Each night, as Jason and I tried to sleep in the filthy alleys of the Downtown Eastside, I wondered why overfed and overconfident rats seemed to be the most common inhabitants of the various places Nay and I had chosen to live. In our Cambodian slum they had swarmed over the cesspit outside our window, feasting on the waste thrown through thatch windows. Here, the rats crawled through dumpsters and alleys, feasting on the abundant waste of a society of excess. My friend Joyce Rees says that if you want to understand the good news that Jesus offers for the poor in a particular place, you first have to discover what the bad news looks like. Those few nights of sleeping on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, alongside the motley throngs of other homeless men and women, provided a glimpse of the bad news our new friends dealt with, right in the middle of one of the most affluent places on earth.
Unlike Cambodia, where there are no soup kitchens, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is saturated with places offering free food. If you’re hungry, you can get a meal every half an hour from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. Yet as Jason and I lined up for our free meals, herded in and out of these anonymous soup kitchens, we realized that the men and women we were eating with were hungry for more than just a hot meal. Having been rejected by their families and pushed to the margins of society, they were desperately isolated and lonely. For those “lucky” enough to have a place to live, 82 percent of the neighborhood housing was limited to single room occupancies (SROs)—tiny, cockroach-infested apartments. It was little wonder that so many turned to drugs to dull the pain.
During the excess of time Jason and I had to sit and contemplate, we learned that if the bad news of the inner city was rejection, isolation, and loneliness, the good news might look something like radical hospitality. We realized that Jesus would welcome these folks inside—not just into a drop-in center or shelter but into a family.
In Cambodia, Nay and I had been moved by the desperate needs of orphaned and vulnerable children. We had seen that the children didn’t need orphanages or institutions to warehouse them, but rather needed families who would welcome them. Knowing that Jesus would have walked alongside the helpless and welcomed them into his life, we started a discipleship movement to mentor the people of God to walk alongside those who were walking alone.
In Vancouver, the lonely orphans and vulnerable children had grown up to become homeless men with long beards and women with matted hair. But like the orphaned children in Cambodia, they had the same deep need to be loved, respected, and welcomed into a family. They still needed someone to walk alongside them in their pain.
Our heads were not clear. We were filthy and smelly and could barely think straight. But Jason and I were absolutely certain of one thing: Jesus would welcome the men and women we had been meeting, the most despised and least welcomed people in the city.
From place to place, even Christian to Christian, a radical welcome would look different. But amid the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, we knew what Jesus would do, and we decided to do likewise.
Taken from Subversive Jesus: An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness in a Broken World by Craig Greenfield. Copyright © 2016 by Craig Greenfield. Used by permission of Zondervan. Zondervan.com
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Craig Greenfield (@craigasauros) is the founder of Alongsiders International. A storyteller and activist living in urban slum communities for the past 15 years, Craig’s passion is to communicate God’s heart for the marginalized around the world.