to assist people in their recovery from addiction. Many people dropped in just to talk and to hear a kind word. In many ways it was the ideal location to plant a church because of the wonderful reputation it had in the community.

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Our family in front of the headquarters of our new assignment

Anthony and I took a room at the base being used for storage and cleared it out. We disassembled large shelves, moved many cans of food, boxes of clothes etc. into the warehouse next door. We cleaned out and even powerwashed the very dusty, dirty room. I had several mission teams participate in helping us to prime and paint it. We painted it a light tannish brown to get a tribal feel. We named the new church CityTribe. Then we put our many fliers into the surrounding community.

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Tha Tribe Is Alive! The Foursquare denomination agreed to back Tracy and I as church planters after we went through an assessment and Church Planting Institute. It was

great to have an organization behind us that believed in us and was there to support us in our adventure.

When the first Sunday night service finally happened, we didn’t know what to expect. What I really expected was hardly anyone to show up- maybe five people. The amazing thing was that twenty-nine people showed up that night and the numbers grew each week. Several months later God graciously blessed us with an incredible sound system. The addition of a sound system meant that we could now play music! Being a songwriter for years, this was extremely exciting for me. I wrote original songs just for CityTribe and decided I’d go ahead and write all our songs. Why not? I had a vision for worship music that was different and felt urban. I wanted music that all ethnic groups could appreciate and not just white folks. I dove into writing reggae, latin, hip-hop, rock and dance music with a passion. Because I didn’t have many musicians, I used computer

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software to produce tracks that had all the sounds that I lacked people to play live. Then we played guitar, bass and keyboard over these funky tracks. The more I got to know my new town, the more God began to give me lyrics about the city and for the city of Elizabeth. We began to sing prophetic lyrics such as, “We’re taking back the city!” and we believed it too. Our theme song, Tha CityTribe Vibe laid out our vision: “Tha tribe is alive, alive is tha tribe. Everybody keep it real, cause that is tha vibe. From the time you arrive you belong at tha Tribe, God is here, it is clear with his arms open wide. Come unwind, speak your mind. You will find God in time. You can feel Jesus now. There’s his love, look around.” One of our intimate worship songs, Elizabeth, spoke hope into the streets: “Elizabeth look and see, deliverance is at hand. Death is on your doorstep, but I still have a plan, for hope and a future. It’s time to take your stand. Join the King of outcasts. He’s taking back the land.” The Spirit of God moved so powerfully in our times of worship that we saw homeless men on their knees, tears streaming down their faces crying out to God. One man yelled out during the quiet moment after we concluded worship, “That’s deep!”. Afterwards he explained how much the time of worship had meant to him and how he had cried a lot, but “it was a good kind of cry”. It was my favorite time of the service because we had the privilege to give the greatest riches that we had, God’s presence, to those who were the poorest and most in need.

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Here’s Tracy’s description of our adventure that she wrote in one of our newsletters: “Well, we have been living here for over a year now. So much has happened. So much is happening. A taste of the city is at your lips, take a sip: “A Taste: Last night, CityTribe, (our funky different church we pioneered/planted 6 months ago) was pumping as I walked through the black curtains into our “sanctuary”. Rewind: I drove down dark streets filled with warehouses and abandoned lots. Trash was piled on the curbs and the homeless were hanging out on the corners. An old brown sofa, torn, sat by the sidewalk where the dealers make themselves at home. Once upon a time I would have traveled with fear and much caution as I approached New York City Relief, at night where our church is located. But today is a different day. I drive happily talking to River and Hailey my oldest daughters as we finish up our $1 Chicken Nuggets for dinner and laugh and joke about who knows what. We hop out of the car laughing and singing as we get strange looks from tough men striding by, who wonder what these white, blonde girls are doing smiling so big and acting so free in such an oppressive place. We always seem to stick out quite a bit here. We walk towards the white and red building that has a sign that shouts the word HOPE in big bold black letters. I walk in to be greeted by Steve. He is our security man who has a team of guys trained and ready to handle ANY situation. He goes to our new bible

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school, East Coast School of Urban Ministry. He is a “union Guy” who used to be a bouncer at a strip club before he became a Christian three years ago. He smiles and welcomes me as I ask him to leave the door open in the front because it is finally getting warm around here. Right on my heels a handsome Hispanic man enters with a flier and says, “Is this the right place?”. He got one of our church fliers after getting free soup and bread at The Relief Bus at their Thursday location in Elizabeth and wanted to come check it out. The music was pumping as I entered the black curtains.

A night of worship at the Tribe! “Best Service @ Citytribe: Last night, the message was about being tattooed on the palms of God’s hands. One of our leaders was preaching and she had everyone raise their hand if they had a tattoo. 75% of the group raised their hand

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and then were lifting their shirts or pants legs to show them off as everyone ‘ohhhhhed’ and ‘ahhhhhed’ and clapped! You know, a typical church service (Just kidding! Ha!). Sixty five people were there around small candlelit tables. We had booming reggae style worship led by Juan with HUGE tie die and camouflage flags waving and the shofar blowing. Wild, baby. Wild! “Most disgusting experience: Out front of our home today I decided to pick up the trash that is strewn about in our postage stamp yard (a weekly task). Our lovely trash today consisted of a Wendy’s french fry carton, a few plastic bags, two vodka bottles, twenty-five cigarette butts, ten other misc. trash items as well as two lovely slightly used condoms. Oh the joys of city life!

The Galloways: (From left to right) Juan, Corban, Hailey, River, Connor and Tracy

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“How can your kids be OKAY Tracy? “Amazing, isn’t it? If I was reading these notes I would say – horrible! Who would live with their children in such an environment? Well, I guess about thousands and thousands do all around us. There are children pouring out in the streets here, so we fit right in with our big family. It is funny how everyone I meet thinks each of my children is from a different father! They just can’t believe I have been married to the same man for eleven years and have four children just from him alone (a very rare thing in these parts I guess). Anyway, River, Hailey, Corban and Connor are happy as clams. Home school provides tons of special time with them and they love checking out up to forty books at a time at the library for our month long studies on countries, states, presidents, plants, animals, historic events, and much, much more. They love to make friends with our neighborhood kids and are trying hard to learn Spanish so they can communicate with them better. They are more than okay, they are honestly doing just great.”

Tracy :) The Core Every CityTribe meeting started with music, but that wasn’t really the core of the night. Usually the core of most church services is the message, or sermon, which lasts an hour or more. The giver of the sermon is the pastor, who is a gifted speaker with a degree in theology. At CityTribe we started by having Tracy and I give all the messages with Anthony chipping one in once in a while. Tracy and I traded off speaking duties

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every other week. Over time we had more and more people come to volunteer and we put them to work. They handed out fliers, set up chairs, laid out food and especially loved on anyone who came through the door. In a year’s time we really only got these leaders together twice to “meet” and “strategize”. Our main plan was not to plan too much and not to create lots of work intensive programs. We were sick of programs. What we had set out to do was, to our surprise, working very well. People were coming to church who didn’t like church and having a fresh God experience instead of another dry religious experience. Eventually, our core team had thirty leaders who were all helping, but we didn’t want thirty helpers. We wanted to empower thirty new leaders to actually lead. Tracy laid out a bold plan where they would take over and run various aspects of CityTribe. Instead of the pyramid model, where the pastor was on the top with associate pastors underneath, elders, members etc. she laid out a model that looked like a big circle. The pastors were on the circle, but they were on an equal level with the setup team leader, the food leader, the flier team leader, table discussion leaders, etc. It was kind of like a big wheel and the center of the wheel was Jesus and we just tried to bring people closer to the center of the wheel. Part of this new plan was that each of our leaders would take turns bringing a message every week. To my surprise, they didn’t even blink and were ready to go for it! We had a few prerequisites for the message and they were:

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1. The message should only last fifteen minutes at the maximum

2. At least one scripture should be shared, but not more than two

3. A personal story about themselves to illustrate the message

4. At least one visual must be used and Powerpoint®

5. Create two questions for people to discuss around the tables afterwards

To my amazement, we had young and old people give some really great messages that were fun, powerful and most importantly NOT BORING. People from the streets really responded to these messages because the speakers were obviously just regular people like them and simply shared from their hearts. One of my favorite messages was by a girl in her twenties who through tears shared how she had made mistakes in relationships in the past and described how God’s grace had changed her life. Tracy tells about a great night at the Tribe: “Best CityTribe service yet! Round tables with black tablecloths had flickering candles and yummy desserts on each one. There were four or five people at each table with a leader at each one. Mark, an ex-addict, ex-prisoner rapped a song about Jesus that was pumping! Laurie, an ex-Satanist, ex-addict did a number on her guitar that felt like the 60’s in San Francisco. Juan did a drama where he played the man in the Bible that is a paralytic and has some guys carry him to Jesus and tear a hole in the roof to lower him before Jesus where his sins are forgiven and he

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is healed. Well, it was so great because Juan did this eight minute drama lying on a table as if he were paralyzed. He just moved his head as he acted out the whole scenario. It was hilarious and also very moving. He had Anthony powersaw through a door to give the sound effects of trying to get in through the roof. It was great. We have been praying for God to do miracles lately because we have become too “seeker sensitive”. These people need a REAL God to meet their REAL needs. We had an altar call and half of the room received prayer and were deeply touched by God. Two of the men gave their hearts to Jesus. Our light does shine brightest in the darkness!”

Tracy :) The messages were good, but that wasn’t the core of the meeting either. The main event was when we stopped listening to the message and started listening to each other. During the meeting, everyone sat around these little café tables where we had a cake cut up in the middle. On the refreshment table people could get all the coffee, hot chocolate or lemonade they could drink. Around these tables, businessmen and homeless men were the same. Young students and prostitutes could share equally the challenges and fears in their lives. Drug addicts and pastors could be real, pray for one another and struggle together. Everyone was treated the same. The real ministry happened around the tables. We did talk about the questions up on the Powerpoint® screen, but each week we happily went off of the subject to discuss what people really needed to talk about.

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There were many wild discussions around those tables that escalated into the supernatural.

Prayer around the table

Albert Nolan writes in Jesus Before Christianity,

“It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation and guilt. By showing them that they mattered to him as people he gave them a sense of dignity and released them from their old activity. The physical contact which he must have had with them at table (John 13:25) and which He obviously never dreamed of disallowing (Luke 7:38-39) must have made them feel clean and acceptable. Moreover because Jesus was looked upon as a man of God and a

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prophet, they would have interpreted his gesture of friendship as God’s approval on them. They were now acceptable to God. Their sinfulness, ignorance, and uncleanness had been overlooked and were no longer being held against them.”

Because people knew we were Christians, when we showed them acceptance and love, they felt that God loved and accepted them. This is the Word of God coming alive. We called this tabletop discussion time, “Keeping It Real”. We encouraged people to be themselves and not try to put on any airs to be accepted by us, because we were going to accept them just as they were anyway. They were free to share their opinions (right or wrong), fears, concerns, or ask questions. If they were Muslim, Jehovah’s Witness or some other religion we accepted them as they were and asked questions about what they believed. We encouraged them not to pretend to be something they weren’t for us Christians. So often people have to perform a certain way around Christians or they get a Bible beatdown. We gave them freedom to be themselves, because in that atmosphere we had freedom to be ourselves. We shared our testimonies, which didn’t just consist of our victories, but also of many of our failures and the grace we encountered as a result. In this way, we were able to extend grace. For some it takes much time before they feel safe enough to open up and

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expose the shame of their lives, but for many they just break immediately. One of the keys I find is that when I sit at a table and confess my own sins publicly each week and repent, it opens the others up to do the same. Once they see that I am willing to “keep it real” and expose my own shortcomings and character flaws, they can let down their hair and really share what is in their hearts. Charles Ringma quotes Henri Nouwen in Dare To Journey With Henri Nouwen,

“’Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.’ This model promotes the vulnerable leader. It elevates authenticity above power and influence. It points us away from ourselves as the source of life and to the One who is the Lord of life indeed. The problem with people is that they often have a fear of being open and vulnerable. They assume that strength, certainty, and ready answers are what others find attractive. They are generally wrong. Those who are searching for spiritual answers are usually at the transition points of their lives. They don’t want ready-made solutions. They want understanding, friendship, sensitivity, and the sharing of a faith that can speak about struggle as well as hope,

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questions as well as answers, and fragility as well as wholeness and strength.”

The neat thing about CityTribe was that instead of the pastor being the “star of the show” with all the focus on him or the leaders, the guy who walked in off the street becomes the most important person there. Everything was tailored towards the hurting, lonely, and needy. For many this was the only place that they mattered. They were used to being treated like the refuse of society, but we saw them as diamonds in the rough, God’s beloved. We gave them value and worth by treating them like true friends and equals, because they were. We asked for their opinion and asked them to pray for us. The response was amazing. One night a man who was drunk yelled out during the middle of my message, “Jesus isn’t the Son of God!” I asked him his name and after he responded I said, “Thanks for being here. We really value your opinion. You can share what you believe and we’ll share with you about what we believe.” After that he was satisfied to sit and listen until I finished and then talk during our table time. For a time, we had a “testimony time” called Going Public. Basically anyone could stand up and share what God was doing in their life. The first thing that they had to say was, “My name is ______ and I’m going public”. Everyone would scream shout and raise a ruckus in approval.

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Brian goes public

One of the other ways we gave people value was telling them how we needed help and asked if they would help out. Homeless people would show up early and set up the room, put out the food, pass out fliers, run the soundboard, run the Powerpoint® slides and sing on the worship team. Some of these people couldn’t hold down a job or be responsible enough to bathe themselves, yet here they were playing an important role in serving God. In the book Restoring At-Risk Communities: Doing IT Together & Doing It Right, Bob Lupton, Peggy Lupton and Gloria Yancy state,

“We are finally beginning to realize that programs do not fix communities. Only neighbors can do that.”

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In Urban Ministry- The Kingdom, the City & the People of God, Conn and Ortiz write,

“This is often difficult for the church because we are fearful of working with non-Christians.”

We had a major breakthrough in CityTribe when we began to link arms with non-Christians to reach the community. We wanted the non-Christians to have a relationship with Jesus eventually, but didn’t feel that we had to wait for them to have that relationship to begin working for God. As we began working together for God, we believed they would come to know God. Conn and Ortiz continue on to say,

“As you move into the community, recognize that the people are image bearers of God. They are alienated from God and need the Lord greatly. But they have much to offer you. This is God’s grace in mission. Begin to take note of their skills and resources. Too often we are blind to community members’ gifts because we are task oriented and not people related. We want to get the assignment under way and see it completed as soon as possible with minimal frustration and financial cost.” “Vulnerability is not an academic exercise taught at a seminary. It is that quality of spiritual life that allows us to

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come into community not as the savior but as the servant of the Savior. Today we embark on this process by learning dependence on others. We are weaned from the strong individualism that is promoted in many of our institutions- the idea that we can do just about everything. We develop a spirit of community and reliance on others.”

Jimmy Ponytail and John Corenti making lemonade for the Tribe

This sums up a lot of my warped thinking from the past that I still battle with today. When are people

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ready to serve God? When they quit smoking, cursing or committing crimes? I always thought that people had to prove themselves holy through years of church service to prove their eligibility. This kind of view becomes very exclusive. This is not to say that we should thrust people into positions of leadership to influence others when they are obviously tools of the enemy. This is where discernment comes into play. Fortunately for us, God began to organically just take over at CityTribe and people began to go ahead and love on other people whether they were “holy enough” or not. As my father has wisely taught me many times, “God is interested in the process, not just the product.” One woman that really impacted my life was named Bonnie. She was a drug addict and prostitute. I remember her walking in the door of the building. Her body was skeletal and she had open sores on her face. My friend Karen Storz cleaned and bandaged her wounds. Bonnie came to CityTribe regularly and began helping to clean up afterwards. She grabbed a broom or mop and went to town. When someone offered to do that for her she said, “No, this is what I can do for the Lord.” In the midst of a damaged life that looked hopeless, Bonnie wanted to serve the Lord NOW. I never forgot that. It was like the widow’s mite. Bonnie gave what she was able to give. One of the most amazing manifestations of the Holy Spirit was when the poor and homeless gave money. We would pass the bucket around and they would pour change out of their pockets or put in the few dollar bills they had into the offering. This was

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humbling and moving. Many didn’t even know Jesus yet, they just knew they liked what was happening and felt loved. Their generosity and willingness to give was fruit of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. Some people say that you can tell what you worship by what you invest in, spend time, money and energy on, and by that which you think about the most. It was obvious from the outer manifestation that God was doing something in their hearts. Another area of flawed thinking in my life concerning ministry has been my tendency to try and “do everything myself so that it can get done right”. Or if I’m not doing it myself, I need to check up on every detail of the job someone else is doing. This is obviously being controlling and really stifles people. It keeps the whole decision-making process running through me, which limits everything. We were continually learning to tell people to go for it and learn from your successes and mistakes. We wanted to be experimental and take risks because the greater risk is not taking any risks and getting stuck. People’s faith thrives when there is risk involved. If there isn’t any risk, why do we need to have faith in the first place? Erwin Raphael McManus states in The Barbarian Way,

“For the Spirit of God to unleash dreams and visions within our souls, we must become free to risk and to fail. Every conversation to be had with God challenges the boundaries of our imagination.”

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Community In Theirs Is The Kingdom- Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America, Robert D. Lupton describes his revelation on entering into community with the poor as required in the Kingdom of God,

“I came to the city to serve those in need. I have resources and abilities to clothe the ill-clad, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless. These are good works that our Lord requires of us. And there is blessedness in this kind of giving. But there is also power that allows me to retain control. My position as a helper protects me from the humiliation of appearing to need help. Even more sobering, I condemn those I help to the permanent role of recipient. “When my goal is to change people, I subtly communicate: Something is wrong with you; I am okay. You are ignorant; I am enlightened. You are wrong; I am right. If our relationship is defined as healer to patient, I must remain strong and you must remain sick for our interaction to continue. People don’t go to doctors when they are well. “The process of “curing“, then, cannot serve long as the basis for a relationship that is life producing for both parties. Small wonder that we who have come to the city to “save” the poor find it difficult

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to enter into true community with those we think needy. “I need the poor? For what? The question exposes my blindness. I see them as weak ones to be rescued, not as bearers of the treasures of the kingdom. The dominance of my giving overshadows and stifles the rich endowments the Creator has invested in those I consider destitute. I overlook what our Lord saw clearly when he proclaimed the poor to be especially blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20). I selectively ignore the truth that monied, empowered, and learned ones enter his kingdom with enormous difficulty. “The community into which Christ invites us is one of interdependence. We are called to mutual sharing and the discovery of gifts Christ has concealed in the unlikeliest among us. And to those who consider themselves leaders, our Lord offers humility—the salvation of the proud that comes from learning to receive from the least, who are the greatest in the kingdom.”

