Jesus Loves the Disconnected (Part 2)
I’ve already said that I loved the chapter in Jesus Loves You titled “Jesus Loves the Disconnected.” In this chapter Jason Harper writes about Jesus meeting the common needs of common people, pointing out that “Jesus loved them with authentic compassion and practical help.” Mission: St. Louis is living out the love people call better than most organizations I know. Their heart for the people of inner city St. Louis is inspiring. I recently had an opportunity to talk with Josh Wilson, Executive Director of Mission: St. Louis, about meeting the needs of the disconnected in their community. It’s an honor to share the work that they are doing with you.
NW: What is Mission: St. Louis?
JW: We’re a community development organization committed to serving the needs of people in high-risk, high-need areas.
NW: How did Mission: St. Louis get started?
JW: I moved to St. Louis from Louisiana with a strong background in sports camp development, and I knew I wanted to get involved in sports here. I started working at the downtown YMCA doing sports and after-school care. That was my first experience with really touching the needs of the urban poor. I saw the face of poverty. Through the YMCA program, I started working with charter schools and met children every day who didn’t know who their dads were or had seen a family member get shot. It wrecked me. I spent six days each week with these kids and one day a week at my middle-class, predominantly white church, The Journey. I knew these two worlds had to meet. So at The Journey we started to ask, “What would it look like if we lived outside these walls?”
NW: What is your relationship to The Journey?
JW: Mission: St. Louis started when I was doing an internship at The Journey. I asked for volunteers to serve in the city, and immediately I had 200 volunteers signed up. I wanted to do everything. In our desire to do it all, we had burned out about 150 of our volunteers within the first three months. I knew we had to figure out how to do this well because it wasn’t working. Around that time we did a school supply drive for a local elementary school. When we dropped off the supplies we met the faculty at the school and started a conversation with them. We felt a connection with them and knew that we had to go back. After that meeting I went to talk to the principal and told her that we wanted to help in the community but couldn’t figure out how. She said, “You can start by loving my babies, because half of them don’t know how to read.” So we set aside all of our other projects and narrowed our focus to running a literacy program at this elementary school.
NW: Mission: St. Louis has a large scope of services. How did it grow out of that one literacy program?
JW: When you’re meeting with a child every day, sitting down next to them trying to teach them how to read, it doesn’t take long before you start to see what’s going on in their world outside the school. We started hearing about food needs, employment needs, single-parent households — everything that was going on in the lives of these children. We were hearing so many needs that we started talking about what it would look like if we stopped helping other non-profits and poured all of our resources into this one community. It was an attractive idea because in this situation, we weren’t coming in with big plans to help. We were in a position where the people in the community were teaching us how to best love them.
NW: Once you really dug into the community, how did program needs start to emerge?
JW: After the literacy program, we started a program called “Cross the Street.” The sole responsibility of these volunteers is to build relationships. They go into the community and just walk around talking to people who are playing basketball or sitting on their porches or just walking down the street. Program needs evolve out of those relationships. One guy, Maurice, is a perfect example of how this works. When we met Maurice, he was sitting on his front porch with a glass of gin and had been addicted to crack for 25 years. We kept coming back and were eventually invited onto the porch, and one of our volunteers established a relationship with him. Over the past few years, we’ve seen Maurice stay sober and reconcile with his wife and children. He now hosts a Bible study in his home. At each Bible study we talk about what’s going on in the community, and that’s how we hear about the needs. For the most part, you can group them under education, empowerment, and economic development, so that’s what we’ve decided to focus on.
As Mission: St. Louis grew, we knew that we needed to become our own 501(c)3 to really advocate for the community and begin pursuing grants. Becoming independent from The Journey has created a lot of opportunities to develop our outreach efforts. But no matter how big we become, we’ll never come in and say, “We want to do this program.” We focus on meeting needs organically and raising new leaders out of the neighborhood.
NW: Out of all of your programs, I have to ask about your prison after-care program. Tell me a little bit about it.
JW: That is a perfect example of meeting the needs of the community. When we were working with these kids and working in the neighborhoods, we heard over and over stories of single moms raising children, and we started to ask where were all the men? What we heard was that many of these dads had been locked up. This happened so often that we knew we needed to go find these guys. So we started the program to work with them while they were still in prison and help them transition back into the community. To participate they have to be for real about life change, and if they take it seriously, we help them with skills development, parenting, employment search, whatever they need.
NW: What’s next for Mission: St. Louis?
JW: We recently applied for a $5 million HUD grant that we’re praying will help us with some housing programs, but our big project right now is creating a needs database that we can use to mobilize volunteers from the community and from other churches. Right now, we get calls from local government, the Department of Children’s Services, or public schools with requests to help with minor needs. It may be an elderly lady who needs someone to mow her lawn or the Department of Children’s Services telling us that they have a client who needs to have major home repairs done in order to keep their children. We want to meet all those needs. Our new database will categorize them by zip code so that when volunteers call in, we can connect them with something in their area.
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