Since moving to Denver I've been active in a church called AfterHours Denver (AHD). It's weird. We meet in a bar three times a month for fellowship and to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to be included in sack lunches. Every day AHD and its partner groups meet in Civic Center Park to distribute up to 150 lunches to the people who congregate there or who are passing through. Communion is also offered in the form of bread and grape juice.
That's it. It's weird. There's no building. There's no paid staff except Jerry. There's service and there's fellowship in the name of Christ.
A common criticism of AHD often comes in the form of a question: "What are you doing to address the root causes of homelessness? The poor don't need a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." It is an important question. It is a question that I, myself, have asked. It is also a question that can be cynical. When I have heard it, it is often delivered in a tone that says, "so what?"
The answer is, 'nothing.' "What are you doing to address the root causes of homelessness?" Realistically? "Nothing." So, if the answer is nothing, then who cares? Why continue to do it? I mean, other than the fact that most people like to have something to eat for lunch?
What I intend below is a quick look at AHD and its mission as a movement of Christian hope.
Hope
I follow Soren Kierkegaard's (SK) expansive treatment of hope in his book Works of Love. In it he deals with hope not as a feeling but as action. For SK, hope is "to relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good" (249). Importantly, SK points out that hope cannot be put to shame. Even if what is hoped for does not come to pass, still, hope remains intact. This is because the action of hoping for the possibility of the good, a good which may not exist in present time, itself creates the good (296). In the face of crushing poverty this is perhaps not quite satisfying. But hopefully the sandwich adds some tangible satisfaction.
Hebrews 11:1 teaches that faith is the constancy for what is hoped for. To ask the question alone, "do the poor need a PB&J," and not to participate in hope is to hope nothing at all, is to lose faith, and indeed is to sink into despair (248).
Going out into the park every day, sustained by the Spirit, in communion with homeless women and men, springs out of a constancy of hope. It is a work of love from love, an act of faith from faith. Far from doing nothing, this daily action creates out of nothing a new reality, community, and awareness.
Consciousness
Without public meetings among the poor, the root causes of homelessness will not be addressed. Awareness is the very beginning of the movement to address social problems. In a society in which most wish not to see the poor, in which individuals dismiss an area as dirty or off limits because homeless women and men sleep in doorways -- some actively go to the poor, ask them to gather together, and interact with them as individual human beings and blessed creations of a loving God.
The best case scenario is that those who gather are brought to a new consciousness. They come to be awake. If the Spirit of the divine is involved in the least then their being is transferred into a state of aletheia: unconcealedness, disclosure, all truth. Their world experiences an apocálypsis, not a literal destruction but a revelation that destroys preconceived notions, an un-covering, an end to a time in which the reality of the world as it exists was hidden to them. They may experience a re-birth and perhaps take a step on the road toward Christian Discipleship. They may ask, "why do these conditions of poverty exist," "why have I not come to terms with them until now," "why have they been hidden from me?" This new awareness may lead toward action addressing homelessness itself.
Worst case scenario? Someone who's hungry gets something to eat.