In the past missionaries going to foreign lands would train native born peoples to forsake their culture and customs completely to follow Christ. In “westernizing” them they robbed them of the richness of their culture,

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while believing that they were simply freeing them from hedonism. The truth is that God exists in every culture. Learning to embrace God in other cultures is discovering new aspects of God that you previously didn’t even know existed. Many of the values held sacred in various cultures are key biblical values as well. Such as: community, family, hospitality, generosity, artistic expression, strong work ethics, etc. One of the reasons people responded so well to ministry at CityTribe is that they weren’t just on the receiving end of charity when they came. They were part of a loving community where they had something worthwhile to give too. Doing community also sometimes means suffering together and not always trying to solve problems and “fix” people. It’s typical for people coming into the inner city to serve the poor to be initially exasperated by all the problems in people’s lives that they can’t fix. Rob Bell describes his own experience in Velvet Elvis,

“Suffering is a place where clichés don’t work and words often fail. I was at lunch last week with a friend who is in the middle of some difficult days, and I don’t have any answers. I just don’t. I can’t fix it for him. I’ve tried. And we sat there and talked and ate, and I let him know that I’m in it with him. It isn’t very pretty and it isn’t very fun, but when we join each other in the pain and confusion, God is there. Sometimes it means we sit in silence for awhile, not knowing what to say. And it is in our suffering

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together that we find out that we are not alone. We find out who really loves us. We find out that with these people around us, we can make it through anything.”

SOAP BOX MOMENT Enter the Rejected Are there certain types of people that we don’t associate with due to their dangerous lifestyle, unpredictable behavior or just different appearance, mannerism, politics or philosophy? The chronically poor, homosexuals, those who are diseased or disfigured, immigrants (legal or illegal), those not fluent in English, someone of a different race, criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers, ex-cons, the homeless or the mentally ill? How did we determine that people who fit in these categories were unfit for our company? How did they become outcasts in our minds and unfit for conversation, interaction and friendship? Who are the people we deem acceptable to associate with? Those who are living holy lifestyles, pursuing education and a profitable career? Charles Colson writes in Loving God,

“The moral worth of a society, the prophets declared, is measured not by

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life in the palace but by life in the streets. To know the all-powerful God one must know the powerless.”

Common wisdom says that we need to surround ourselves with positive people pursuing positive goals. “It’s all in who you know”, is a phrase that tells us we can get ahead in life if we have relationships with key people in positions of influence and power. There is much to be said for this, but what about the other people? “Oh, they are losers who could just drag us down.” We wouldn’t say anything that harsh out loud, but let’s search our hearts and think about that for a minute. Does being a “responsible adult” mean that we perceive those who aren’t like us as being rejects or failures? In Acts 15, the Jewish believers had to face the fact that God was inviting outsiders into their world: people of different ethnicities, different religious upbringings and who had questionable backgrounds. There was a big debate over whether or not to accept these “stained saints”. Would they corrupt the faith? The typical Jewish requirement for those who wanted to convert to their faith was to have them follow the law, which included following an exhaustive set of rules concerning every area of life. If they followed these requirements, then they were acceptable. The Jews took it for granted that this was God’s way too. What they didn’t understand was God’s grace. What kind of religious rules do we impose on people before we allow them entrance into our inner circles? Do

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people have to be making all the right moral and ethical choices for us to extend the olive branch? Peter pointed out that it was not keeping rules that made anyone acceptable to God, but sheer grace. That includes all of us as well. Even while trying to pursue righteousness, we are huge failures, yet Jesus accepts us wholeheartedly. If we can remember that we too were outsiders and losers, then we will be much more willing to accept others. If we accept ourselves, then we have to accept them, because we’re all in the same boat. Instead of moving up socially in the world and aspiring to meet and know all the right people, Jesus tells us to go in the opposite direction: When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and repayment come to you. But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

Luke 14:12-14 This portion of scripture is NOT a parable. We are actually supposed to take this verse literally and do exactly what it says.

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Who will you invite to your next dinner party or get together? Think about inviting someone outside your normal circles. Consider inviting someone who is Muslim, Mormon or into the New Age movement. Consider inviting a homosexual, an unwed pregnant mother, a mentally challenged person or someone with lots of body piercing and tattoos. Consider the outcast. Jesus invited the outsiders in, will you? Craig Gross writes in The Gutter- Where Life Is Meant To Be Lived,

“As Christlike people, unless we have gone to the gutter, we have not fully understood His purpose, nor fully embraced His plan for mankind. His plan is to make real love available to any and every person who would want it. If you haven’t gone to the gutter, you haven’t gone fully to Christ. After all, those in the gutter are the ones He called family, and the gutter is where He called home.”

I’m sure that this might sound threatening to you, especially if you’re not involved in mercy ministry. This could be unsettling, because you have probably begun walking out biblical principles in your life, are being a nice, responsible person and don’t need more stuff to do. After all, you go to church, are trying to be a good parent, employee, and citizen and don’t need any hassles. Believe me, I hate to rock your boat and I totally relate, because I have felt the same way myself. However, the Spirit of God and the Word of

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God are provoking us to more. The Bible is a very provocative book, and that’s a huge understatement. In Loving God, Charles Colson writes,

“The Bible kept revealing to me God’s compassion for the hurting and suffering and oppressed; His insistent Word demanded that I care as He does.…it was the Bible that called me into fellowship with the suffering.”

Tim Keller, pastor of the renowned Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, NY writes in Ministries of Mercy, The Call of the Jericho Road,

“The parable of the Good Samaritan is nothing if not provocative. To begin with, it is a reverse trap. A law expert sought to trap Jesus into saying something derogatory about the Law, but Jesus showed him that the Jewish leaders are the ones who do not really keep the Law at all. Our Lord attacks the complacency of comfortable religious people who protect themselves from the needs of others. The points he makes are no less shattering to us today, and his teaching instantly raises many questions. “First, there is the question of the necessity of mercy to our very existence as Christians. We must not miss the fact that this parable is an answer to the

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question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds by pointing the law expert to the example of the Good Samaritan, who cared for the physical and economic needs of the man in the road. Bear in mind that Jesus was posed the very same question in Mark 10:17 by the rich young ruler. There, too, Jesus concludes by saying, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor” (v. 21) It appears that Jesus sees care for the poor as part of the essence of being a Christian.”

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Chapter 4 “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

John F. Kennedy

Homeless man enjoying a cup of soup at The Relief Bus

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Busload of Philosophy The Relief Bus outreach that my parents Richard and Dixie Galloway started as a result of divine inspiration revealed to them through Isaiah 58:6-12. The strategy that The Relief Bus uses to help people is smart and it works. Here is an idea of why and how it works: (Hey you -the reader. This is the cold intellectual section, so look out, you folks who don’t normally make it all the way through a book. Yes, you. This next part might make smoke come out of your ears and cause your brain to hurt, but hang in there, there’s more wild stories and hijinx later on. You scholarly types, however, may think that this is the most important and stimulating part of the book.) In Urban Ministry- The Kingdom, the City & the People of God by Harvie M. Conn and Manuel Ortiz, they state Maslow’s hierarchy of human motives, which lists these seven common human needs:

7. Aesthetic needs 6. Desire to know and understand 5. Need for self-actualization 4. Esteem needs a. self-esteem b. esteem from others 3. Love and belongingness needs

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2. Safety needs 1. Physiological needs In The Contagious Congregation: Frontiers in Evangelism and Church Growth, George G. Hunter points out,

“Maslow’s basic point in his theory is that all seven of these needs are intrinsic to human personality—but not all of them are center stage, in the forefront of consciousness, and currently motivating a person’s life. The need that is in the forefront of consciousness and that is currently motivating the individual will be the lowest need that is basically unfulfilled. “For instance, the basic, rock-bottom human needs are physiological—nutrition, elimination, sex, sleep. If these needs are not met, a person spends most of his time in an attempt to fulfill them; and until these physiological needs are met, he ignores his other needs that are present in the background of his personality. In wartime, when people are starving and homeless, they do not expend much energy asking philosophical questions or painting landscapes.”

Tim Keller writes in Ministries of Mercy, The Call of the Jericho Road,

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“It takes the illumination of the Holy Spirit to understand that the deepest need of the human heart is fellowship with God. But anyone can recognize in themselves and others the need for food, clothing, medical treatment, or human friendship. So we see that the needs are perceived or “felt” needs. “It is crucial to understand that these ‘felt’ needs are the door to core needs. In fact, Charles Kraft believes that felt needs are the basis of communication. “The process of communicational interaction on the basis of felt needs commonly results in two ongoing processes. First, certain of the original felt needs get solved. Then, deeper needs, which were originally not in focus in the interaction because they were not perceived or because the receptor was not open about them, come to the surface.”

How We Do It At The Relief Bus we temporarily meet some of the most basic needs so that we can address some of the deeper needs that have been put on the back burner. First, the staff and volunteers offer food and clothing to meet immediate physical needs.

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Second, the presence of the bus in a neighborhood provides a comfortable, safe zone and temporary shelter or home. This is especially true for those who come inside the “office” area of the bus to get out of the elements. Outside of the bus, through the one-on-one connections that are made, we are then able to get past the masks to people’s hearts. Through friendship we begin to meet some the esteem needs. They feel approved of, not judged. Then the issues that they have been hiding come to light: emotional wounds, addiction, etc. Third, we try to meet their need for love and belongingness. While they may have no group to belong to on the streets, they are heartily welcomed when they arrive at The Relief Bus. Many people will stay with us for the entire four hours that we are there during an outreach day. Prayers are prayed, love is demonstrated, relationship is established and trust is built. The love they have experienced in the past may have been very flawed due to abuse or exploitation from friends and families. Experiencing unconditional love in an accepting environment is very impacting, as some have never experienced this before. Walking through the door of meeting the love and belonging needs allows us to meet the esteem needs which many times are crippling them. The

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lack of belief in their own self-worth and feelings of powerlessness to escape negative situations such as poverty, unemployment, and addiction breeds hopelessness and despair. When people are resigned to their dismal state of affairs and give up, then they become truly trapped in their minds. Self-respect and dignity are chiseled away until what are left are shells of human beings. That is when people bottom out into the most self-destructive level. We give them esteem by expressing how much we value their friendship in a way that is not at all condescending. We endeavor to listen attentively to their thoughts, feelings and opinions. As we treat the poor and homeless like regular people they begin to feel human again. They start to believe that they are worth saving - to us and to God too. I mean saving in every sense, not just spiritual. I am not saying that we ourselves become their saviors, but in many ways God works through us to rescue them from death, prison, hunger, homelessness, addiction, etc. Meeting the esteem needs allows us to begin meeting their needs of self-actualization - answering questions such as “Who am I? Why am I here? Why do I exist?” Meeting each need creates the space to start thinking about the deeper, more complex need. When living in survival mode, these kind of deep questions are pushed to the back burner and remain a mystery. In the immediate they only exist to make it another day and find any form of temporary relief.

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It is at this place of self-actualization that they can consider the person who created them, what his plans are for their lives, and discover how to enter into their divine destiny. For many people on the streets, addiction is a serious, life controlling issue that holds them captive. The Relief Bus connects many to detox and faith-based drug/alcohol rehabilitation and discipleship programs where they can walk down the long-term path of meeting their need to know and understand. In this environment they are taught how to live the Word of God and gain insight not only into themselves, but into the world around them—how it works, why people do the things they do and why systems succeed or fail. Things become clearer through this new lens of spiritual revelation. Finally, now that they know who they are, they can get to the point of meeting their aesthetic needs. When they see how they fit into the world and what their role is they can begin to think about what they like, their style, their taste in music, food, clothes and hair. As they walk in the fullness of who they were created to be, they begin to display their beauty on the outside as a reflection of their inner self that is now free. They can express in creative ways the depth of their souls. What Maslow doesn’t write is that God is everyone’s greatest need, and as this predominant need is met, through the spiritual growth process,

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each of the other needs is also met. How they are met is through the Holy Spirit and through Christ’s body functioning on earth. In most churches ministering predominantly to the middle and upper class of society, the most basic needs are already met to some degree. The average person has a home, food, a loving parent or parents, education, friends, and a job. The acceptance they receive and the productivity in which they operate seemingly fills much of their love, belonging and self-esteem needs. The average person has some sort of belief in God or a higher power and concludes something about their role in the cosmos, however correct or flawed it may be, to fulfill their need for self-actualization. The church typically comes in at this point to meet the need for understanding and knowing. Through educational, intellectual and philosophical lessons, the gospel is presented as the key to life with varying degrees of success. Very often these needs, which are assumed to be met, are really more of a house of cards that if nudged by stress or tragedy quickly falls apart and exposes holes in the person’s foundation. Most of society assumes their primary needs are met and obsess on meeting their aesthetic desires which can become a self-absorbing black hole. Those who are more aware of their needs are much more prepared to find answers for those needs because they are in less denial. When your

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whole life is a wreck, you find it more difficult to rationalize your poor choices, although some do try. Self-justification has much less ground to stand on when a person is in acute pain. I don’t mean to suggest that life is as neat and orderly as the picture I am painting with all these needs, but it is a good outline of reference for understanding the human condition. The role of the body of Christ should be to help seekers and believers escape the trap of focusing solely on their own needs and desires and look to meet others’ needs as well. As we seek first the Kingdom of God, our needs are met. Then as we seek to love our neighbor as ourselves we find great results for us too: emotional health, mental health, physical health, spiritual health and most important, glory is given to God as the source. The beggars learn to tell the other beggars where to find the bread and so the cycle is completed. Whew! That was a lot of big words and intellectual concepts, but we made it. Now on with our story.

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Becky Yuschak and our wild and fun CityTribe kids!

Kids’ Ministry and The Art of Improvisation Tracy describes our early children’s ministry experiences: “River and Hailey (our two oldest daughters) are the main members of our new CityTribe Kids’ Church that is held in our home three blocks from our new church. At eight and six years old, I am surprised at the compassion they have shown. You see, there is a woman in our church who walks with a limp with five kids in tow every week. Not only that, but three of them have developmental disabilities. Well, more than anything we wanted to help her with these children by getting them involved in our new kids’ church so she could have a break for two hours. “After being in our house just three minutes, the boy with autism threw Hailey down the stairs (she caught

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herself on the banister halfway down). Another boy tried to strangle River the same night as well as kick and pull hair. One boy picked up a 2x4 piece of lumber and swung it around the room. Even the teachers were scared - horrible things for any mother to hear. I was so worried about the girls. I ran up to their rooms as soon as I returned from church and heard the awful news. I talked with them both. I expected tears and anger and disappointment from the girls because they had been hoping for nice kids to come and play with them in kid’s church for a long time now. Their response was, ‘Mom, they are special. They just need the love of Jesus and healing in their minds. I’m okay, we will just need to teach them how to behave. They sure loved the music time!’ “I was relieved to see they were not permanently damaged in any way emotionally or physically from what I could tell. The next week we took a giant stride forward in our CityTribe Kids’ Church program and put limits on everything. For now, as we are starting out, we are just taking kids from first through fifth grades who are potty trained. This allowed our kids and the others to learn and grow in a safe environment. The children with developmental issues are now with their mom in service and sitting pretty quietly the entire time. Amazing.”

Tracy :)

Even in kids’ church we have found that “normal” children’s ministry structures and curriculum have not worked, so we have adapted to the children’s learning styles. It takes a lot of flexibility to be “all things to all men”, or in this case to be “all things to all kids.” We

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could try to force a typical suburban classroom model on them and frustratingly try to do things the “right way,” but we are learning to be flexible in ministry and be willing to go new directions and try new things. Coming from an extremely unstructured lifestyle into a highly structured classroom may be too much for some kids to handle. That’s not to say that we have no plan and like chaos. It’s a constant improvisational flow of listening to the Holy Spirit’s song so that we can harmonize with him. Sometimes it’s a more structured classical piece, but many times it’s a free flowing jazz piece that requires constant changes in rhythm and regular adjustments in tone.

Austin Bonds and Greg praying at The Relief Bus (Artwork by Bob Gherardi. www.gherardi.com)

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Greg Greg was waiting for a volunteer to get some hygiene products from The Relief Bus while he enjoyed some soup. He was having trouble holding his things and his soup, because of an injured arm. Austin Bonds, Director of Outreach for The Relief Bus, said, “We had to help him put his hand in his pocket to keep warm on this cold night before Christmas.” Greg has no control over his hand or fingers on his left arm, in which the muscle is all gone. Greg sustained this injury after hitting a guardrail going 120 mph on a motorcycle. The medical professionals could not believe that he was still alive after a wreck like this. As Austin talked to Greg, he learned that Greg had gotten clean from drugs for a year and a half, right after his accident. Greg has two daughters that he is trying to support. It is difficult because the only income that he has is a monthly disability check. He rents a room from a family member, but is concerned about living there because of the drug activity that is going on. Austin said, “We were able to get him hygiene products for himself and his daughters, a children’s Bible for the girls, as well as Christmas stockings for them that a school had donated. He started to cry as he was feeling so blessed and uplifted.” Austin was able to pray with Greg that day and he received Christ. Austin said, “We were able to encourage him with the scripture, ‘Come to me you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Greg seemed to be longing for that rest.”

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Freddy Behind the building I work in called The Relief Center was an old boarded up, abandoned house. Inside that house was found the body of a friend of mine, a Haitian homeless man named Frederic Desir, a man I saw almost every day on the way to work. His body had begun to decompose and when the police found him, maggots had started to infest the corpse. What I remember about Freddy is that whenever I said hello or stopped to talk he always greeted me with a big warm smile like an old friend. Freddy was thirty-six years old and always wore a jacket covered with basketball team logos. He used to live in his brother’s basement, but was kicked out because he refused to quit getting high. Freddy ended up sleeping in cars or abandoned buildings at night, even through the bitter cold of winter. Of all the times I talked to him, I never encountered him sober. His eyes were very yellow and he was always intoxicated. This really impacted me, because although I know many alcoholics and addicts, none that I knew were drunk or high all the time. I wondered what it was like to be so young and yet live constantly in a drug or alcohol induced haze. What caused him to want to escape from reality so badly? What was it about life that he couldn’t face? We don’t know much about Freddy except that he was some mother and father’s son. He was a fixture on the block. He stood in one of two spots: in front of a tiny Haitian record store or across the street, sitting on a concrete block. Every time I drove by or walked by, there he was. For about a month I didn’t see him

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and thought it quite odd for him to be missing because he was always there. I tried to imagine what it would be like to stand in the same spot for eight to ten hours at a time doing nothing.

