This past Saturday I had the opportunity to volunteer at Hope Ministries here in Des Moines. Hope is a parachurch organization that brings the gospel to the homeless and poverty-stricken in practical ways. They have a number of different ministries, including a homeless shelter for men, a year-long recovery program for alcoholics and drug addicts, and a cafeteria that serves three meals a day, 365 days a year, free to anyone with no questions asked.

My friends Jeremy and Shana are part of Vineyard Community Church, and about three times a year, a group from the church will volunteer at Hope from 9:00 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. They were doing it this weekend, so Jeremy invited Amanda and I to come along. It’s always the same basic schedule: the morning is spent sorting through donations at Hope Bargain Center on the east side of Des Moines. After that, everyone goes to Hope Café for lunch, and then in the afternoon a group goes down to the tent camps by either the Des Moines River or the Raccoon River to give food and supplies to the homeless people who live there.

It’s long, so click the link below to see my full account of the day.

Hope Bargain Center

The Hope Bargain Center is a thrift store on the east side of Des Moines. It’s open to the public, but they also provide free clothing to those who need it. When we got there in the morning, Amanda and Shana sorted through boxes of books while Jeremy and I helped to finish a new room that would be used to sell furniture. Jeremy is a contractor who does remodeling and finish work, while I have barely used a power drill, so you can imagine who did most of the work. But at least I could hold the boards in place while he hit them.

At the bargain center I met Rodney, a living testament to God’s working through Hope: a few years ago, he was an alcoholic who had reached rock bottom one too many times. He found out about Hope, went through the Door of Faith recovery program, and gave his life to Jesus. Now he runs the bargain center full time. Rodney is one of the most cheerful people I’ve met. The bargain center gets a lot of donations and it’s a lot of work to sort through everything, but just by being there and being himself, he maintains everyone’s perspective. It’s not just a sixth weekday. It’s kingdom work, and kingdom work is exciting, even if it’s just throwing away romance novels!

When we were done there, we went over to Hope Café for lunch, which is part of Bethel Mission, the men’s homeless shelter.

Hope Café

When we arrived, we were taken to the chapel area where we were joined by two other groups: a team of about 15 from a local Catholic church and a youth group of maybe 12 from Fort Dodge. There, we met Dave Burrier, who handles public relations for Hope Ministries. He gave us a proper introduction to Hope, painting us a landscape view of what Hope Ministries does in the community: their men’s shelter is the largest in Iowa, and their recovery program has such a high success rate that the courts will often require people to go through it, even though Hope is entirely private, receives no government funding, and is brazenly Christian.

I said earlier that Hope Café serves three meals every day of the year to anyone in the community. This is not entirely accurate. After Dave finished telling us about Hope, he had everyone count off to five, and asked the 3’s and 5’s to come with him. Jeremy was a 2 and I was a 4, while Shana and Amanda were 3 and 5 respectively, so we were separated from our wives. Dave led the two groups out of the room, and returned alone a few minutes later. “They are all in line for lunch right now,” he told us. “The rest of you won’t be eating today.”

He went on to explain that empathy is the key to what they do at Hope: “Right now, the other two groups are eating pasta and salad, with the guilt of knowing that you all are left in here with nothing. And you are in here with nothing, perhaps envious of those who get a hot meal. You may be really mad at me right now. I don’t care! Until we can understand how these homeless people feel every day, we can’t serve them in a meaningful way. But when you stop to get a hamburger on the way home, remember that most of them don’t have that luxury.”

Every hunger pang throughout the rest of the afternoon was a reminder to me that I don’t deserve to be fed. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege. And it’s a privilege that I have never had to do without.

But we were the only 20 people in all of Des Moines who couldn’t get a meal at Hope Café. They don’t turn anyone away, no matter what. When the other two groups returned to the chapel area from their meal, Dave told us that someone had once asked him how many people “abuse the system”. He is a very even-tempered guy, but he told us that this question infuriated him. There is no system to abuse! Free grace is a very simple thing. Their job is not to sort people at the door, but to give each person a meal in the name of Jesus Christ. No strings, no small print.

Half of us still hungry, we got in our cars and followed Dave to the Raccoon River.

Raccoon River Tent Camps

Along the Raccoon River and the Des Moines River are a number of homeless communities. They set up tents and shelters in the woods—some of them pretty elaborate!—and they just survive. We may go camping for a weekend to get away, calling it recreation, but for them it’s life, rain or shine… or snow.

Every Saturday, Dave leads a group of 4 or 5 volunteers to these camps to pass out supplies, pray for the people there, and ask them if they have any specific needs. Today there were at least 15 of us. We were concerned that it would look like Dave was the tour guide and we were a bunch of middle-class people who wanted to see all the homeless people up close. But Dave reassured us that he had been doing this for six years, and while the people in the camps were initially resentful, feeling as though they were being patronized, they quickly grew to understand that Dave loved them and so do all the people that come with him.

So we went down the hill to the camps. Each of us had a plastic sack containing a roll of paper towels, a pair of socks, a ham sandwich, a bottle of water and a can of soup, and we gave one to every person we met, or left one near the tent if the person wasn’t there. Dave knew most of them, so he would talk them for a bit about what they’ve been up to since he saw them a week ago, and tell them to say hi to the other people who weren’t there (many of them spend a lot of their time at the library about a mile away), then ask if we could pray for them. If they had any needs, like extra coats or batteries, Dave would write down a list and make sure they got what they needed. Then we’d move on.

(Sometimes when we proclaim the Kingdom of God, it takes different forms. That afternoon, it took the form of a warm place to stay. Facing the prospect of living in a tent through the winter—if the city doesn’t evict them from the riverbank first—the best gospel they could hear is that they can be warm. First things first.)

A few of the people we met:

• David, in his mid-50’s, was a former trucker who had fallen on hard times along with his wife Diane. He lost his CDL license and is waiting to get it back so he can start working again. He was very friendly, wanting to know all of our names (15 of us, remember), and he treated his wife like a queen.
• Steve lives in relative style, having built a rather spacious shack for himself and his roommate Allen (complete with windows and doors!). He hasn’t been able to find more than temporary jobs lately, so if he doesn’t find something permanent in a few weeks, he’s going to ride his bike down to Missouri (where he has family) to wait out the winter.
• Andy, in his early 40’s, came to Iowa for his ex-wife’s funeral five months ago, and decided to stay once he found that the work environment is a lot better here than it is in Sacramento, where he came from. Andy is a really nice guy and very well-spoken.

Andy told us that when he first came to the camp in the spring, he found that it was something of a “gated community” and that they didn’t want anything to do with him. He set up his tent nearby, but it took a few weeks for them to accept him. He later found out that they are suspicious of new people because they have a very strict drug-free policy in their camp. (The drug users are on the other side of the bridge.) Andy ultimately stayed for the past 5 months because he hadn’t ever been in a homeless community as good as that one.

As we were going home, I realized that I had gone down to the camps for me, not the homeless people. Dave Burrier could have done it all by himself without fifteen of us following him through the woods. But he knew, just I have come to realize, that we really were tourists, and this was an exhibition of bringing hope to the hopeless. He also knows that it always has to begin this way for everyone. We just have to keep taking the tour until, one day, it is no longer a tour but an act of pure love. And all fifteen of us had our perspectives changed that afternoon.