HOUSE OF HELP RECOGNIZED IN
CONGRESSMAN RYAN'S NEW BOOK...
The Graceview Apartments are part of House of Help City of Hope, a faith-based substance abuse and homelessness program that is part of Bishop Shirley Holloway’s ministry. Her motto is, “We don’t see the problem. We see the person.” Since the ministry started in 1995, they’ve served over 40,000 people struggling with drug abuse, homelessness and poverty.
The secret, of course, is the people. I’ve met with Bishop Holloway and the people who serve in—and who are served by—her ministry on a couple of different occasions. This fall, I met a young man and young woman who had been married just ten days earlier. They walked me through their journey. Both had lost their parents and, soon after, lost their way. The young woman hung with the wrong crowd and had been stabbed and shot. The man had turned to alcohol to dull his personal pain. Both were homeless when they came to Bishop Holloway. Now they were married and starting new lives. The man was back in college. He had just finished his midterms and was getting all A’s.
WORDS FROM WILLIAM SCHAMBRA
I thought one aspect of Bishop Shirley’s presentation was particularly helpful for our understanding the difference between what conservatives normally think of as civil society and what she does in her ministry: you need both hope and help. Conservatives are long on talking about how freedom and opportunity in America offer hope for the poor, but they don’t grasp the need for help. But Pastor Shirley understands that first, you have to figure out all the ways the people before her are broken and what they will need to be put back together again within the intensive, deeply personal and particularized, one-on-one community she has built those she helps. Only then they can begin to find some hope for the future. Help by itself is enabling and crippling; hope by itself is a cruel delusion. You need both.
WORDS FROM JENNIFER A. MARSHALL
Convicts, gang bangers, addicts and dropouts from across the country descended on Denver the other day.
But instead of drawing police, they had an admiring audience of analysts, academics and donors eager to study their success. Success, that is, in transforming troubled lives -- just as they themselves have been transformed.
Leaders of more than a dozen groups, from San Antonio's Outcry in the Barrio to the House of Help City of Hope in Washington, D.C., gathered for the "Joseph Summit," a movement to change lives, schools and neighborhoods. Sponsored by the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE), the summit took its name from Joseph of the Old Testament. In his book "The Triumphs of Joseph," CNE founder and president Robert L. Woodson explains that Joseph transcended his dysfunctional family and checkered past -- including a prison stint -- to lead Egypt in a crucial moment.
Like Joseph, the nationwide neighborhood leaders affiliated with Woodson's CNE have had their character forged through circumstance and redeemed by grace.
Jennifer A. Marshall is director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.