This is the abandoned building where Freddy died Freddy used to come to our church, CityTribe, regularly. Most of the time he would sit down, make himself comfortable and doze off. Everyone there showed him lots of love and I got to pray for him many times. One night I asked him to come into my office so we could speak one-on-one. I was very concerned for him. I asked him if he would like to give his life to Jesus and he said yes. I prayed with him, yet felt sad because I wasn’t sure if he was sincere in his prayer because he was in such a fog. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, or was just praying because I

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asked him to. Freddy was such a friendly guy that he probably would have done anything I asked him to. After we prayed I asked him if he would like a change in his life, to be free of drugs and alcohol and get off the street. He nodded in agreement and I implored him to come in the next day to talk to a drug counselor so that we could try and get him into a detox or rehab. As far as I know, he never did. Now I wonder if I should have done more. I thought several times of taking him out to lunch, but never got around to it. Maybe there would have been a breakthrough. I’ll never know now. Sometimes I am a little too direct when I talk to some of my homeless friends about getting some help and getting free of their addiction, but there is a reason. Freddy is not the first person I have known to die a drug addict. Sometimes I just have to look a man in the eye and tell him, “Let us help you out. I don’t want you to die out here.” I don’t want them to feel bad or ashamed about their situation, but I just don’t want them to die. In that same abandoned building in which Freddy had been found, a woman had been found raped and killed a year before. Thankfully, the building has since been torn down. Jesus came to help the most despised people in society. He came to help Freddy. We offered to hold a memorial service for Freddy at CityTribe and many of his family came from the Haitian community. Many of the friends he had on the streets came as well. We sang songs in Creole such as “Amazing Grace” and everyone who wanted to had

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a chance to share about Freddy’s life. Freddy’s ex-girlfriend and thirteen-year-old daughter, who we didn’t know even existed, showed up too. At the end of the service I gave a call for salvation and seven people raised their hands to give their lives to Jesus. Like many people, they had to face death up close before they would think about eternity. It was another example of how God can use such a tragedy to “turn around evil for good.” Later when Jesus was eating supper at Matthew’s house with his close followers, a lot of disreputable characters came and joined them. When the Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into Jesus’ followers. “What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and riff-raff?” Jesus, overhearing, shot back, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what this scripture means: ‘I’m after mercy, not religion.’ I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

Matthew 9: 10-13 (The Message) When will Christ’s body, the church, rise up to pursue his mission and his calling to reach the outcast, the sheep that went astray? Are we perfecting seeker sensitive, politically correct, entertaining and even spiritually powerful services that most sinners will never come to? Where and how did most of Jesus’

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teaching happen? It happened outside in the streets and countryside to the mass of poor peasants that made up the population. It’s interesting to think that as the church puts our energy into dynamic multimedia productions, Jesus simply spat in the dirt and rubbed the mud in someone’s eye. (Not that I don’t love a good multimedia presentation .) If we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we need to serve God by physically touching people’s lives.

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Chapter 5

“It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.”

Jim Grue

Homeless people being served by The Relief Bus in Brooklyn

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SOAP BOX MOMENT The Cry of The Poor The rich man’s wealth is his fortress, the ruin of the poor is their poverty.

Proverbs 10:15 While you and I don’t think of ourselves as rich, we can agree that we eat food each day and have a roof over our head. Most people who are homeless today were once just like you and I -- employed. Something happened that caused them to lose their job and that’s not all they lost. They lost self-respect, dignity and for some, the will to keep on living. Not only do they feel bad all by themselves, but society is there to heap on some more guilt and condemnation. The poor is hated (shunned) even by his neighbor. But those who love the rich are many. He who despises his neighbor sins, but happy is he who is gracious to the poor.

Proverbs 14:20

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How do you and I react to the poor as Christians? Do we shun them and avoid talking to them? Are we afraid of the bother and messiness of a relationship with someone with complex problems? I know most of us want to do the “God thing” and help people, but when it come’s down to it, many of us are too nervous to engage. A friend of mine who is homeless described his descent into despair, “I was working for years making good money when I lost my job. I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I was devastated.” He went on to describe how within a short amount of time he lost everything and ended up on the streets. Drugs and alcohol became his only source of comfort. Through being engaged in his journey, I had the opportunity to be a better source of comfort in his life than booze and drugs. If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.

Proverbs 21:13 You may not audibly hear someone cry to you for help, but the empty eyes, the heavy shoulders and the downcast demeanor of the poor around you shout louder than words. Listen to that cry and you will hear the very heart of God as well.

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Our church actually flows out onto the street. Notice Karen Yuschak hugging a woman on the bottom right. Our

“smoking section” on the sidewalk was our sanctuary too Where There ’s Smoke, There ’s Fire During the warm months of the year, we actually had what we called a “smoking section” at CityTribe. We had huge garage doors on the side of the building that we opened up and put tables and chairs out on the street as well as inside. Those who wanted to smoke sat outside. We never asked them to do this, they just did it on their own. During the winter months, they simply got up and walked out the front door to smoke a cigarette and then come back inside. Many of our members smoked, but for some of them it is an incredible miracle that cigarettes was their only addiction, because in the past they may have shot up

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heroin for twenty years or smoked crack. They knew that there was freedom to come and go as they pleased and we put no requirements upon them. I remember overhearing a woman one night telling her friend in the middle of the service, “We can leave, they don’t make you stay.” I had never thought about the fact that some people feel forced to stay at church. That can’t be too inspiring. SOAP BOX MOMENT Food For Thought and Thought For Food Wherever you are and whatever you are doing right now, I have a question for you. Are you hungry? Imagine that you are very hungry, in fact you haven’t eaten all day. Imagine that your finances have been low and you haven’t eaten all week because you had to put all your money toward your rent. I am inviting you to come over to my house for dinner. I know things are rough and I’d like to help. When you arrive at my house I will surprise you by letting you know that you will only get to feast on the sumptuous dinner on the table after hearing a religious message that I will deliver over the next hour. If you won’t listen, then I’m sorry, but there will be no dinner for you. How do you feel? Does that make you upset, even angry?

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It has been common practice for many feeding ministries to require the people coming to eat to first listen to a sermon. Some famous missions have been practicing this for over 100 years. This is also done in some churches in my community. Although I honor these ministries that are fulfilling God’s mandate to feed the hungry, and thank God for their passion to reach the lost and hurting, I think we should rethink this method. Since CityTribe Church ministers primarily to the poor, I hear the way they feel about this strategy. A friend of mine named James told me that it makes him feel manipulated and worthless. He can’t understand why they treat him that way. He said that his heart would be much more open to the Gospel message if he was listening out of his own free choice, not because his stomach was grumbling and he listened only to obtain a meal and survive hunger. As I listened to his heart on the matter, I realized that his was a voice not being heard, simply because there weren’t many willing to listen. Another friend of mine who was homeless for a time believes that feeding programs should offer the Gospel as dessert after dinner, because it’s the best part of the meal. Are we taking advantage of people’s misery in order to manipulate them into hearing the Gospel? Why not just give them what they need and give an open invitation to hear preaching, get prayer or other spiritual help? Jesus speaks about it this way:

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Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.

Matthew 5:42 No mention of forced ministry is mentioned in this verse, it just says to give with no strings attached. We certainly wouldn’t hesitate to feed Jesus immediately if He asked us for food. Why put requirements on anyone else? When we do it “unto the least of these” we do it unto Jesus anyway. We should see ourselves as students and train ourselves to get inside the heads of people on the streets. One way is to start friendships with people on the streets, not just evangelistic discussions and witnessing. Who better to embrace and love the homeless, the poor and the outcast than us? Most are much more open to hearing about our faith once we extend care and concern for their lives. This is what we call friendship. To make a short story long, I’ll wrap this part up by saying that Jesus was a friend to the poor. I think that He would like us to be too. The greatest gift Jesus could give to the poor wasn’t money, it was himself. We can walk in his footsteps by giving money, food, and material things which they do need, but the greatest gift we can give the poor is ourselves. Like Jesus, we can fulfill the scripture in this verse:

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Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.

Luke 15:13 That doesn’t mean we have to die, but it does mean we have to spend ourselves on behalf of others the way He did. Talking, encouraging, sharing the word and yes, even feeding the way He did. Not only did Jesus break enough bread from five loaves to feed five thousand, his own body was broken to feed all humanity for the rest of history. Will your heart be broken for the sake of the poor? Can you give with such humility and even sacrifice for others? And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:3 Love isn’t an emotion or a feeling we have for the poor, it is the way we treat them, demonstrating compassion, concern and affection. Take a moment and ask Jesus, “How can I love the unlovable? What tangible action can I take to do what you did for me?”

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Chapter 6 I’ll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, “You’re nobody!” they’re calling you “God’s living children.” Romans 9:25,26 (The Message)

Marlyn and her son Ricky

Marlyn Marlyn Torres grew up and lived in Puerto Rico until she was nineteen years old. She faced hardship early

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as a child; dealing with her father’s death when she was seven-years-old. At the age of seventeen she faced death again in her family through the discovery of her fifteen-year-old brother hanging from a tree in her front yard, where he had committed suicide. Soon after, she married her first husband, and through him she contracted HIV. She divorced him a few months later, and moved to the United States, where she gave her life to Jesus and met the father of her two sons. At that time, Marlyn had no idea her first husband had given her HIV until her five-year-old son, Wilfredo became sick with AIDS. Fortunately, after more testing, they discovered that no one else in the family had been infected. Marlyn said, “It was horrible to discover that I was infected with HIV, but the most painful thing was to know that my baby was going to die.” Seven years later, after the death of her son, Marlyn separated from her second husband and began to suffer from schizophrenia. Marlyn said, “I heard voices that told me to destroy everything in my house. I believed that I was clearing demons out of my house by burning all my possessions, including my clothes, furniture and even my TV. I was not eating anything except for drinking olive oil in an attempt to cleanse all these thoughts from my mind.” Later, Marlyn started up a romance with someone on the internet, which eventually led to the man living with her and her son, Ricky. Marlyn was walking down the street in Elizabeth feeling very depressed when I met her at The Relief Bus. She told me the sad story of her life and I prayed

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for her to be healed of schizophrenia. The Holy Spirit touched her powerfully, and since that time she has been totally healed! I invited her to CityTribe Church, and she attended faithfully. Marlyn said, “I really felt at home at CityTribe because I’ve always had a compassion for the poor, and even cooked and fed Thanksgiving dinner to eight or nine homeless people in my apartment. Suffering schizophrenia has made me sensitive to others who are on the street who have mental problems. I also have a brother who was homeless and schizophrenic, so I could really relate to the people attending this church.” After attending CityTribe and taking some classes at East Coast School of Urban Ministry, Marlyn felt convicted about living with her boyfriend and decided he had to go. She went on to become a regular volunteer on The Relief Bus two or three times a week with Ricky, her son. Marlyn said, “I love The Relief Bus and connecting with people on the streets. I have been trusting God more and leading many people to the Lord.” One day on The Relief Bus, she led five people in prayer to receive Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. She also filled a vital need by ministering to people who only speak Spanish. Ricky, who’s 13, has opened up a lot since he started volunteering, and really became a hard working member of the bus team. Today Marlyn is married to a wonderful man of God who gave her the wedding of her dreams. Marlyn says, “If the Lord can heal me, restore me, and use me to help others, He can use you, too!”

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Creativity We did some fun stuff at CityTribe to get people involved. One week we had an art show and everyone brought paintings and drawings to display on the walls. We had everyone in the room paint a section of a big wooden cross we had made. It looked like it was made of stained glass when we were done, and it is still up on the wall.

Itana performing a worship dance

Another time, we had a photography show and passed out many disposable black and white cameras. The group took photos on the streets and brought back the cameras. I developed the pictures, blew them up, and framed them. The show was called, “Life on the Street”. It was a fascinating retrospective of real people living on the streets.

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I found packs of Uno® cards at the dollar store and bought a whole bunch of them. We had Uno games going at every table and people were having a blast. My buddy, Pastor Paul, told me that our church is unique because someone in the middle of your message somebody might yell, “Uno®!” We have had so many different skits, dramas, human videos, and dances at CityTribe, and the response is always enthusiastic. I think the fact that people would even go to the trouble of preparing these artistic expressions for them was just more tangible love. One of the coolest musical performers we had on a regular basis was Mark Aguilar, AKA Eternal Life. Mark would rap his testimony with such honesty and anointing that everybody loved it. The amazing thing was that this Phillipino-Panamanian-Irish guy used to live under a bridge a block from my house, and regularly used and dealt drugs. He even went to prison. Today he is in Bible college, works full-time and travels all over using Hip Hop to communicate the gospel.

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The CityTribe Band performed at our block parties- Yeeha! Hundreds attended these free block parties every year.

The Relief Bus would serve soup, and we all had a good time together.

DJ Caleb (Lee Brundidge) worships with flags in the street during our block party outreach with Radiant band in the

background

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One of our good friends, Lee Brundidge, AKA DJ Caleb, would come lead prophetic worship on the turntables. We would put on the disco lights, dance for God, rap a prophetic word, wave flags, blow the shofar, and it was on! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s okay. Just keep reading!

Former interns Anne Teppo and Eric Porter

Learning By Doing At New York City Relief, we had an internship program for many years. For several years I ran a school called East Coast School of Urban Ministry, but eventually went back again to the on-the-job-training model. Today, we have short-term missions experiences people can be a part of. People from around the world have come to serve on The Relief Bus for one to twelve months. They thought they were coming just to serve the poor, but encountered powerful life transformation themselves. It’s an intense immersion experience that accelerates growth. You might want to do some short-term urban

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missions yourself, so take a look at www.reliefbus.org to find out how.

After ten years of youth ministry, I had “peaked out” in many ways. My new life serving the poor in the inner city caused forced growth in my life spiritually, emotionally and as a leader. So many of the strategies I had used in suburban ministry just didn’t work in this new setting. So many of the preconceived notions and stereotypes that I had concerning the poor were smashed. My confidence in my own spirituality took a beating, as I realized how easily it was for me to judge rather than extend mercy. The religious clichés I parroted meant little to someone with no hope. I had to humble myself before God and ask for him to pull the scales from my eyes so I could see the hurting the way He did. He did just that, and my view of the world expanded as I saw life from “the other side”. My heart broke as I saw generations of family dysfunction, social injustice, and the devastating effects of the drug culture on a

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community. I also began to feel the heart of God like I had never felt it before. Cute Bible stories were not going to cut it here, and intellectual principles would not soothe anyone. Only ruthless faith in a real and living God would suffice. I entered a training ground that changed me forever. My faith was put to the test and, thankfully, was and is being refined in the fire. The fire is sometimes painful, but it burns up that which is unnecessary and leaves something that is pure as gold- the very heart of God himself. Charles Ringma writes in Dare to Journey with Henri Nouwen,

“Much of life is spent preparing for and gaining knowledge for future roles and tasks. And many of our educational strategies are based on the premise of learning first in order that we may do later. For some, this has resulted in much learning but little doing. For others, it has meant quite a deal of unlearning once they have experienced the real world. “Yet it should be obvious that many things are learned by doing. One learns to pray by praying, to serve by serving, and to love by loving. “This is important for spirituality. It can never remain simply at the level of ideas, liturgies, or dogmas. It finds its true identity in the reality of engagement and practical participation.

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“Nouwen hints at this. He writes, “The great illusion of leadership is to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.” Not only can we not look to spiritual guides who lack life’s difficult experiences or who have failed to make sense of them or acknowledge them, but we also need to walk our own desert experiences and learn from them. “Because spirituality does not embrace only an aspect of life, but all of it, all of life’s experiences become the testing ground for linking faith and practice. Thus, in being, living, doing, praying, serving, risking, loving, and participating, we are weaving a pattern for understanding our spirituality. “Spirituality can only fully develop when we include others and serve our neighbor. A spirituality that only knows “holy isolation” is most probably an illusion, and a spirituality that fails to serve others is more than likely self-indulgent. “True spirituality knows both the place of solitude and the cry of the world. It is concerned about self development but sees it occurring much more through

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serving another than through pampering the self.”

In Training Students for Urban Ministry: An Experiential Approach, John Edwin Fuder points out,

“Learning experiences in communities of need give a realistic perspective of disenfranchised subcultures and stimulate compassion for the city and its people. Attention must be given to training men and women within this education context in order to understand the dynamics of such diverse urban “people groups” as gangs, prostitutes, and the homeless and to help students develop effective ministry skills. Students must be challenged by face-to-face interaction with hurting people rather than mere cognitive input alone.”

Translation: Get your hands dirty doing the work Jesus did and you’ll catch the heart of God for the hurting.

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Chapter 7

"If you'll hold on to me for dear life," says GOD, "I'll get you out of any trouble. I'll give you the best of care if you'll only get to know and trust me. Call me and I'll answer, be at your side in bad times; I'll rescue you, then throw you a party. I'll give you a long life, give you a long drink of salvation!" Psalm 91:14-16 (The Message)

A man enjoying a cup of soup from The Relief Bus

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SOAP BOX MOMENT PARTY WITH THE POOR!

Jesus followed up. “Yes. For there was once a man who threw a great dinner party and invited many. When it was time for dinner, he sent out his servant to the invited guests, saying, ‘Come on in; the food’s on the table.’

“Then they all began to beg off, one

after another making excuses. The first said, ‘I bought a piece of property and need to look it over. Send my regrets’

“Another said, ‘I just bought five

teams of oxen, and I really need to check them out. Send my regrets’

And yet another said, ‘I just got

married and need to get home to my wife.’ “The servant went back and told the

master what had happened. He was outraged and told the servant, ‘Quickly, get out into the city streets and alleys. Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the

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misfits and homeless and wretched you can lay your hands on, and bring them here.’

“The servant reported back, ‘Master, I

did what you commanded- and there’s still room.’

“The master said, ‘Then go to the country roads. Whoever you find, drag them in. I want my house full! Let me tell you, not one of those originally invited is going to get so much as a bite at my dinner party.”

Luke 14:14-24 (The Message)

There is more room in God’s kingdom and He wants it full! If spoiled, rich, success driven folks don’t want to enter God’s kingdom because they prefer the spoils of their work to God, guess who we are supposed to bring to the party instead? We, the servants of God are told to go round up those who are the “failures” of society, the hungry, the homeless, the addict, and invite them to the best party going. That’s how God’s grace is. He doesn’t invite us to school classes, services or religious meetings, He invites us to dine with him and feast on his presence with no strings attached. Wow! We don’t get to come to the party because we earned it, are smart enough, or slick enough. It’s just free! One Christmas CityTribe threw two big Christmas parties for the poor and homeless, which is most of our congregation. We ate disgusting amounts of

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delicious food, sang Christmas carols with great gusto, gave out presents and had a blast. Even Santa showed up to help pass out the presents. So many of my friends from the streets were truly happy celebrating the birth of Jesus, that it was another reminder of what we’re here for and what life is really about. These verses from Luke come straight from Jesus’ mouth to our ears. How will you respond? How many people have you led to Christ in your lifetime? The only thing you will take to heaven with you is people. The question is, will you do that? The harvest is ripe but the laborers are few. It couldn’t be more clearly stated than in Luke 14:12-24 that as servants of God, we are to go and welcome in those who are on the bottom rung of society, the poor, and invite them to the best party there is, hosted by none other than God himself. Party on! When it comes to befriending the poor, no one does it better than my co-workers at The Relief Bus: Austin Bonds, Director of Outreach, and Steve Pastor, Outreach Team Leader.

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Austin Bonds

From Hillbilly Hell Raiser To Servant On The Streets I was born in Arkansas in 1977 into a very poor family. We lived in a shack with an outhouse out back and used a woodstove for heat. We were hillbillies, basically. My father grew marijuana for a living and had a large crop planted across the street from our house. At the age of four my parents divorced and I moved with my mother to Indiana. We soon moved in with her boyfriend who, like her, heavily abused alcohol. They would often get into physical fights. Eventually he became my stepfather. In Indiana we once again lived in dire poverty when my stepfather lost his factory job. He and my mother began to drink more and more. Smoking lots of marijuana was common in our home also. There was no electricity, heat or hot water at our house. My brother and I would sleep on the floor in between our dogs to stay warm at night. The cupboards were

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empty and I learned how to eat at school or over at friend’s houses when I could. It was tough being the poorest kid in school. My clothes were full of holes and I would get made fun of. I became the class clown and laughed along with the jokes, but inside it hurt and I felt like an outcast. At the age of 13 I went to a youth group at a local church and it was really a surreal experience. I couldn’t believe how nice everyone was and that they came there every week to have fun and follow God. One month later I decided to follow God too.

When I turned 16 my life began to fall apart as I hung out with the wrong crowd and started privately smoking and drinking. I got stoned on pot all the time and even went to church high. I have always been an extremist. I would drink alcohol until I would pass out. I would roll giant joints and smoke the whole things. At the same time, although my

parents loved me, I knew that I didn’t want to go down the same path of a becoming a habitual drug and alcohol abuser. At the age of 17, when it didn’t seem like things could get worse, my parents lost our house. I knew how to hustle for money doing various jobs outside of school so I rented my own apartment. As a senior in high school, my place became the party house. There was a constant stream of people bringing in acid,

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mushrooms, crack, cocaine, and lots of alcohol. When I was younger I was the one always getting made fun of, but now I was very popular and enjoying all of the attention. I lost my job and was too proud to ask anyone for help. While stoned out of my mind on acid I broke into a junior high school in a nearby town in hopes of robbing a safe. All I ended up doing was vandalizing the principal’s office and stealing some cheap junk. While walking home I came across a police officer who questioned me. I panicked and took off running. I hid in the neighborhood and would have easily escaped, but something strange happened. From my hiding place in someone’s back yard I felt the spirit of God literally pull me out into the middle of the street where I then laid face down. I was arrested and confessed everything because I realized that God had brought me there to come clean and get right with him again. I had just turned 18-years-old and was now facing 14 years in prison. I told God I was sorry and felt him tell me that this was

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my chance to turn my life around. I ended up serving only 5 months in jail. After being released I started attending college. One night I went to visit my mom and couldn’t get into her apartment building because it was sealed in police tape and the officers wouldn’t let anyone enter. I searched for her all over town, but couldn’t find her anywhere. I ended up going to check at the police station and found all my family members there which I thought was very strange. My uncle got to me first and told me that my mother had been murdered. I collapsed in tears and was filled with rage, screaming in the police station. I bawled for hours and was inconsolable. Weeks past and the police could not solve the crime. I went back to college, but was an emotional wreck with all kinds of feelings balled up in a knot inside of me. This tension was released as I prayed to God and forgave my mother’s murderer. I began to walk in a whole new level of freedom. While in college I met a beautiful girl who was a pastor’s kid and so pure. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me, but I knew she was the one for me! After some conniving on my part we started to date, fell head over heels in love, and eventually we were married. We became youth

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pastors back in Indiana and later in Arkansas as well. Eventually we had two handsome sons. I started my own business doing home inspections and working for a construction company for about 4 years, but knew that I was called to full-time hands on service for God. That’s when I made a connection with The Relief Bus, a mobile outreach to the poor and homeless. I now serve as an Outreach Director leading teams to help the poor all over the New York City metro area. I can relate to those who have been victimized, are in pain, abandoned, living in poverty, fatherless, on drugs, or have served time in prison. My heart breaks for people. I want to embrace them and befriend those who have no friends. This allows me to help connect people to vital resources. I also get the op-portunity to train volunteers on how to help others and help them understand what people are going through. I enjoy becoming a bridge from the church to the streets. Although I still have challenges in my life, God has blessed me with a wonderful family. He teaches me how to better serve them everyday.

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Steve Pastor

A Walk On The Wild Side My name is Steve. I was born in 1969 in South Amboy, New Jersey into a dysfunctional family. Tragically, my mother had a nervous breakdown on Christmas Eve when I was five-years-old. The experience was confusing and devastating to me as I was sent to live with my grandparents. I suffered terrible feelings of abandonment as my father worked two jobs and my mother was away in a hospital. At this young age the seeds of insecurity were planted deep in me, as I struggled with a learning disability and was bounced from school to school. Even when my mother returned, she was on heavy medication and very distant. The affection and comfort I needed wasn’t there and she wasn’t much a part of my life. She was filled with anxiety and as a result was overprotective and overly strict. It was very had for me to have friends to play with or even leave

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the house. There was much stress in my home because of my mom’s mental condition and our family’s financial troubles. I remember my father choking my mother and even putting a knife to his own throat, threatening to kill himself. In high school I began to walk on the wild side: getting drunk, smoking marijuana and getting into fights. My senior year I began working for an alcoholic, heroin-addicted gambler and became the chauffeur for his petty theft operation. I would drive my boss to New York to pick up stolen credit cards, which he used to buy merchandise that he could sell quickly. Then I would drive him down to Atlantic City to gamble away his profits. After graduation I entered the carpenter’s union and enjoyed learning and working in the trade for several years. Life seemed to be stabilizing, but then I began drinking and partying again. I was heavy into weightlifting and bodybuilding, and martial arts, which boosted my confidence. Unfortunately, this led to street fighting and road rage. I became addicted to violence. If someone gave me a bad look, I would beat them viciously. Even I was scared of what I was capable of doing to someone who crossed me. I began hanging out with people involved in crime who helped me fix my many tickets for driving

Senior High School photo

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violations. I even went into business with one of these guys and ran a used car scam. Along with this con man, I became a professional liar and even cheated senior citizens and the handicapped. At one time I was arrested for writing over twenty thousand dollars in bad checks to people, but got off because of our connections. I was on top of the world and felt bulletproof because I had money, drove expensive cars, had nice clothes and could get away with my criminal activities. During all of this I was heavily addicted to sex and pornography. Sex was like a drug to me. It was a release from the tension I felt and an escape. I had many girlfriends, but each relationship ended badly. I gave up on dating and just started using prostitutes. I was looking for intimacy, but always ended up with cheap, meaningless sex. I was filled with guilt and regret. I eventually went back to doing carpentry and was making a lot of money working overtime. I spent the money as fast as I made it, getting drunk regularly. Because I thought of myself as a tough guy, I began working as a bouncer at go-go bars and rock clubs. I ended that career after a huge man broke a bottle over my head, pulled my shirt over my head and stabbed me repeatedly with the broken bottle. Miraculously I jabbed him in the throat with two of my fingers and escaped with my life. What I remember during this time period is being lonely, empty and feeling like my life was being wasted. While on the picket line one day with the

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carpenter’s union, a fellow union brother began talking about Jesus. I mocked him and made some snide remarks but when my job ended this same man helped me get more work. While on the new job I began attending a Bible study that was held during lunchtime. I liked it and felt real peace when I was there. I started attending church and a home group where I grew closer and closer to God. This is when I made a commitment to Christ that changed my life forever. In my old life I thought I had influence and power, but it was actually totally false. I had lived a lie. Now I know my real purpose. I was created to follow and serve God. As part of this new life with God I decided to volunteer one day to work on The Relief Bus, an outreach to the poor and homeless. I got more and more involved over time, and today I work full-time as an Outreach Team Leader.

Now I am able to really have influence in people’s lives to find help and hope -- the same help and hope I found. Despite my

parents’ troubles in the past, they

celebrated their forty-year anniversary in 2000 and

Steve on the streets with The Relief Bus

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are fully supportive of me today. I am still a regular guy who is tempted by bad thoughts, but now I am not a slave to those thoughts. I am free and God is bringing me deeper and deeper in relationship to him in the midst of everything I go through. Now I am walking out a wild life that is really FULLY ALIVE with God. I finally found the intimacy I always needed and wanted with my best friend Jesus, the lover of my soul.

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Chapter 8 Do you think you can mess with the dreams of the poor? You can't, for God makes their dreams come true.

Psalm 14:6 (The Message)

Jim Berry and Anne Teppo praying for a man on

the streets of the Bronx with The Relief Bus

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Freedom What holds most people back from getting involved or trying new things is insecurity or fear that they will do something wrong. Some may have even experienced judgment, harshness, manipulation, or legalism at a church in the past and are afraid to plug in. An environment of freedom is something that we can create and reinforce constantly to make a safe place for people to find their calling and purposes in God. Freedom is an atmosphere that people can feel and opens up doors for God to move in many different ways. The Relief Bus is a place where everyone is a minister- even the pre-Christians. People who aren’t living for Jesus yet feel the positive vibe going on and see how people love each other and get pulled in. They begin to comfort, console, offer helpful advice, and even pray for one another. They become a part of the team and begin to share our core values, which are spiritual, just from coming in contact with us. It turns out that one of the best ways to lead people to freedom in Jesus is to have them serve Jesus and others even before they have made a commitment to Christ. We have had volunteers come and serve on The Relief Bus for many reasons. Some just want to participate in a charity and give back to the community, while others are volunteering to fulfill community service hours for school or a court mandate. I sat in a van next to such a volunteer named Michael, while driving to do outreach on the streets of the Bronx one day. I felt compelled to pray that God

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would touch him as he served. It was cold and miserable that day. We put up canopies to shelter people from the freezing rain while they enjoyed soup from The Relief Bus. This man had a smile on his face as he handed out soup all day. I knew I had to talk to him when we were done that day.

Michael and Nef serving hot soup on a cold day.

I sat down with Michael to ask him about the experience. He said that as we drove into the city singing worship songs and praying that he felt this energy flow through his body, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. He described it as an incredible, peaceful feeling. Michael went on to tell me that had been an alcoholic in the past and was now in recovery, trying to get his life back together. He really enjoyed volunteering that day and making a difference. I talked to Michael about how God had used him that day to help others, and

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asked if he wanted God to take over his whole life. Michael was ready and willing to make a change, and I had the privilege to pray with him as he dedicated his life to Christ. I gave him a Bible and pointed him towards a local church with faith-based recovery meetings. He was so happy to hear about them so that he could plug deeper into God. When you experience an atmosphere of freedom, you feel comfortable enough to take risks to serve God. You could be risking rejection, humiliation, or failure, but because you are free you just go for it because grace covers you.

Mark Anthony Aguilar, AKA Eternal Life, worshipping at

CityTribe. Mark used to be a drug addict, live under a bridge, and run from the police. Now he’s in Bible school and ministers

through Hip Hop all over the Metro NYC area.

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On the streets, we regularly speak prophetically into people’s lives, telling them things like, “You’ve been a drug dealer and negatively influenced people’s lives, but now God wants to use you to help people and be a positive influence.” When we see the poor, addicts, prostitutes, and criminals, we see pastors, prophets, and evangelists.

Jim Berry

Escape From Shame My name is Jim. I grew up as a pastor’s kid in Illinois. I literally lived next door to the church where my father worked. It was like growing up under a microscope where everyone was watching me and expecting me to be the perfect kid. I worked very hard at looking good in front of others and was thought of as a real goody-two-shoes. Unfortunately, this set me up to have a very legalistic

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relationship with God in which I tried very hard to follow all the rules, but could never measure up. We had a very traditional church where we sang hymns and acted very reverent in the early years. Behind the scenes however, some people would be very judgmental. There was plenty of talk about grace, but the reality was that there was plenty of shame to go around. If you wanted to be accepted, you had to earn it by proving how holy you were (at least on the outside). Shame was the name of the game. It was how I tried to manipulate people into being “good.”

I became my father’s little helper and was more like a little general, keeping tabs on who was good and who was bad. I was like the “narc” of the church, who would go to the boss whenever I caught someone getting in trouble. This

became my identity. While we were playing the part of the perfect Christian family at church, life at home was a different story. There was arguing and uncertainty, as in most families. For the most part though, my mother and father had a good relationship. When my parents fought, it was often over money. After my sister was born, my mother became mentally ill and suffered from bi-polar disorder. She was always in bed, though able to manage a part-time job. She was usually

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drained of energy and depressed, so it was difficult for her to be available to us. At one point, she was hospitalized long-term for this, and my father couldn’t take care of both siblings. As a result, I went to live with our grandparents (who lived four hours away) for six weeks. My life was in confusion. Eventually I moved back home. As I grew up, my sister and I couldn’t stand each other and fought non-stop like cats and dogs. It was a stressful situation to grow up in. My father and I had some good times fishing together and fixing computers, but besides that our relationship was emotionally distant. I spent most of my time playing video games or watching TV. I was living a double life. I wore my religious masks to church and appeared like I was perfect, but I was truthfully very lonely. I didn’t feel closeness or real peace. At school I was regularly picked on and made fun of.

Because our family was poor, I didn’t have nice clothes and that made me a target of ridicule. I was very unsociable and isolated at school. I didn’t have many friends and mainly hung out with the “geek crowd.”

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Through my parent’s satellite TV system I was exposed to pornography. For the next seven years, it ruled my mind. I was completely addicted to porn. The images I watched on TV made me feel good temporarily, but the long-term consequences were intense guilt, emptiness, and shame. Once again, I wore a mask of being a righteous believer, but inside my heart, I was filled with sexual bondage. An amazing thing happened to me at the age of 17. I very clearly heard God’s voice in my heart telling me to go into ministry. This was a huge step for me, but I really felt that it was what I was supposed to do. After graduating, I attended a Bible college on the East coast. It was a whole new world. The teachers and others students were so accepting and encouraging. I started breaking out of my shell and making new friends, but secretly I was still held hostage by porn. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t totally break free. One day I met the daughter of one of my professors. She was so cute that I had to ask her out. One thing led to another and we ended up getting engaged. I confessed my struggle with pornography to her and her mother, too! I just wanted to come clean and get free of this thing. Over time I went through a Bible program with them called Bondage Breakers. I confessed my sin to them and to God, repented, and had a major breakthrough in my life.

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I began to learn about the grace of God. I began to find freedom from the deep insecurity I felt because I discovered God loved me. I didn’t have to put on an act for God or pretend to be something I was not. I could be real with God and others. I didn’t have to be bound by shame and feel like I was never good enough. I was so happy to be engaged and start a new life, and family of my own eventually. That’s when I got a call letting me know that my mother had passed away from an overdose of medication. No one knew if it was because of disorientation or because she was suicidal. I was broke, but somehow God made a way for someone to buy me a ticket to go to my mother’s funeral. It was a devastating experience, and I was in total shock.

Step by step, God walked with me through the grieving process, bringing healing and hope for the future. I pressed on to finish college and achieve my goals.

I got married to that girl, had two beautiful daughters and a handsome son. Today I work full-time with The

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Relief Bus and reach out to many others who have been trapped by shame. Once people find out that God loves them passionately just the way they are, it allows them to let God take over and transform their lives. Maybe you need to escape from shame, too. Believe me, God can help.

Kevin is one of God’s strategic servants in New Jersey

Kevin One of my very special friends here in Elizabeth is an older man named Kevin. He was an alcoholic for many years and a very bitter, hardened man. He lost his wife to illness, and because of his own illness, lost a leg. He came to our base for years to get help in various ways. To those who worked with him the most, he seemed like someone that was really off the

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deep end in misery. Because of his continuing medical condition, Kevin lost his other leg. Amazingly, it was at this point Kevin opened up to the Lord. He has let Jesus come in and be the healer of his soul. He is finally free from the power of alcohol over his life. Kevin rides around in his powered scooter/chair and walks with the use of two prosthetics. You’ve never seen anyone with a better attitude. Kevin will tell you today that he is a much better man with no legs and Jesus, than he ever was with two legs and no hope. One day in his apartment building there was a fire. Kevin wheeled himself around his building, knocking on doors and warning people to get out. One apartment had small children in it who were alone because their mom was down in the basement doing laundry. The door was locked and they couldn’t get out. Kevin told them to stand back from the door and using his wheelchair, he propelled himself forward while using his prosthetic legs like a battering ram and knocked the door down. As a result, he was interviewed on the local news as a town hero! Kevin is also an everyday hero. He has helped out at the food pantry we call “Matthew’s House”, every Saturday, at The Relief Bus on Friday nights, was on our leadership team at CityTribe Church, and was a student at East Coast School of Urban Ministry. He even helped answer phones in the office one day a week. He is the kindest, sweetest, most wonderful man to be around. There is such a change in his demeanor that the hospital actually has him come in and talk to people who are having their legs

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amputated to help them work through the many emotions involved. He ministers to these men and women who are at their lowest point and gives them hope to go on living. At a Halloween night block party outreach, I started ministering to a man, but had to break away to go get the music started. The man was homeless and an addict. He told me he was ready to let God take over his life and ready to let us help him get off drugs. I wanted to come back and pray for him, but got caught up in running the event. Kevin and several of our others continued to minister to the man and share their testimonies. They ended up praying with the man to receive the Lord. Kevin is just one example of how people can be released into ministry. Many times we would see people get so much into the atmosphere of helping each other at CityTribe that they naturally start doing it themselves. Even those who weren’t even Christians yet reach out to those around them to give them tips on where to find food, a good place to sleep at night, or even pray for them. Fortunately, no one told them that they need to wait until they have their lives all in order before they can begin ministering to others.

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SOAP BOX MOMENT Trash or Treasure? He picks up the poor from out of the dirt, rescues the wretched who've been thrown out with the trash, Seats them among the honored guests, a place of honor among the brightest and best.

Psalm 113:7,8 (The Message) One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Some people are treated like trash in our society and there is even an insensitive slur called “white trash” to describe the refuse of society. Of course there is a slur for every ethnic group to convey exactly the same sentiment, but according to scripture, this “trash” is God’s treasure no matter what a person’s ethnicity or economic status may be. In America, we refer to people as upper class, middle class, and lower class. This is a reference to socio-

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economic status, but it also seems to categorize those with less money as “lower” than other people, in worth. By the way, which class was Jesus in during his time on earth? We know that as a carpenter he was a blue-collar manual laborer, but he was also the King of Kings, which makes him royalty. Being God, He owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10), making him richer than any Texas rancher, yet Jesus lived as a peasant among other peasants and lived off of the charity of others. He had no home to speak of and was chastised for eating raw grain out of someone else’s field on the Sabbath. That doesn’t speak of great wealth. Though He was incredibly wealthy, He chose to live amongst and to live as, the poor. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.

2 Corinthians 8:9 What is He trying to tell us by his lifestyle? The plot thickens. What we call “third-world countries” or “developing nations” consist of a population of people of whom the majority lives in poverty. These “third-world” nations make up two-thirds of the world population. In other words, most of the world does not have the wealth of resources, education, or even food that we do here in America. The majority of people on earth are the so-called “lower class”, “less educated”, “less

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productive”, and “less important” folks. The eye opener is that these nations are more the norm and our country is more the exception. Now what is our role to play in all this, as Christians? I’m glad you asked. To whom much is given, much is required.

Luke 12:4 We are REQUIRED by God to help out, make a difference, and share the blessings that we have. The New Testament church was very concerned with giving to the poor, as stated in Galations 2:10: “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.” In the New Testament time period, there was a definite class system and class bias. The rich were treated better and shown preference over the poor. The Bible addresses this issue of how the church treats the poor. I don’t know many churches that would chase a homeless person out the door. Usually they are warmly greeted and welcomed back, but what about the next step? If we met someone at church who had a lot in common with us, had a similar profession or hobbies, we would probably try to make them a friend and get together. It is this simple step that most of us miss with the poor. We have to overcome our feelings of discomfort and natural desire to be with people who are just like us and enter into the lives of the poor. The truth is, they may be as nervous and apprehensive about you as

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you are about them, because they have been rejected in so many other areas of life. In A Glimpse of Jesus- The Stranger to Self-Hatred, Brennan Manning states,

“Jesus perceived that the only way to help people experience life as a precious gift, the only way to help them prize themselves as grace and treasure, was to treat them as treasure and be gracious to them. I can be anointed, prayed over, sermonized to, dialogued with, and exposed to God’s unconditional love in books, tracts, and tapes, but this marvelous revelation will fall on ears that do not hear and eyes that do not see, unless some other human being refresh the weariness of my defeated days. Barring previant grace, we humans simply will not accept our life and being as God’s gracious gift unless someone values us. “We can only sense ourselves and our world valued and cherished by God when we feel valued and cherished by others.”

One day a woman came to our church needing medicine for her children, so my wife took her to the drugstore to purchase what she needed. While riding in the car on the way there, the woman said, “I hope you don’t feel uncomfortable riding with me since I’m poor.” My wife replied that many of the people in our church were even poorer than she was and even lived

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under bridges. She had to take time to ease the discomfort of the woman she was helping and help her overcome the feelings of past rejection that she had experienced. The poor may not dress appropriately, speak elegantly, exude self-confidence, or be especially skilled in many areas. Because of this, they have been placed into a category in people’s minds, and maybe even their own minds, that they don’t fit in with people who have money. It’s our job to break down those barriers.

Darnell and Juan

I sat down with a man named Darnell in my office one day to pray with him because he was about to enter a drug detox and then a rehab. After 18 years of snorting heroin, he decided that he had had enough and was ready for a change. As we chatted, Darnell told me that he felt that God might not want to help him because of all the things he had done wrong in his life. I shared the story of the prodigal son and how God was running to receive Darnell back into his arms. His yellow eyes leaked tears as he repented of all his sins and came into his Father’s arms. It is

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through us, as ambassadors of Christ, that we help people hurdle the barrier of their shame to find the lover of their soul. "If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

Mother Teresa

Christine Feldi

Christine Finds True Love Far from a storybook upbringing, Christine Feldi’s childhood was plagued with the arguing and tension that came from living with an alcoholic father. She grew up believing that partying and drug use would lead to happiness and popularity. When she was twelve-years-old, her father passed away, triggering a cycle of substance abuse in her life.

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By the age of thirteen, Christine was smoking marijuana, drinking, and snorting cocaine. After getting caught stealing a car, she was court ordered to enter a drug rehabilitation program: the first of over twenty-five programs and rehabs she would shuffle between over the next five years! At fifteen, she began injecting heroin and was using daily by age sixteen. Desperate to save her daughter, Christine’s mother brought her to New York City Relief. Christine remembers, “I was so rebellious at the time. It was amazing that I came to New York City Relief. It must have been God.” Bill Hoffman, Vice President and General Manager of New York City Relief, counseled Christine. She recalls, “Pastor Bill took me under his wing and shared his understanding of addiction and the Bible. He was like a father figure to me and I trusted him, because he went through it, too.” For the first time in her life, Christine felt an unwavering peace and joy. She volunteered serving bread and soup on The Relief Bus. Working on The Relief Bus helped Christine stay clean. She explains, “Serving others and seeing people struggle helped me realize it wasn’t just about me.” After relapsing multiple times, Christine was living on the streets homeless and hopeless. She sold her wedding band and engaged in prostitution to support her heroin habit, using motel rooms and cars for shelter. Christine realized that she hated who she had become. She was caught shoplifting and sentenced to one month in jail. During this time, Christine began reading the Bible again and

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constantly prayed for strength and restoration. After her release in 2006, she admitted herself into one last rehabilitation program and has been clean ever since. Christine looks back at her experiences at New York City Relief as pivotal to saving her life. She says, “The staff showed me God’s love even when I felt so unworthy of love.” Now a loving and sober wife and mother to three boys, Christine wants everyone to know, “God’s love is amazing. God loved me even when I was an addict, prostitute, and thief. God wants all of us, just as we are.”

Pastors Paul and Karen Yuschak

Passing the Torch The more CityTribe and East Coast School of Urban Ministry grew, the more obvious it was that we

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needed help so that we could plant more churches. Tracy and I prayed diligently about who was to be raised up as pastors within the tribe. We met with Paul and Karen Yuschak to ask them to take over our Sunday night church. Fortunately, God had already revealed to them that this was going to be their assignment. They went on to change the name of the church and expand the vision to become Streetlight Mission. Learn more at www.streetlightmission.org. CityTribe had between 70-90 people coming every Sunday night to meet in a very small space. People regularly asked when we were going to get our own building so that we could fit more people. Having larger services didn’t necessarily translate into better services however. The larger the crowd meant the greater challenge of achieving intimacy in relationship. Our goal was to multiply and create more CityTribes. I helped plant the next church for the homeless with Pastor Sylvia Brown. It is now called The Bridge and is led by Pastor Shwantha Hargrove. Later I helped my friend Pastor Evy Gallik plant Frontlines Church for the homeless in Paterson, New Jersey. Almost right after that, I planted a different kind of church in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It is called The Street Hip Hop Church, and is led by Pastor Ruddy Daville. Check it out at: www.myspace.com/thestreethiphopchurch.

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Chapter 9 Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless -- cheerfully.

1 Peter 4:9 (The Message)

Homeless man in New York City, reading his new Bible

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SOAP BOX MOMENT The Challenge Of The Poor After ten years of ministering in what I would call suburban, middle-class churches, I moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey and was thrown into a whole new world that was much like a third-world country. The roads are full of potholes and people drive like they’re crazy. The curbs are lined with trash. The streets are filled with loud music rooting from the West Indies, South America and the Middle East. The city abounds with ethnicity from all points of the globe. Cultures conflict with each other, as well as blend with each other. Violence is a common means of solving problems quickly and ruthlessly. The harsh effects of poverty and broken homes haunt the streets in the form of burned out people with empty eyes. I was forced to look at the Bible in a whole new light and ask God, what does this Word mean for them? What is the church’s role? What is my role? Conn and Ortiz write in Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, The City & The People of God,

“The city becomes the land of those left behind- the poor, the underemployed, the ethnic outsider. The conditions they inherit are economic decline, physical

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decay and social disintegration. The industrial city of the United States looks less and less like a launching pad for hope and more like a repository of despair.”

What we think of as the American Dream may for some seem like the American nightmare. They see no way out of their dismal situation and become hopeless. What has the church’s response been to the problem? Conn and Ortiz go on to write:

“In the Western world the church moves to the outer edges of the city, fearful of what it perceives as emerging urban patterns”. This is also known as “white flight”.

Facing the overwhelming nature of the generational challenges in the inner city, many people, both Christian and non-Christian have decided to literally move on to greener pastures. The problem is that as we abandon people, we feed into the problem. We abandon orphans who are part of a fatherless generation desperately in need of spiritual fathers and mothers. We pass the buck onto social relief organizations and government employees who may not have a spiritual well to draw from. Jesus too was overwhelmed by the masses of people with their many problems and many times became exhausted because the need was so great. What was his motivation? Jesus was constantly moved by compassion and felt the pain of the people. To have

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compassion means, “to suffer together”. That was what motivated him to bring healing. If we the church, would interact with the poor and suffering, we too would be moved with compassion and be motivated to do something about it. If we continue to isolate into our own Christian world with our own Christian culture, we will become more and more out of touch with the lost, our mission and our purpose. We must ask ourselves, “What is our mission, and what is the church’s mission?” Brian D. McLaren writes through characters in his allegorical book, A New Kind Of Christian,

“Mission is the “apostolic” dimension of the church—“mission” and “apostolic” simply being Latin and Greek ways of saying that we are sent….Jesus said it: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’—which means that we are sent not to ‘be served’ but to ‘serve,’ and that we are sent not to ‘the healthy’ but ‘the sick’ (profound new thoughts for many people -- that the church exists for the world, not it’s members, and that we are on a mission to the irreligious, not the religious)….. “Our mission is simply seeking, receiving, and manifesting the kingdom of God, the reign of God, the reality of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven. In that mission, the church is

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the catalyst, not the goal; you know I believe the kingdom is much larger than the church, and the more successful the church is in mission, the more expansive the kingdom…. “One of the ways modernity captured Christianity was in this area of mission: our mission evaporated (except in the narrow slice of church life that we called ‘missions’—whose very existence unfortunately legitimized the largest part of church life not being mission-oriented). We became purveyors of religious goods and services, seeking a clientele, competing for market share, complete with brand names and all the rest. If you want useful plastic kitchen articles, you go to Wal-Mart. If you want low-cost, high-fat food in generous portions, you go to Taco Bell. If you want a standard scripted vacation, you go to Disney World. If you want a fizzy sugary drink, you go to Coca-Cola. And if you want a spiritual pick-me-up, you go to church. This put us in a situation exactly opposite to -- as I see it – Christ’s intent.”

I don’t believe McClaren’s comments are meant to minimize the importance of healthy discipleship, fellowship and church life, but I do believe that the church at large is weak in this step of discipleship: release. Jesus trained his people verbally and

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through example. The next step in their development was to be sent out. It’s all about denial of self and letting loose of control. We need to give of ourselves in order to grow. It goes against the very ingrained concept of the American Dream. Instead of climbing up the ladder, we climb down so someone else can get up on our shoulders. Jesus became like a slave when he washed feet. We must change our most basic inner philosophy that life is about getting what we want. This is very painful to our flesh. As a Christian we want Christian friends in Christian environments that are safe for us and our children, so we stay in the nest of immature Christianity until we forget we have wings to fly. We become stunted people huddling together in the nest waiting for mama bird (the pastor) to feed us another worm. We sometimes couch our desire for success and personal promotion as being “responsible” and “logical. Scripture compels us to leave the safety and predictability of the ninety-nine to go after the one trapped in a pit (Matthew 12:11, 12). It isn’t logical to leave the sure success and safety of the ninety-nine to go after someone who should have known better than to wander off and fall into a pit. Besides, that sheep is getting what it deserves isn’t it? Remember the day Jesus pulled us up out of the pit and carried us back on his shoulders?

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So what do we tangibly and physically do to embrace the outcast, the reject and the poor? Matthew 25 spells out the ABC’s of helping the down and out. When I come back demonstrating my power and I bring my angels with me I’m going to take over control from my seat of power. The whole world will be brought before me, and I will separate the acceptable from the unacceptable, just like when you sort through the fruit in the produce aisle to find the good stuff. The good stuff I’ll put on my right, the stinky stuff will go on my left. Speaking from my authority as king of the universe, I’ll tell the folks on the right, “You paid your dues and now it’s time to get your reward that I have been planning on giving you before the earth was even created. You did a great job living for me. When I was starving, you bought me lunch. I was parched and you gave me some iced tea. You didn’t know me from Adam, but you treated me like your best friend. I needed some decent clothes and you got me a new wardrobe. I was puking my guts out and you nursed me back to health. I was locked up in the pen and you came on visiting day to see me. Then the ones who lived for God will ask, “Chief, when did we do all this stuff? We don’t remember you being hungry, thirsty,

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being a stranger, out of clothes, sick as a dog or locked up in the clink.” I’ll say, “Whenever you did all these wonderful things for people you encountered in life, you were doing it for me. Great job!” Matthew 25:31-46 (28, The Street Bible)

Although this is a fun paraphrase of scripture, the message still comes across loud and clear. This is NOT a parable. Jesus tells us what really matters and gives it to us straight without any symbolism. This is how we are judged as being acceptable to God or unacceptable. None of the actions described in these verses look anything like a church service. These happen out in society where people are living and dying. I have found that helping people in the most dire of circumstances is fascinating and even exciting, as well as heartbreaking. I have discovered what it means to be a friend to the poor and know that I get the most out of the relationship. I learn more from hanging out with burned out Vietnam vets, ex-convicts, drug dealers and prostitutes than I do from reading any teaching book. These diamonds in the rough are people marked by God. Their names are carved into his hand. Every time my heart comes in contact with the heart of someone who is hurting, desperate and lonely, I find Jesus, because He said, “I tell you the truth, whatever

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you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40) Be challenged by the poor and then embrace them the way Jesus does.

Pastor Paul and I baptizing our friend Paul

who was homeless and lived in a tent by the railroad tracks Beach Baptism One of my most chaotic and meaningful experiences is when we took CityTribe to the beach on July 4 for our beach party/baptism. We took a rough group of people right off the streets to mingle with all the people from middle class America. Forty-five people went and ten got baptized. We went to one of the nicest, most exclusive areas on the Jersey shore. Before we even left I had to confiscate some booze from a couple of the guys. It took a large caravan of vehicles to get all these folks to the beach. I drove a van there full of homeless guys. One guy on medication sat behind me and talked non-stop. The tough guys behind him kept telling him to clam up. As I am driving, a puff of white “smoke” bursts out of the floor board of the van and I begin to laugh because I think the engine has blown. I laughed because things were already so nutty. It turned out that the “smoke” was a fire extinguisher going off behind me and

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shooting along the floorboard. The guy on meds found it on the floor beside him and picked it up. He got antsy and pulled the trigger thus filling the front of the van with billows of white vapor. You just can’t make this kind of stuff up! This really made the tough guys mad and he apologized profusely. I just shook my head in amusement and kept driving. One of those “tough guys” was Doug. Then Doug was homeless and addicted. Today he’s clean, working steadily and puts all of his hope in Jesus. We got to the beach and joined the hoards of beach goers. Most of the people from CityTribe hadn’t been to the beach in years. I remember a guy named Barry just stood there staring at the beauty of the ocean drinking in the whole beach atmosphere. It was awesome to take the Tribers on a little getaway from the concrete jungle and give them a little slice of paradise. Everyone shared their food. We played games and had a blast. We used a cooler as our pulpit and shared a little about what baptism meant. That day we baptized homeless people, drug dealers, people with AIDS- basically we baptized our friends. It was beautiful. We ended the night by watching fireworks on the beach together.

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Tracy speaks on baptism

The next year seventy-four people attended the beach baptism and 29 were baptized! The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper was even on hand, taking photos and doing interviews with everyone. I was moved by people’s genuine enthusiasm at openly demonstrating their commitment to God through baptism. It makes me think of that verse, “and whosoever shall humble himself shall be exalted” (Matt. 23:12). Who would think that a motley crew of folks from the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey getting baptized would be a hot story?

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Chapter 10

SOAP BOX MOMENT The Tsunami of Self Most of us have seen the historic devastation of the tsunami in Asia in the newspapers or on television- a giant wall of water that wiped out villages and carried people out to sea to their deaths. Galatians 5 talks about a different kind of wave, a wave of selfishness that I believe has already hit America and mankind. It has wiped out families and even cities. It has carried people away without them even knowing it and many of them are even believers. The apostle Paul addresses this very issue with the believers in Galatia. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day.

Galatians 5:17 (The Message)

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In Galatians 5:19-21 Paul lists the outcome of being consumed by self: “repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; small- minded and lopsided pursuits; uncontrollable addictions, ugly parodies of community.” Though riptides of selfishness powerfully sweep through our society and are held to be lofty ideals, we can escape getting sucked under by them if we swim in the right direction. You may have swallowed some of these notions yourself at one time. Like salt water though, the more you drink, the sicker you feel and the thirstier you get. This trumped up lifestyle is ultimately unsatisfying and worse- very deadly. A prominent pastor in Los Angeles had a woman in his congregation come to him for counsel because she was suffering from great depression and anxiety. He counseled her to go and volunteer in their outreach center, baking cookies for men in the drug rehab and reading the Bible to victims of AIDS in the care unit. She was truly offended by his inconsiderate guidance, but said that she would follow his counsel. For several weeks after, the woman did not show up for her counseling appointments with him. The pastor saw her at church and questioned why she had

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stopped coming to meet with him. She answered with a glowing smile, “I just haven’t had time. I have been so busy helping those people down there and they really need me!” Rather than getting swept away by self, Paul makes this suggestion in chapter 6:2,3 “Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law. If you think you are too good for that, you are badly deceived.” v. 8 “The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others- ignoring God! -harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds.” The truth is that we are called to a life of sacrifice. In The Barbarian Way, Erwin Raphael McManus writes,

“Jesus understood His purpose was to save us not from pain and suffering, but from meaninglessness. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance.” He writes about Peter, “…he understood what Jesus was asking for. Love and sacrifice were inseparable. The barbarian way is about love expressed through sacrifice and servanthood. The original call of Jesus was so simple, so clean, so clear: ‘Follow Me.’ He wants us to surrender our lives to Him and follow Him into the unknown. And if it means a life of

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suffering, hardship, and disappointment, it will be worth it because following Jesus Christ is more powerful and more fulfilling than living with everything in the world minus Him. A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. Love always moves to sacrifice, which is exactly where He calls us to go. If you genuinely embrace His sacrifice, you will joyfully embrace a sacrificial life.”

Don’t ignore those in need around you and don’t ignore God. Open your eyes! You are here for a reason- to rescue victims of this “tsunami of self” around you who will perish unless you do something. Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Once you walk in your purpose by helping others to find God, you will find that you are truly living.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)

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Motivations and Expectations When most people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them, their typical response is, “That must be very fulfilling.” I never know how to respond to that so I usually say, “yes”, but inside I feel like saying, “It is really hard work and I don’t always know how to cope with the emotions stirred up by these battered lives, multiple relapses into addiction and human heartache.” I do feel fulfilled, but it’s not because of the work I do, it’s because of Jesus working through me. I’m amazed that He uses me at all and that people really do get impacted for the better sometimes. If I was doing this work to feel good about myself and get fulfilled through my acts of charity, I wouldn’t make it ten minutes. I fall into this trap sometimes, like everyone else, but that’s when I bottom out and turn back to God once again. One way to burn out quickly when helping people in desperate situations is to expect too much of them. Charles Ringma writes in Dare To Journey With Henri Nouwen,

“From those we love much we often expect much, and from those we serve well we frequently expect progress and thankfulness. But our expectations may be unrealistic. It is therefore important that we assume the responsibility of reevaluating our expectations of others. A second issue is to look at our motives for service. All too frequently we give in order to get.“

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I remember meeting a man while I was on vacation who described his experience while working with Habitat For Humanity. He was repairing the house of an extremely impoverished family. The family was present while the construction crew was working and some were young guys who looked pretty strong and healthy. The man was perturbed at how the young men never offered to pitch in and just sat around lazily watching. When it was time for the crew to leave for the day, one of the young men asked, “Are you leaving already?”, because the job wasn’t finished. The man bit his tongue and came back to finish the job the next day, but inside swore that he would never again help people who wouldn’t help themselves. This is what we call taking offense at the poor. He assumed, because of the ungrateful attitude of the young man, that all the work he had done to help this family was a waste of time. He also didn’t get the feeling of satisfaction that he hoped for by helping someone in need. Instead he felt used and unappreciated. Motivations are tricky and many times when I assumed my motives were pure, I only realized later that I was trying to make myself feel better by “fixing” someone else. When things don’t turn out the way you plan, disappointment can be devastating and make you question why you even bothered to try in the first place. Here is the key: When you do reach out and help someone and do it for Jesus as if you are helping him, you cannot fail. If the person you attempt to feed, encourage or rescue doesn’t respond positively and instead takes a turn for the worse, your heart may be broken, but not to the point of giving up.

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Jesus didn’t ask us to take the cares of the world onto ourselves, but to cast all cares onto him. We have to avoid trying to be anyone’s savior. We just do our own little part and let God do the big stuff in people’s hearts. He’s the transformer, not us. Charles Ringma goes on to say that what we need to learn about poverty is how to give of ourselves:

“We can be concerned about others and yet essentially still live for ourselves. We can be giving to the poor and yet withhold the very thing they most urgently seek: companionship in the journey. Nouwen reminds us that ‘Being poor is what Jesus invites us to, and that is much, much harder than serving the poor.’ If we wish to journey with the poor, we need to become poor ourselves- poor for the sake of the gospel and poor for the sake of our neighbor. This poverty does not only mean that we voluntarily lay aside our time, our power, and our priorities in order to serve others. At a deeper level it means that we discover our own poverty, weakness, and brokenness and can thus journey in true companionship with the poor. We journey not as those who have much to give and who have all the answers, but as fellow travelers toward light and liberation.”

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As a man, I usually want to help people problem-solve and brainstorm on how we can overcome a situation, but sometimes I’m just supposed to be there for someone and share their pain as well as their joy. While doing that, I discover that I am just as desperate for God’s help as anyone else and not quite the “advanced Christian” that I thought I was. That state of being doesn’t really even exist. Ringma continues,

“Nouwen reminds us that care means to be present to the other person and warns that ‘cure without care makes us preoccupied with quick changes, impatient and unwilling to share each other’s burden.’ This warning is well placed. We are usually quick in offering counseling, healing and helping strategies, and tend to blame the other for a lack of commitment to our strategies if results are not forthcoming. We find it much more difficult to journey with others, enter their places of pain as they are opened to us, offer friendship even when there is no significant change, and seek to empower rather than help.”

I think that this is where patience and longsuffering come into play. How committed are we to people? Is our love tied to their growth, or is it unconditional? How did Jesus treat the woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery? The grace he extended to

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them was the very key to the unlocking of the bondage they were trapped in. If you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face. Don’t burn out; Keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians, be inventive in hospitality.

Romans 12:8, 11-13 (The Message) Sheila Finds Freedom Sheila Howard grew up in a family that was materially stable, but emotionally bankrupt. She felt very alone, and at a young age looked for love in all the wrong places. Her first boyfriend was a crack addict and she followed in his footsteps. For seven years he physically abused her and even sent her to the hospital with a fractured jaw. Several children later, Sheila left him and tried to start over. However, she ended up marrying an alcoholic man who was also abusive and fell back into using drugs. One day, in front of her children, her husband held a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her. Reaching behind her, Sheila found a claw hammer and hit him over the head. Leaving him in a pool of blood, she

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escaped with her children. Because of her drug use, Sheila’s children were taken away from her, and on the same day her husband fell at work and broke his back. Her apartment was taken away from her and Sheila became homeless, wandering aimlessly, washing in public restrooms and working as a prostitute to support her drug addiction. She was incarcerated over 13 times. So emotionally damaged that her mind was in a fog, she couldn’t even speak a complete sentence. She had no friends, no one to talk to and was totally isolated. One day she heard music playing on the street and traced it to The Relief Bus. She cried as the volunteer staff hugged her and prayed for her. “I was being loved, as unlovable as I was,” she remembers.

Juan, Bill Hoffman and Sheila Howard

Soon after, Sheila was sleeping in an abandoned building very sick, unable to move. She said, “My breathing was rapid and I was unable to scream out

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for help. I cried out for help to Jesus and passed out. When I woke up, 2 police officers took me to the hospital and then to jail. From jail I called the Walter Hoving Home, a women’s discipleship and drug rehabilitation program. I knew God had saved my life.” Sheila was accepted into the 12-month program, and it was there that she rededicated her life to Christ. During her time there she was allowed to come with other ladies in the program to serve on The Relief Bus. After completing the program, Sheila moved back to Elizabeth and was given permission to stay with her mother for only one week. If she didn’t find a place to stay in that short time, she would be homeless once again. She came to volunteer on The Relief Bus on a Friday night and met David and Patty Rower. David and Patty took her in their home and as Sheila says, “They treated me like the best family I ever had. They treated me like I had never been treated in my life.” Sheila went on to become a regular volunteer with New York City Relief and a leader in a 12-step recovery program. She even got a job at a therapeutic recovery program and is going to school for substance abuse counseling. Sheila is able to meet and encourage many people who are in the same place that she used to be: addicted, homeless and in despair. She is able to honestly communicate that there is hope and that they can make it. Sheila is now using her freedom to help others become free too.

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Jimmy Ponytail (on right) helping out people

at a CityTribe block party Jimmy Ponytail James Lowery was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1953. When he was ten years old his parents moved with him and his siblings to New Jersey where his father worked for the Singer sewing machine company and his mother waited tables. Both his mother and father had their favorite child, these being James’ older sister and younger brother. Because of this he chose to go to boarding school for several years and even during the summer and school breaks

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didn’t go back home. At the age of eighteen James quit high school and went into the Navy. It was there that he learned to be an electrician. In 1976 he left the Navy, and for the next year and a half he hitchhiked across America living a freewheeling lifestyle. In 1978 he returned to New Jersey and married the love of his life, Donna. For the next twenty years they lived a normal life and had two kids, James Jr. and Michelle. He began a job teaching nutrition at Rutgers University. It was then that Donna had a major heart attack and died. James tried to hold it together for his kids, but within three years his life fell completely apart and he lost everything. Unable to cope with the pain, James disappeared into a bottle. He drank and did drugs with no thought of the consequences. James ended up homeless, living in a tent by some old railroad tracks in Elizabeth. He had the only tent around with pirated electricity running underground to power his electrical appliances. It was during this time that he let his hair grow out that he became known affectionately on the streets as “Jimmy Ponytail” or “Ponytail Jimmy” depending on your preference. After a year and a half his life took a turn because he wanted a good cup of coffee. He heard on the street that you could get free coffee at CityTribe Church so he came by one Sunday night. To his chagrin he discovered that the coffee was terrible! However he says, “I felt comfortable there. I felt like I belonged.” Pastors Paul and Karen Yuschak prayed for him at CityTribe one night and that’s when he says he

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started to feel again. He began to come out of the fog. He stopped drinking and holed up for five days to kick his drug habit. Previous to this Jimmy had hated God who he blamed for taking away his wife, but now he started to see that maybe God had a purpose for his life. Jimmy is off the streets now and living at the Salvation Army. He cooks there every week for the people living there and works various odd jobs throughout the week. Well, Jimmy fixed the coffee situation at CityTribe by taking over the preparation. Every week we would see him serving cake, donuts and coffee with a smile to everyone who walked in the door. Jimmy says, “Serving others charges me up and makes me feel great.” He worries about guys on the street who were once his only family. He reaches out to help them and has brought several guys to CityTribe who have gotten into rehab. According to Jimmy, “I’m not as nasty as I once was and I like myself again.” I told him one day that he was performing the role of a deacon and he responded, “I don’t want to be a deacon. I want to be a beacon. I want others to look at me and say, ‘Look at that guy and what he did. Maybe I can do that, too.’”

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Chapter 11

“Don’t go into full-time ministry unless you can’t stand not to do it. The cost is too high otherwise.”

Juan Galloway The Cost I would be remiss in the writing of this book if I did not describe the heavy side of this story. Urban ministry or any other kind of ministry, for that matter, is nothing to be romanticized. There is something involved that no one ever wants to talk about, including me, and that is the topic of suffering. Some suffering occurs because of outside forces beyond our control and some is just self-imposed. Learn to Think Like Him Since Jesus went through everything you're going through and more, learn to think like him. Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way. Then you'll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want.

1 Peter 4:1,2 (The Message)

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People have lauded us for our courage in coming to plant a church in the inner city and told us how amazing we were to do so. We’re not that amazing, but the truth is that it did take a lot of courage for us to take a step of faith into something that very likely would fail. Most attempts at starting a brand new church don’t succeed. We were trying something that, to us, was so experimental that we were bound to learn a lot by trial and error. The downside is that you pay a price for your errors. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t work in the midst of our errors. In fact, the hard lessons are the most impacting ones, because they are the ones that we never forget. The mistakes we made weren’t in the areas I expected like bad leadership decisions, poor strategies, and lack of interest from the community we were trying to reach. The mistakes we made were in how we handled our personal lives or, I should say, in our total disregard for having healthy personal lives. I guess people who break new ground have to have a certain amount of drive, but the ministry became all-consuming. We lived it, breathed it, and loved it. The idea of creating something new and groundbreaking was exciting to us, but when it actually worked, it became even more exciting. We watched our baby (the ministry) birth forth, crawl, walk and then run. There was nothing wrong with this part. It was our response in the midst of this success that we made our faults. We made ministry the core focus of our lives. Tracy and I talked about it non-stop. We were so jazzed about how things were going that we felt

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constantly compelled to “take it to the next level.” That could mean better leadership training, more mentoring, more effective outreach, better multi-media, cooler worship songs, more students, more challenging classes, etc., etc. Aren’t we as leaders supposed to always improve, refine and advance our ministries? Sure, but when is it ever enough? When can you relax and be satisfied? I was not having as much fun as I used to, battling immense stress, butting heads with my wife over ministry issues and for the life of me couldn’t figure out why. The truth was that the only enjoyment I was getting out of life was new achievements at work. I was hooked on the adrenaline of making it happen. If I was working a job I didn’t care about, and wasn’t interested in, that might not have been the case. What I felt was that I had to keep pushing, growing, expanding, and improving. I thought that since we created this thing, it was totally dependent on us, and every decision we were making. What a deception. The truth is that we had made the mistake of believing that our identity was in what we were doing. Now I have known and believed that as a Christian my identity is in Christ. The way I was living, however, was that if I performed well, than I was okay. If I didn’t, then I stunk. I felt an enormous responsibility for everything. I had a long list of people that I didn’t want to let down - my wife and children, the people we ministered to on the streets, our leaders, our financial supporters, our students, our teachers, our fellow pastors, our co-workers, my denomination, etc. So many people had

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gotten behind us and joined up to serve with us that I felt obligated to do more of what we were doing and do it even better because in my mind they were all looking to me for the next greatest breakthrough. You can only take that kind of strain for so long before you crack. We had no boundaries in the way we handled ministry and the boundaries we did have, we crossed. I took work phone calls at home and answered my cell phone any time it rang. Our family schedule revolved completely around our ministry schedule, which was hectic. Because we were homeschooling, we could adapt our teaching schedule however we pleased. The truth is, Tracy and I are pretty adventurous. We love to push the envelope and try new things. We thought that we could handle anything. We are visionaries and idealistic - “Move from the country to the inner city with four kids and no promise of any steady income to start a church for the homeless and a school to train students in urban ministry? No problem!” We pulled off quite a bit, but eventually came to the end of our rope. We couldn’t keep up the pace anymore and hit the wall. Tracy’s health took a huge nosedive. We sent her to multiple doctors to find out what was wrong. She was completely drained of energy and could hardly get out of bed. Her thyroid condition worsened. Asthmatic bronchitis racked her body. Her throat was closing up and her breathing was labored. This went on for months. Our brains were writing checks that our bodies couldn’t pay.

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One of the areas of stress for Tracy that we ignored was living where we were. We purposefully moved into the city to live amongst the people we were ministering to. We wanted to transform the community that we lived in. In fact we did make many meaningful relationships with the people living around us. However, we didn’t pay attention to the toll of living in this impoverished area. The people we loved and lived next to were homeless, addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, mentally ill and even violent. Many of the people in the inner city have a tough exterior and a rough mannerism. Seeing people curse each other out, yell at each other or argue openly in public is pretty common. Any trip to the grocery store or an errand could leave Tracy shell-shocked from what she witnessed or experienced. My co-worker and friend, Shwantha, saw a man holding a gun in his hand chasing a woman down the street just a block from our house. We did not grow up in the city and had never lived in the city prior to this time. This cultural adjustment was way more than we ever figured on.

Tracy describes the experience this way: Hmmmmmmmmmmmm Not sure how to start. I look back on living in Elizabeth almost as if it was a dream. Everything was so surreal, or not real. It is hard to even imagine the things I would see on a day-to-day basis, much less understand that it was really real. For a normal inner city person who was born and raised in the city, my

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perceived reality of living there may seem like, “Uh, soooooo? What is the big deal?” But for the rest of America who lives a somewhat comfortable lifestyle in the suburbs or country with their family, they will relate to my feelings and emotions more quickly. Almost every day there was a new challenging experience and we were there for two and a half years, so I will just single out a three-day time slot that really was what caused me to start feeling like I needed to lock myself in my room and sleep forever. Here is an excerpt from my diary at that time: Tracy's Computer Diary: A few things happened here over the past few months (even the past few years) that were the beginning of me reaching my end. The incidents that occurred just shook me to the core. First, a woman the same age as me was abducted in daylight just one block from the New York City Relief office the same day I was working there. She was raped, murdered, wrapped in plastic and found by a garbage receptacle in a parking lot just two blocks from my house. Death was happening to girls like me so close to home I could smell it. The next day, I visited a girl in our church who had delivered her baby in a Newark hospital. Her story and that of her boyfriend is nothing short of miraculous, but because of past problems with DYFYS (Division of Youth and Family Services), we were hoping she would be allowed to bring her baby

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home with her with no problems. It is amazing how so many women in the city fear that their child could be taken by the government at any moment, just because any person can file a complaint that many times is false and done in retribution over a past grievance. Then, once the child is taken to a foster facility in the city, the child many times cannot be released until the claim is proved false which many times can take up to eight months since the system is so slow and terrible. Can you imagine it? A child taken from your home for eight months because an angered neighbor or enemy makes a false claim? Granted, many times the child should be taken because of a horrible situation, but so many times people believe the lie that the children are put in some nice family’s home who will love the child. Sometimes the child is put in a really bad place that is worse than the family home. For my friend in the hospital, she had her younger children taken away in the past because of her old lifestyle. Now she is clean, living better, yet, any future children, like her new baby, are put into the status as "maybe you can keep your child, maybe you cannot, we will see". If this was me facing the horrible stress of having my children taken from me and given to a place where their chance of being abused physically and emotionally could be 95% then I think I would flee the country with them. Flee the hospital and run. This is what the inner city "drug recovered" mother faces every day. Horrible. As I descended the front steps of my house earlier that same evening with Hailey, I carried a tray of dinner for my friends from our church who just have

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had their new baby girl that day. Before I could even reach my sidewalk, a homeless man began hassling me for the tray of Italian food I had prepared for them. I had to hold it back and rush to the car smiling politely and saying, “No, no, no!”, so that he wouldn't grab it from me before I could reach the car. Then when I got to my friend’s apartment to deliver the food that same night, there was a sad makeshift memorial outside of their brick building for a 17-year-old boy and his baby daughter who were both shot and murdered outside the building that same day. His memorial consisted of about twenty little white candles on the sidewalk and a ripped small piece of cardboard leaning on a chain link fence with a nondescript dark photo pasted on the front with his name scribbled in black marker. Here a boy and his young child are killed and all you have to remember their young lives are a few gang members looking down at some melted candles and a piece of trash with a name and photo. Horrible. When we got inside the building, the tiles were broken and laying all about, trash everywhere, tough guys everywhere, it smelled of pee, and the security camera was hanging from a wire half-smashed. All the doors looked as if they had been kicked in and repaired. The place was really bad. I would have never brought Hailey, my seven-year-old daughter, if I had known how bad it was going to be. I knocked on the door for many minutes as I knew I heard noises inside. Finally a small boy answered and called the mother of one of my friends to the door. The “mom” waved me in as she talked on the phone in French.

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Their apartment had one old refrigerator in the living room, a scratched black lacquer table and ONE wooden chair next to the fridge. A few boxes and trash about the 1 bedroom apartment were about all of their earthly possessions. At this point I wondered where all the things were from the baby shower I had thrown for them. I wondered where the sofa was that I had helped them get for free. I felt confused and sad that this is where they were bringing their baby home to. I felt worried and wondered if they really were clean from drugs after all. I put the food in the fridge and the other things I had for them on the table. As I left the building, there was an irate man outside who I blocked in unknowingly with my car, I was blessed that my sweet apology and my explanation that I was just delivering food for a person returning from the hospital tomorrow helped him to walk away and say it was "okay" and soften up a smidge. I really think if Hailey had not been by my side I would have been in danger. Many times a woman with a child is much safer than just a woman alone at night. The thing that really bothered me as I drove home is that this place was located two to three short blocks from my house. Sigh. It's real hard. God help me. The very next day, the first thing that happened at my office at New York City Relief was that another friend from CityTribe shows up in a panic because the police came and took her children away the night before.

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I grabbed my purse, dropped everything at the office and drove her to DYFS, which had taken her kids. It was located half of a block from our home. I was an advocate for her as she is so wonderful, more wonderful than I could ever be in her situation. Their reasons for taking her children were that because the woman’s doorknob lock was broken on the apartment (which she was trying to get the super to fix for months) and there was not enough beds for the children (yet there was enough beds with the fold-out sofa bed). They told her that the doorknob was the ONLY reason for taking the children and that she would not be getting them back for six months to a year. It was tragic and overwhelming for her and I have NEVER seen such injustice and tragedy. It was because she was poor and uneducated - bottom line - that they could get away with it. One more thing, I had also found out this same week the true reason that so many of her children are disabled. Four of her five children were born as a result of this woman being raped repeatedly by her father during her entire childhood and teen years. Let me repeat that so it can sink in, four children fathered by her father. Four. I had never even known that such a horrible thing existed. How tragic for her, how can someone be normal or okay after such atrocities and abuse lasting her entire childhood? End of Journal. Well this is my 3 days of Urban Ministry, glamorous isn't it?

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It really all just consisted of trying, crying, praying, crying, trying, praying and trying some more. It is and was very, very hard. So, does this excite you for urban ministry? I don't mean to scare anyone off. I do believe that the past two and a half years were the most eventful, colorful, wild, years of my life. But the pain. Oh the pain, is so very deep I know I will always carry a sadness with me for the reality of pain that could be so easily helped if just people who LOVE would do something, ANYTHING to help the poor, abused, forgotten people in our cities. If I had been born and raised in the urban area that I lived in for the past few years I am 100% sure I would take drugs and have a baby at 15. I am sure. Just living here as a pastor sometimes I think, if only I could get high or drunk to forget all the pain. Isn’t that crazy? But that is reality. Reality in the impoverished inner city is like a bad dream for a suburbanite. In my journal I later wrote about how I left the following week for Texas with Juan for a two-week ministry trip. This is what an old friend named Cheryl told me while I was visiting her beautiful home in the woods- it exploded in my ears when I heard it, "It's okay if you can't handle it." What a concept. Can't handle it? Never been in my vocabulary. I can handle anything! Everything! With God on my side there is nothing I can't do. But, now, well, yes, there is something I can't do. I can't do this anymore. I can't. It is affecting my health with horrible migraine headaches and panic attacks. It is affecting my children who say, "Mom, I'm scared," while a wild man struts down the street out front regularly at 10pm

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shouting horrible shrieks while taking off his clothes, waving them in the air, and walking slowly by. It is every time the doorbell rings almost daily and I ask, "Who is it?" in a timid voice hoping it is not someone who wishes us harm. The last thing I wrote in my journal before we moved was, "I hope I can make it until we move, I hope I can make it. I hope I can keep from losing it really bad. I hope.” Nowadays we only live 6 short miles from Elizabeth, but in a totally different world. When we first arrived at our very small, but cute three-bedroom, one-bath home in Cranford, New Jersey, I cried. I cried for two weeks straight. I felt guilty for leaving the city and the people we minister to. I felt strange seeing white women walking in white clothes pushing their babies in expensive strollers to our nice parks. I felt weird. I still do. I have lived here three months now and I am amazed at the beauty of the homes, the yards, the people, the peace, the crickets at night, the trees. I know this is all good for me, my children and for Juan who needs a place to rest at the end of a stress-filled day at New York City Relief, but still, I remember my friends who have had their new baby girl taken now, my friend who hobbles down the street with many disabled children in tow, and the many girls who roam the streets in prostitution and who are being murdered every day. I can't forget, I can't forget how horrible, how horrible, how horrible, how horrible, how horrible, how horrible, how horrible. God, help them.

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Tracy Galloway, broken, but still in love with God :)

Much of Tracy’s anguish was not for herself, but for our children. As a minister she was committed to doing anything, including suffering, if it would help people to find life and healing through Jesus, but as a mother she was torn because of the environment she was subjecting our children to. Every time I traveled she was filled with fear at the possibility of someone breaking in to our home and killing our children. She would borrow my father’s giant German Shepherd to protect them while I was away. Her heart told her that our kids needed to be nurtured and protected. There was no way to win because she felt that moving meant betraying God’s call on her life and staying meant betraying her children. They don’t teach you about these things in Bible college. The more Tracy got to know the people we ministered to at CityTribe, the more her heart was broken, and I don’t mean in a good way. Her exposure to this degree of depravity and dysfunctional living traumatized her. She couldn’t take it anymore and shut down. Tracy is a strong woman and a strong leader, so discovering that there were things she couldn’t handle was devastating. The guilt she felt was enormous. Finally the light bulb came on over my head and I understood that we had to change the way we were living. I talked to the many people that I was accountable to about moving my family out of

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Elizabeth. I didn’t want to quit fighting the war, but I had to get my family off of the front lines of battle. The counsel we received was overwhelming positive about relocating so we took the plunge and have started a new life. We are developing a healthy family schedule. I am taking my kids out on dates once a week, turning off my cell phone at home, going to the beach more and just trying to have a life outside of ministry. It’s still not easy and we’re still learning how to make it all work. The funny thing is that God used some of these hellish experiences to get our attention and show us what really matters and I think that we’re better off for it. I don’t want to burn out. I want to keep serving Jesus and serving my family. I’m sure that we’re the first people this kind of thing has ever happened to. Yeah right! In the midst of caring for the urban poor it’s extremely important that we care for ourselves. If we aren’t emotionally healthy and honest with ourselves about the way we feel, we won’t be able to help others in their situations. No amount of positive thinking and “overcoming faith” can change that truth. Will we suffer to some degree in order to help others? Of course, but we need boundaries in our lives to keep us from going over the edge. We also need people in our lives that we can be real with and open up all our hurts and pains to. No doubt, working in urban ministry will stretch us and bring our personal issues to the surface. This is our opportunity to deal with our personal issues, not to live in denial of them or wish

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them away. If we pay attention to the emotions God give us and the warning signals that flash in our brain, we can respond appropriately and wisely to take care of ourselves. There is a cost to following Jesus and to serving the poor, but laying your life down is not supposed to be a recipe for burnout. Denial of self is also a denial of ego, pride and the belief that you can save the world. Let God be God. He cares more for the hurting than we ever will. He has created us to work, rest and play too. He wants us to enjoy life, not push through it, gritting our teeth and using every ounce of our will power to make it through the day. Jesus knew his own physical and emotional limitations and broke away from the crowds constantly to recharge his batteries by spending time with his Father. Going down in flames doesn’t give God any glory. Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me -- watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. Matthew 11:28-30 (The Message)

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If we’re going to preach this to others, we had better apply it to ourselves as well. This next verse sums it all up nicely: So let's not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don't give up, or quit.

Galatians 6:9 (The Message)

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Chapter 12

“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”

Woody Allen SOAP BOX MOMENT Bucks Wealth, as well as poverty, is a relative term. I thought of myself as economically challenged until I came back from a mission trip to Ethiopia and saw that my little apartment was a veritable castle in comparison to the huts I had seen. My clothes from Walmart seemed luxurious now, compared to the raiment of the goat herders I had met who owned no shoes. Remember that famous verse about faith without works being dead? Let’s take a look at that verse in context: What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep

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warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

James 2:14-17, 26 The good deeds of faith listed are clothing and feeding the poor. We generalize works to be lots of things and I believe God does want us to love people in a variety of ways, but He specifically mentions clothing and feeding the poor. I don’t think that was a mistake. Some people may be offended by my exclusive focus on the poor, but that’s just what this particular book is about. Yes, we do need to love and minister to rich people, middle-class people and all people that live and breathe. However, the poor do have a special place in God’s heart. Growing up in the church from the age of ten-years-old and on, I didn’t hear many messages on this subject. Of all the thousands of sermons I heard, I actually don’t remember one about serving the poor. This is not to condemn the church, because now I am hearing more messages every day on the subject. I believe that God is giving great revelation on this topic to many people. Please don’t feel condemned if you have money or are not involved with ministry to the poor, because that is not the heart behind this book. Do understand that I do not hate the rich and I am not angry at those who

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have money. However, scripture is full of cautions for those who have wealth and the responsibility that goes with it: Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.

James 3:13-16 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. Submit yourselves, then to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

James 4:3,7 The devil we are resisting here is envy (I want what they’ve got), selfish ambition and being focused on our fulfilling our own pleasure. America is a country that is known for the “American Dream”. If you work hard and long enough you can have it all. Ambition is as American as apple pie.

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Where we cross the line is when our life becomes about self and pride and we forget about those who don’t have enough. When you grow up in an environment like that it becomes a part of you. We need to replace the world’s priorities with God’s. It is a switch in mentality from “I’m going to be somebody” to “I’m going to be nobody and serve. I’m going to lower and humble myself to make someone else who is a nobody to be a somebody.” The world’s image of a leader is intimidating, successful, smart, impressive, aggressive and successful. I don’t see any of that image in the cross, I see a humble servant. We are called to be servant leaders who lay down our lives for others. Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody.

Romans 12:16 (The Message) Let me ask you a question: Do you want to love God more than you do now? It may sound silly, because most of us do, but not all of us are willing to pursue that goal. God has given us a portal to Himself through the poor, the outcast and the misfit. When we love them more, we are loving Him more. The reality of that is that we have to be proactive in finding a place and means to do this, altering our schedule to make time to do this, and then actually going and doing something.

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Don’t run from suffering, embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for? Don’t be in such a hurry to go into business for yourself. Before you know it the Son of Man will arrive with all the splendor of his Father, accompanied by an army of angels. You’ll get everything you have coming to you, a personal gift.

Matthew 16:24-27 (The Message) The strange thing is that the very blessings that God gives us can be the very barriers that hold us back from doing his will. We can get so focused on a lifestyle of comfort and pleasure that we forget who gave it to us, why He gave it to us and how we are to use it for his glory. Remember the story of the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17-31)? He claimed that he was living the word and fulfilling the commandments, but with one statement Jesus found the fatal flaw in his spirituality. He didn’t own his things, his things owned him. When asked to choose between following Jesus and holding onto his cool stuff, he chose the latter.

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“None has more frequent conversations with a disagreeable self than the man of pleasure; his enthusiasms are but few and transient; his appetites, like angry creditors, are continually making fruitless demands for what he is unable to pay; and the greater his former pleasures, the more strong his regret, the more impatient his expectations. A life of pleasure is, therefore, the most unpleasing

life.”

James Goldsmith The problem with success is that we become our success. Our accomplishments become our identity. We get a warped perspective on who we are and what we’re here for. Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel, “The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth.” Success becomes an idol.

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That could be success in business, sports, academics or even ministry. Being a Christian is described in the Bible as becoming a slave or a servant. No matter how much we achieve in life, we’re still called to emulate our master and wash other people’s feet. This downward mobility is highly prized in the Kingdom of God. The wretched don’t have much of a problem with that role. There was the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. Those who have received great mercy and grace are inspired to great humility and sacrifice. A college student named Mike Yankoski felt called of God to travel the cities of America and live as a homeless man for five months. He wrote a book about his experiences called Under The Overpass- A Journey Of Faith On The Streets Of America. He shares one of his many discoveries,

“If we are the body of Christ—and Christ came not for the healthy but the sick—we need to be fully present in the places where people are most broken. And it has to be more than just a financial presence. That helps, of course. But too often money is insulation—it conveniently keeps us from ever having to come face-to-face with a man or woman whose life is in tatters.”

The wealth we have, whether that means we have a big bank account, an X-Box, a computer or a car

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shouldn’t prevent us from connecting with other people who have less. God has in fact given us these things so that we can use them to help others. There is a parable in the Bible about a man who hoards his wealth by building more barns to hold his grain (Luke 12:13-21). What he doesn’t know is that he won’t live another day to enjoy it and so has wasted his opportunity for true treasures and rewards. Every time I move to a new home and have to sort through my belongings I am reminded of how much we humans hoard things that we don’t need. We have to buy special containers (entertainment centers, dressers, trunks, cabinets, hutches, plastic boxes, glass cases, shelves, etc) to hold all these things, and to fit these containers we have to have houses large enough to hold them. I’m not trying to say that we need to take a vow of poverty and live as paupers forsaking all material possessions, but I wonder how many of us would be willing to lay these things down if Jesus asked us to. I wonder this about myself as well. While at a convention in Chicago, Illinois I visited a friend who I had gone to Bible college with named Colleen Davick. She has lived for the past twelve years in a Christian community that serves the poor in the inner city. The community is called Jesus People USA or JPUSA (www.jpusa.org). The 500 members of JPUSA live in a funky old building called the Chelsea Hotel that used to house jazz musicians in the 1930’s. The origins of the community go back to 1970 when a bunch of hippies got saved and started doing ministry together. Today this community has multiple businesses that members work and operate. The proceeds support the people who live there as

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well as all their ministries, including several shelters, after school programs, music outreach bands and a feeding ministry. What struck me was the way the members of this community lived. Their apartments were small units that barely fit a small bed and a couple of dressers. All of the community ate together in a cafeteria and took turns doing dishes as well as many other community chores. It was obvious that no one there had much, besides, where would they keep it? The other obvious thing was that they didn’t need much. By choosing a simple lifestyle, they were able to pour their resources into helping the poor in their neighborhood. It was inspiring and challenged my own comfort level to be sure. John Piper writes in Desiring God,

“There is a war going on. All talk of a Christian’s right to live luxuriantly “ as a child of the King” in this atmosphere sounds hollow – especially since the King himself is stripped for battle. It is more helpful to think of a “wartime” lifestyle than a merely “simple” lifestyle. Simplicity can be very inward directed, and may benefit no one else. A wartime lifestyle implies that there is a great and worthy cause for which to spend and be spent (2 Corinthians 12:15)….Why does God bless us with abundance? So we can have enough to live on and then use the rest for all manner of good works that alleviate spiritual and physical misery.”

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Over the last several years I have come in contact with many successful businessmen and women who have chosen to downsize their lifestyle, get out of debt and lower their cost of living to be freed up to help others. After they got the brass ring they found that there was more to life and Jesus was calling them to pursue His riches. Maybe your comfort level has been challenged and you are feeling the itch to shed the excess to focus on what really matters. In 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, Paul keeps encouraging the Corinthian church to give liberally to help out their poor fellow believers. He explains that it’s not just shelling out some cash for charity: Carrying out this social relief work involves far more than helping meet the bare needs of poor Christians. It also produces abundant and bountiful thanksgivings to God. This relief offering is a prod to live at your very best, showing your gratitude to God by being openly obedient to the plain meaning of the Message of Christ. You show your gratitude through your generous offerings to your needy brothers and sisters, and really toward everyone. Meanwhile, moved by the extravagance of God in your lives, they'll respond by praying for you in passionate intercession for whatever you need. Thank God for this gift, his gift. No language can praise it enough! 2 Corinthians 9:12-15 (The Message)

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Enabling No one likes to be taken advantage of. When we help the poor or outcast and they don’t try to improve their lot in life, we feel used. There is a fine line sometimes between helping someone out and enabling them. The typical conundrum is, “Should I give money to this drug addict or alcoholic and support their habit?” We have to use discernment and be led by the Holy Spirit no matter what the situation is so that we can be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves”. People ask me for help all the time that I don’t or can’t respond to for different reasons. That’s where prayer comes in and learning to hear the voice of God to respond appropriately. God doesn’t want people to leach off of us and use us as their private rescue squad every time they make a bad decision that brings about negative consequences. We had a guy coming to CityTribe regularly who had been part of a Hispanic gang when he was in prison. He was covered with tattoos including Stars of David under the corner of each of his eyes with two tear drops under each star. He came to the New York City Relief office one day to see me and told me how he was living in fear for his life. He said that he had to sneak around town to avoid a certain drug dealer’s territory because every time he got caught they would beat him up. When I inquired why, he explained that his sister owed the man money and had borrowed it in his name, so they expected him to pay it back. I asked how much money this was and expected to hear a large amount, but he said that they only wanted thirty dollars. I told him that I would be glad to pay the drug dealer thirty dollars to leave him alone. It

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seemed a small price to buy his freedom. He was reticent to take me along because he said they would think I was a narc. I told him that there aren’t many white guys with dreadlocks who are narcs. So we jumped in the car and headed to the projects which are only two blocks from my parent’s house. We parked and approached the building. I didn’t see anyone out front and asked the guy where the dealer was. He replied that he would be inside the building in the hallway. Well, I knew for sure that I didn’t want to go in some dark hallway. Luckily the drug dealer and his sidekick walked down the sidewalk to meet us. I introduced myself and explained that I was Pastor Juan from CityTribe Church. He looked like a thug out of a rap video. His partner was giving me the evil eye stare to let me know I had better be on my guard. I told the dealer that I understood this guy owed him money and how I wanted to help. I asked how much he owed and the dealer said, “ I don’t know, ten dollars?”. The guy next to me was real fidgety and nervous. He said, “No, you remember, I owe you thirty dollars.” I asked the dealer why this guy owed him thirty dollars and he replied, “Grass”. I told him that I wouldn’t be able to help pay for marijuana and told him how nice it was to meet him. As we walked away the guy with all the tattoos got extremely angry with me. Of course he was angry- he was caught in a lie! Now I was stuck with an angry druggie gang member. I drove him home and as he got out of the car he cursed me out and threw a Bible I had given him earlier out into the middle of the street. I felt that God had taught me a valuable lesson and protected my life. I could have gotten busted by the police for giving

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cash to a known drug dealer on the street. I could have gotten robbed. I could have gotten beat up by the guy I was trying to help. I felt pretty foolish for buying the guy’s story in the first place, but was grateful for the grace to learn from that lesson and live another day. In Theirs Is The Kingdom- Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America, Robert Lupton explains,

“In the poverty culture of the inner city, the lie is a way of life. It is a tool the powerless use to get what they need (or want) from the powerful. “I tire of being hooked, deceived, taken from. But when I consider the safer ways of giving, the impersonal media appeals, the professional mailings that would free me from contagion and protect me from seeing the whole picture, I know I must continue touching and being touched. At least I am touched by persons with names and familiar faces. I can confront. I can express disappointment to the one who has betrayed my trust. I can be angry with or embrace the one who has taken from me. “And I can grow. I can see the manipulations I place on my giving, my own subtle forms of manipulation. I am confronted with my pride that requires

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others to conform to my image. I see my need to control, to meter out love in exchange for the responses I desire. “I will opt to be manipulated in person. For somewhere concealed in these painful interactions are the keys to my own freedom.”

Paul spurs us on to give to the poor, but not to support people’s laziness, because obviously there are those who will abuse our generosity as Christians. Many on the streets learn to hustle just to survive and will fabricate all kinds of lies to stimulate you to respond in sympathy. This is still no excuse to write them off, even when they are trying to hustle you. It’s a great opportunity to “speak the truth in love” and take the time to love the sinner. Your attempt to care for them even when you know they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes will probably blow them away. You might say something like, “Hey man, let’s talk. I understand that you’re just trying to survive, but you don’t have to tell me all these stories. You really need God’s help more than just a couple of bucks. Let’s have a hamburger and get to know each other.” We shouldn’t take offense at deception, but look through the fruit of their actions to see the root of the problem in their damaged soul. This isn’t making excuses for people, but looking at them through eyes of grace. Check out what Paul has to say about helping the poor:

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So here's what I think: The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year (concerning their giving to the poor) and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart's been in the right place all along. You've got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it. Once the commitment is clear, you do what you can, not what you can't. The heart regulates the hands. This isn't so others can take it easy while you sweat it out. No, you're shoulder to shoulder with them all the way, your surplus matching their deficit, their surplus matching your deficit. In the end you come out even. As it is written,

Nothing left over to the one with the most,

Nothing lacking to the one with the least.”

2 Corinthians 8:10-15 (The Message)

Sound like communism? It’s not. It’s how people react when they are filled with the Spirit of God as detailed in the second chapter of Acts. The biggest manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the early church wasn’t the tongues of fire, prophecy, or speaking in tongues on the day of Pentecost. It was the sacrificial giving to others and the selflessness they exemplified.

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All these folks living for God linked arms and shared every thing they owned with their new found “family”. They would even pawn their family heirlooms just to help a friend out. They literally tried to hook up with each other every day over at The Jewish Worship Center. It was the coolest and most spontaneous movement of goodwill ever. These Jesus freaks just couldn’t get enough of each other. Everyone thought it was just the best and dug being together all the time: eating, singing songs to God and enjoying one another’s company. This fascinated outsiders considerably and people joined their ranks daily, committing their lives to Jesus along with them.

Acts 2:44-47 (28, The Street Bible) By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

John 13:35 See My Faith? Amy L. Sherman writes in Sharing God’s Heart for the Poor, Meditations for Worship, Prayer and Service,

“Every church should seek to be a “drawing” church, a church that non-Christians are curious about, and

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attracted to, because of the things they see the congregation doing that just don’t make sense to them in our dog-eat-dog world. Much of the Church’s witness in the world depends on what the world sees us doing through our mercy and benevolence ministries. This is what the world needs to see the Church doing. It needs to see the Church demonstrating a heavenly kindness, love and service that goes far beyond the mere politeness and niceness of the world. A cheap, easy, arms-length, clinical benevolence does not give off an enticing aroma. But sacrificial love and service does give off an aroma; and there are people who are far from God who have noses that can sniff this aroma and be drawn toward God because of it.”

How’s that for an evangelism program? Prove who Jesus is by your actions more than your words. Talk is cheap and the world has accused the church of being long on moral superiority and short on personal sacrifice. There is a way to silence those accusations: On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."

Romans 12:20

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Instead of another slogan, bumper sticker, T-shirt, boycott, picket, march, or political attack why not quietly, behind the scenes take care of those who need help? Instead of another marketing campaign, direct mailing or TV ad to grow our church, why not practice Jesus’ method of changing the world: So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Matthew 6:2-4

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Chapter 13

“These things we do, so that others might live.”

U.S. Coast Guard SOAP BOX FINAL CHAPTER COME ALIVE! In An Unstoppable Force- daring to become the church GOD had in mind, Erwin Raphael McManus states,

“The life of the church is the heart of God. The heart of God is to serve a broken world. The serving that we are called to requires direct contact. You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it. There is a sense of mystery to this, but it is in serving that the church finds her strength. When she ceases to serve the world around her, she begins to atrophy.”

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It is in SERVING that the church finds her strength! It’s what we were designed for and what Jesus modeled for us. In Isaiah 58, God talks about what really matters to him and what will make us come alive. It’s these specific verses that God used to call my mom and dad to start New York City Relief, and consequently led to me coming to start East Coast School of Urban Ministry and CityTribe Church. Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?

Isaiah 58:6 In other words, God is saying, “I’m not wanting a sacrificial religious ritual from you of just going without food. This is what I really want…” Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

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Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

Isaiah 58:7-10 Amy L. Sherman writes in Sharing God’s Heart for the Poor, Meditations for Worship, Prayer and Service,

“The word translated “spend” in verse 10, connotes the idea of issuing forth. It’s the idea of pouring out. The King James Version talks of “drawing out” your soul to bestow a mercy upon the recipient. We use terms like these when we talk about water. We talk about pouring out water or drawing water from a well. And what we are being told to spend in these verses is our heart and soul, and we are to pour it out, to issue it forth to water others. But isn’t it our feat, that by pouring ourselves out, we will become empty and dry? What holds us back from spending our lives on the

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poor, from pouring out that which is inside of us? Isn’t it a fear that we won’t have anything left? That if we pour it all out we ourselves will be dry?”

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

Isaiah 58:11-12 Amy L. Sherman goes on to say,

“And that is the promise of Isaiah 58:11. We take ourselves and our “water” and we pour ourselves out in a sun-scorched place, among people who need the water. And we ourselves do not run dry because God pours Himself and His provision into us so that we become “well-watered gardens.” This is the wonderful paradox of the Christian life. When we pour ourselves out we do not become empty; instead, we become full. As we give ourselves out, God pours Himself and His provision in. Through our enriching entanglement in the lives

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of the poor in the places of pain and rought, we become, by the hand and faithful provision of God, a well-watered garden.”

THEN our light will shine, THEN we will be like a spring whose waters never fail, THEN God will satisfy our needs, THEN the Lord will make us strong.

My panicked entry into urban ministry

My Crumbs? You may think, “I only have a little bread of life here and sometimes I feel like it barely sustains me. What do I have to offer others?” Remember when the little boy gave Jesus and the disciples the little sack lunch he had, which consisted of five loaves and two fishes? Jesus took his love offering and broke it and

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in that breaking process it multiplied to feed five thousand people. It’s a perfect analogy. God isn’t asking you to give what you don’t have, just what He has given you. The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

I Peter 4:7-11 Need motivation? “The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing

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the thing, that's when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”

John Maxwell

“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”

Mother Teresa The best time to start is now and the best way to start is to do something. Anything. Don’t wait until the ideal situation comes together or you’ll never do anything. God’s high calling on your and my life is summed up in Luke 10:27: He said, "That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence -- and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself."

Luke 10:27 (The Message)

Your power and strength to carry out this mission is coming from the same source that Jesus had:

God's Spirit is on me; he's chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to

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prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, "This is God's year to act!"

Luke 4:18,19 (The Message) The Harvest The harvest is ripe, but like the disciples, the church has found that sometimes they fish all night and their nets come up empty. We can work so hard with so little fruit to show for it that it’s easy to get discouraged. On the other hand, if we were guided by Jesus himself on where to throw the nets, the amount of positive results might be overwhelming. Where is Jesus telling us to throw our nets? Through the way he lived, we have a good idea of his demographic target for evangelism. He went to those who were obviously in trouble: tax-collectors, criminals, prostitutes, drunkards, and the poor. These were the folks who were ripe for the harvest and ready for immediate relief. John Edwin Fuder writes in Training Students for Urban Ministry: An Experiential Approach,

“Viv Grigg reminds us that the poor are collectively the most responsive people group, as demonstrated by Jesus’ teaching and personal example (Luke 4:18) and confirmed by sociological analysis in general.” In The Problem Of Wineskins, ‘Howard Snyder has also

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aptly noted, “A healthy emphasis on the gospel to the poor may be the surest antidote to institutionalism and irrelevant structures. The most viable training model is the incarnational approach, patterned after Jesus’ example.”

The evangelical church has turned away from mercy ministry as a foundational tool for outreach and has embraced evangelism solely with words. The two are inseparable. Evangelism has become a one-sided speech instead of an intermingling of lives. Tim Keller writes in Ministries of Mercy, The Call of the Jericho Road,

“Evangelical Christians today are by no means against helping the needy and hurting. Yet “social relief work” is generally looked at as a secondary duty. It is something we get to if there is time and money in the budget, after we are satisfied with our educational and evangelistic ministries.”

We have thrown all of our eggs into one basket—church services. At what point during our “services” do we actually physically serve anyone? In my brother’s church in Oklahoma, before the pastor took the offering, he actually said, “If anyone is in need, feel free to take money out of the offering plate when it passes by you.” Wow! Now that’s helping people immediately.

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Tim Keller goes on to say,

“During the past two decades, Christians have been exposed more and more to the biblical teaching that every believer is a minister. Although most Christians are not polished preachers and apologists, yet every Christian is to be a witness. Although most Christians are not skilled psychologists and counselors, yet every Christian is to be a people-helper. Sermons, seminars, and books have been pounding these concepts into our consciousness for years. “However, in at least one realm, the ministry of mercy, laypeople are still consigning ministry to the “experts.” In fact, the church herself has almost completely conceded this work to secular agencies and authorities. Many Christians cannot clearly define this duty, though they may have good understandings of the ministries of evangelism, education, worship, teaching, and fellowship. “Most of us have not come to grips with the clear directive of Scripture that all Christians must have their own ministry of mercy. We must each be actively engaged in it ourselves.”

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The First Step Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, “How can I help?” That’s exactly what Jesus did. He didn’t make it easy for himself by avoiding people’s troubles, but waded right in and helped out.

Romans 15:1-3 (The Message) We are all called to fulfill the great commission and it is time for us to stop turning a blind eye to the disenfranchised in society. The way to really get revelation on God’s heart in this area is to expose ourselves to the need firsthand. His truth will become clearly evident to us as we are exposed to poverty, not so that we can then feel guilty, but so that we can begin to see the world through different lenses and understand how other people live. This allows us to appreciate what we have and to feel God’s burden for those who live without. It gives us the opportunity to reevaluate our values and priorities and question whether or not they are God’s values and priorities. It leads us to examine how we spend our resources and challenges our stewardship. Does

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it hurt to be exposed to the dark side of the world? Yes. Jesus hurt for us, so how can we not share in his sufferings? We truly are our brother’s keeper. We have what everyone needs and wants. Now we must give it away. That is truly what life is all about. In Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell states,

“Very few people in our world are offering anything worth dying for. Most of the messages we receive are about how to make life easier. The call of Jesus goes the other direction: It’s about making our lives more difficult. It is going out of our way to be more generous and disciplined and loving and free. It is refusing to escape and become numb to, and check out of this broken, fractured world. “And so we are embracing the high demands of Jesus’ call to be one of his disciples. “This is what we are all dying for -- something that demands we step up and become better, more focused people. Something that calls out the greatness that we hope is somewhere inside of us.”

Look upon the poor, the rejected, the immigrant, the outcast, the disease infected, for they are you and you are them. Because of God’s nature, He aligns

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himself with and identifies himself with them. As you embrace them, you embrace your true self that God created you to be and you embrace God himself. Feel overwhelmed by the task at hand? Jesus knew it was a big job, but gave us advice on how to get started: This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.

Matthew 10:42 (The Message) You are the beggar to whom he has given bread. Now go show the other beggars where you found it.

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BONUS CHAPTER Compassion Revival There is a shift happening in American churches from “services” to service. Just as when the Holy Spirit moved upon the early church, compelling them to help the poor and disadvantaged, God seems to be moving upon the body of Christ in this generation to focus upon the needy. Society is beginning to acknowledge that excess does not equal satisfaction. In the midst of a recession, people are investing their money and energy in what they see as being the most important. They are aligning with God’s heart for the poor and moving into action respectively. After the attack on 9-11, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti and a host of other tragedies and calamities, the church is responding by rising up to take its proper place as salt and light through action: giving finances and sweat to help the helpless. According to 1 John 3:17,18, the litmus test for whether our faith is legitimate is whether it is moved to bring relief to the hurting. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the

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truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence.

1 John 3:17-19 (NIV) Without engagement in God’s story, we forget who we are. We live a different story and don’t rise to become the real us. When we do engage in God’s story, Jesus comes alive in us. The new story is one worth living, one of risk, adventure and true faith. Epilogue: Not long after the launch of Frontlines Church and The Street Hip Hop Church, my wife Tracy was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and my world turned upside down. I had to take a leave of absence from New York City Relief and I turned over the reins of the newly planted Hip Hop church to Pastor Ruddy Daville. This was a tremendously difficult period in my life as I faced the pain of my wife’s illness: fibromyalgia. After four months of caring Tracy and our kids as she slowly recuperated, I came back to New York City Relief to work as the Director of Communications. Over the next four years, Tracy continued to suffer horrible fatigue along with pain throughout her body. At the same time God did a deep work in me as I faced my fears and inadequacies in dealing with her condition. This process ultimately let Him bring me more freedom as I learned to walk in more grace. After coming back to work, I developed a new urban ministry training system with my friend and co-worker Jim Berry called “StreetWise, A Faith Journey With

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The Poor”. Teams from around America have been equipped to help the poorest of the poor through our videos, workbooks and exercises. This training allows them to hit the ground running when they arrive at our bus to begin their urban missions experience. We are discovering that for many volunteers, their local church is a classroom experience and The Relief Bus is the lab where they get to experiment and put their faith into action. All that work I did with East Coast School of Urban Ministry paid off, as we took much from that school experience and condensed it into these user-friendly tools that are working wonderfully today. DON ’T WALK BY Rocks The City! Over the last couple of years, The Relief Bus joined together with The Bowery Mission, NYC Rescue Mission and many others in the month of January under the new banner of the NYC Rescue Alliance to participate in a historic outreach called Don’t Walk By. This outreach mobilized thousands of volunteers from over 100 churches to walk every block on the island of Manhattan within five Saturday evenings, searching for street bound homeless and helping them get off the streets. Thousands of homeless people have been helped, loved and encouraged to make a change. Learn more at www.dontwalkby.org. Big Changes After serving for four years as Director of Communications, I sensed a change was coming and began searching for a position as a pastor at an established church. In the heat of the economic

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recession, little transition was occuring overall in church leadership. During this time, the Executive Director at New York City Relief moved on, thrusting my father Richard back into the hot seat of overseeing the daily operations of the organization. As we met with the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors to strategize for the transition in leadership for the future, I was directly challenged to consider taking the position of Executive Director. This initially shocked me and later, made me upset. What was God trying to do to me? I saw the toll this job had taken on my father: the stress over finances to keep the outreach of The Relief Bus going on the streets, and responsibility of leading the staff. This was no small thing. My main reluctance was stepping into the shadow of my father, a man I deeply respect. I wasn’t him, so could I do his job as effectively? With others help I began to see that I could be myself and still do this job using my own unique gifts and abilities. I went away to fast and pray. I felt broken as I wept before God and sought His face. I sensed that in fact, He did want me to take this job. I felt a fire begin to stir in my belly. With the full support of the staff, and much fear and trembling, I took the plunge and was appointed to the new position in the month of February 2010. As I face my own insecurities, fears and anxieties daily, I am forced to turn back to Jesus once again (go figure!). I find that His grace really is sufficient for me. Hebrews 13:21 tells me that Jesus will equip me

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in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight. Socially Networked Four months into this job I am in awe of how much God continues to accomplish on the streets with The Relief Bus. We are posting these reports along with photos and videos as they happen on Facebook and Twitter, allowing others to follow us and pray with us:

www.facebook.com/thereliefbus, www.twitter.com/thereliefbus.

You don’t have to wait to get a newsletter in the mail now. You can find out what God is doing on the streets as it is still happening! Relief Bus, The Next Generation After I took this new position, big things started to happen, but not because of anything I had done. One of our buses died months before and we began to raise money for a new bus. Not just another old, used, worn out bus; we set our sights on a new, modern bus that would work better than any we had ever used in the past. The dream is becoming a reality and this new super bus will hit the streets with diamond plated, heavy-reinforced everything. Thousands of lives will be touched through the next 20 years of outreach with this vehicle. Another big change is the turning over of our Elizabeth, New Jersey community outreach known as The Hope Center to Streetlight Mission. We moved out of the leased building into the adjacent building we own. We crammed into a small office space, while

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the rest of the building is being framed and developed into a new facility complete with volunteer team dormitories, a multipurpose room for training and new office spaces. This new facility will allow us to invest into volunteer teams more than ever before, maximizing their experience and their impact on the streets. The Road To Relief As I come into this new position, the ministry is celebrating 20 years of The Relief Bus going out on the streets to fulfill Isaiah 58:6-12. Many ministries have come and gone while amazingly God kept New York City Relief alive using this small team of urban missionaries, donors and thousands of volunteers. My father always said the ministry’s major miracle and claim to fame was, “We’re still here!” The courage and sacrifice of my parents and the staff to get this organization where it is today is hard to describe. These people are heroes of the faith. I stepped into a position on the shoulders of servants of God who endured much for the sake of the broken, the outcast and their deep love of God. It is a humbling and sobering experience. We are all in this position, for it is only because of those who have gone before us that we are where we are and who we are today. Yet we all still come back to the same place of having to go before God for daily manna, daily bread. Let God find us faithful in giving out His bread to those around us who are hungry. We love Him and others because he loved us first. He is our everything.

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THE RELIEF BUS Mission: Life Transformation The Relief Bus exists to respond to God’s heart for the poor and broken by going to the streets to offer food, compassion, and connections to resources that lead to life transformation. To accomplish this mission we partner together with volunteers and care giving organizations. Method CATER The Relief Bus meets some immediate felt needs of people on the streets such as food and clothing in order to connect with the poor and homeless. COMPASSION As staff and volunteers meet the needy, we strive to instill hope by building relationship and trust through conversation, compassion and prayer. CLUES Out of relationship we discover other needs such as shelter, jobs, medical help and recovery from life-controlling issues such as alcoholism and drug addiction. CONNECT Our next step is to connect the person in need with a resource that will help meet that need and ultimately lead to life transformation.

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CONTINUE We endeavor to follow up on the person we are assisting to continue connecting them to more resources on their pathway to life and freedom. CHRIST Ultimately we believe that God is the life giver and will give those in need the strength to walk through the process of transformation. COMMUNITY As we go through this process together, our staff will not endeavor to come as those who have all the answers, but as humble companions in the journey. Motto “These things we do…….that others may live. Mandate Isaiah 58:6-12 (New International Version) 6 "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? 8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. 9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am

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I. "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, 10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. 11 The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. 12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

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Notes : Dare To Journey With Henri Nouwen by Charles Ringma, Pinon Press, Reflections 9, 21, 31, 142, 151, 170, 171 Restoring At-Risk Communities: Doing It Together & Doing It Right by Bob Lupton, Peggy Lupton and Gloria Yancy, pages 75-106 Urban Ministry- The Kingdom, the City & the People of God by Harvie M. Conn and Manuel Ortiz, pages 353, 350, 349, 70, 71, 79 A New Kind Of Christian by Brian D. McLaren, Jossey-Bass, pages 155, 156 The Gutter- Where Life Is Meant To Be Lived by Craig Gross, Relevant Books, pages 3, 54, 57, 59 The Barbarian Way by Erwin Raphael McManus, Nelson Books, pages 31,34, 45, 101 An Unstoppable Force- daring to become the church GOD had in mind by Erwin Raphael McManus, Group Publishing, page 23 Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, Zondervan, page 169,170 The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning, Multnomah Publishers, page 27, 58

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A Glimpse of Jesus- The Stranger to Self-Hatred by Brennan Manning, Multnomah Publishers, page 35 Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan, Orbis Books, page39 Theirs Is The Kingdom- Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton 1989, Harper Collins, page 6,7, 31, 42 RBC Ministries July 2003 Email Newsletter, President Mart DeHann Desiring God by John Piper, Multnomah Books, 1986, page 170 The Contagious Congregation: Frontiers in Evangelism and Church Growth by George G. Hunter, Abingdon, page 41,42 Training Students for Urban Ministry: An Experiential Approach by John Edwin Fuder, Wipf and Stock Publishers, page 3, 4 Cry of the Urban Poor by Viv Grigg, MARC, page 10 The Problem of Wineskins by Howard A. Snyder, InterVarsity Press, page 48 Sharing God’s Heart for the Poor, Meditations for Worship, Prayer and Service by Amy L. Sherman, Feb. 2000, Published by Trinity Presbyterian church- Urban Ministries and Welfare Policy Center of the Hudson Institute, page 16,17, 36,37

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Ministries of Mercy, The Call of the Jericho Road by Timothy J. Keller, P&R Publishing, page 11, 12, 38, 43, 55 Communication Theory for Christian Witness by Charles Kraft, Abingdon, page 203 Studies in the Sermon on the Mount by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Banner of Truth, page 172 Loving God by Charles Colson, Zondervan, page 39, 174 28, The Street Bible, by Juan Galloway, Acts 2:44-47, Matthew 25:31-46 Articles: Outcast Nation, Enter The Rejected, The Cry Of The Poor, Food For Thought And Thought For Food, Party With The Poor, Trash or Treasure, Resign Your Judgeship, The Tsunami Of Self by Juan Galloway, The Love Express Christian Newspaper, Article: The Challenge Of The Poor by Juan Galloway, The Foursquare City (Urban Ministry Magazine), International Church of the Foursquare Gospel

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Hailey, Tracy, Juan, River, Connor, & Corban Galloway

Juan Galloway, Executive Director The Relief Bus 295 Walnut Street Elizabeth, NJ 07201 (908) 352-8778 juan@reliefbus.org www.reliefbus.org www.facebook.com/juangalloway www.twitter.com/juangalloway SPECIAL THANKS The printing of this book was made possible through generous donations from New York City Relief Board members Daniel S. Benson, Robert A. Karson and Daniel Buttafuoco.

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HOW ABOUT YOU? Would you like to help keep The Relief Bus going in its mission to bring life transformation to the poor and homeless? Go to www.RELIEFBUS.org to make a donation online today. THANK YOU!

or Fill out this page and mail it in with your donation. YES! I WILL GIVE $20 $50 $100 $250 $500 $1000 Other $_________ Monthly$__________ Your monthly donation will be processed on the 5th of each month. GIVING METHOD Credit Card (Visa/ MC/ AmEx) Card#___________________Exp._____/______ Check payable to The Relief Bus Bank Draft – voided check enclosed for monthly bank debit Paypal – Send donation to hope@reliefbus.org Maximize your donation; ask your employer about matching gifts. Name (please print)___________________________ Address:_____________________________Apt#___ City:____________________State____ Zip________ Telephone:__________________________________ Email:______________________________________ Facebook Profile Name:_______________________ The Relief Bus is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization, and your gifts are tax deductible.