A History of Jesus People USA

By Jon Trott

Part 8
Action -- Social and Political, II

We've come a long way from part one of this history, and unfortunately, last issue I erred. We did not buy the Clifton building for a church/shelter in 1987. Rather, the date was 1989. lot had to happen between those dates, beginning with . . .

By 1988, it was evident that Chicago was in the midst of a housing crisis. A late 1980s United Way study found that there were approximately 25,000 homeless persons in the city of Chicago, and that in one year alone approximately 6,500 women and children were turned away from shelters due to lack of space.

The United Way report underscored both the lack of housing and the plight of the homeless, noting that four to five thousand units of housing in Chicago were being demolished annually while no new subsidized housing was being funded by the government.

A set of empty lots, located only two blocks from JPUSA's main address, had more than a decade earlier been earmarked for "scattered site" low-income housing. But their emptiness seemed to symbolize the plight of the homeless.

On October 9, 1988, some members of Jesus People USA, the Chicago Union of the Homeless, and the Heart of Uptown Coalition moved onto the property and constructed a tent city for the homeless. Among the smaller tents and one giant circus tent we'd rented for the occasion, some of the men built shacks of materials which (ironically) were scrap from nearby gentrifiers' construction.

In a hastily-created broadside entitled Uptown Tent City News, we reported on our progress by the fourth day:

It's cold outside but the heat's on! Since our takeover of the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority] lots at 4425 N. Malden, our "affordable housing" has continued to rise . . .

The media has taken our challenge to CHA seriously. Channel 9 (WGN) gave us prime billing on both their 12 +noon+ and 9 +p.m.+ newscasts. Channel 5 covered Tent City Uptown as one evidence of gentrification, their anchorman ending the segment with this stinging line; "They call it gentrification, but there's nothing gentle about it."¹

One of the JPUSAs who stayed at Tent City, Chris Ramsey, wrote down his reflections each day. The first day he helped unload the fire barrels, wood, and tents, including a couple large circus tents:

Trouble was, nobody knew how to put them up. Suddenly, an elderly man from next door appeared and told us that he used to put up these kind of tents. Soon he became our foreman as we raised the tents.

Night: We have about twenty-five people this first night, including a young husband and his pregnant wife. We offered them one of the pup tents . . .

[Day 2:] 5:00 +a.m.+: Some of the men are getting up. They're going off to try to get out on a day labor job. How many of us have to face this--every day! Getting up so early for the possibility (there's no guarantee) of work, earning just enough to get by?

9 +a.m.+: Some of the guys get together with [Heart of Uptown's] Mark Kaplan, heading out for another wood run in his stepvan.

11 +a.m.+: Otis Thomas, president of the Union of the Homeless, looks at the boards Mark has scarfed up. Some of them came from gentrifiers' construction sites. "I think it's time to build some affordable housing," Otis says with a smile. A while later, his lean-to is built against the fence.

Someone has added a lazyboy chair to the landscape. More donations of food arrive, and a couple of outdoor grills.

That night: We stay up, sitting around the fires. It continues to be very cold, in the thirties. I discover that many of the homeless are easy-going and non-threatening. They also don't complain much, while I ask myself, "Why do we have to be out here--this is rough on the body."

[Day 4] More and more housing made of wood scraps and cardboard has been put up, including three small shacks. Someone has scrawled graffiti: "We refuse to freeze to death quietly."

[Day 5] Night: About thirty men are sprawled out in the big tent. Others are gathered around the fires. Now and then the conversation turns toward the spiritual, but mostly the fact that we are Jesus People seems to speak loudly enough.

The last evening, after a potluck dinner, we sat near our barrel fires and, on a portable television, watched George Bush and Michael Dukakis in their presidential debate. Chris' diary noted, "The sheer irony of sitting outside in October, temperature in the fourties, watching our Presidential candidates talk about what is important to them would have been laughable if it wasn't such a serious matter." Neither candidate mentioned homelessness.

On the sixth day, the police mobilized, and five people, including Alderman Helen Shiller, a Boston alderman, and this historian were peaceably arrested. (We spent only about an hour in jail before being released with no charges filed.) ²

But the real problem was faced by Tent City's citizens, now that they once again were homeless. Many of the men simply dissolved back into Uptown's streets. But ten to fifteen women had nowhere to go. We were already housing homeless women, but usually only two or three families per night. This small number allowed us to put them into our own dormitories. With the sudden increase, we opened the first floor to those otherwise at risk in 1988's bitter Midwest winter. What began as the remnants of Tent City's population soon swelled far beyond that. By December, a Christmas party for the homeless women required gifts for over thirty persons.

The homeless men weren't forgotten. JPUSA member Chris Ramsey took a van on "night patrol" looking for homeless persons locked out in the cold. Our 4707 N. Malden building's first floor lobby filled nightly with fifty to seventy men, while by the summer of 1989, the larger dining room kept nearly ninety women and their children safe from the streets.

Logistically, it was a nightmare. The 4707 building was bursting at the seams, as the women and children competed for the dining room with the dinner guest program, JPUSA evening Bible classes, and assorted other uses, including JPUSA meals and church on Sunday. Fights broke out between homeless individuals already stretched to the breaking point. We, too, came in for serious testing of our resolve. How long would we love our neighbor when he smelled like urine and liquor, cursed at us, or defecated on the floor?

Day after grinding day, night after eventful night, we were confronted with a feeling of powerlessness, of sorrow, and of anger. Yet, as practicing what we preached literally came home to us, we found Christ willing to use us and conform us to His will, even shaping our hearts to His sufferings. After all, part of the frustrating pain of dealing with the homeless was our inability to be anything more than a crash pad. We wanted to empower these people, to provide more than a mat on a dining room floor, to help them discover the healing only Christ can bring. We didn't have the funding or resources for even the little we were doing. And in that knowledge of our own inability to "do," came the first inklings of learning merely to "be" there for others. Listening in silence is often a greater act of love than striving to "fix it." And slowly the homeless took on names, faces, personhood.

This writer's zealous involvement with the cause of homelessness got a serious reality check when, instead of being able to "leave it at the office," he had to come home to the homeless persons. In a single moment one hectic afternoon, stepping into the Malden lobby, I found my senses assaulted by the odor of crowded unwashed men. The thought came with force: What are these people doing in my house?! A sense of convicting shame assaulted me. It is an amazing thing how reactionary one's thinking becomes when sacrifice leaves the realm of soft sentiment and enters one's reality.

The most visible factors awakening us to others were the homeless children. We attempted to articulate this in Cornerstone:

An estimated 500,000 homeless children exist in the United States. We know thirty or forty of them, because they live in our shelter. But--unlike our own children--these small ones have little or no sense of where they belong. How vulnerable they have become! They are in fact susceptible to anything or anybody. They are at others' mercy . . . at our mercy.

Their mothers are optimistic. "I've reached the bottom. It can only get better now," said one. "My kids will have it better than this." Yet comparatively few women seem to escape the cycle. What can an unskilled woman with children do to alter the harsh economics that consign her here?

The children often miss school. Mom's too busy to get them there, and without really having a home, why bother going to school when you might not be around next week? Instead, some sit, bored and listless, in the shelter lobby. In such cramped quarters, it's inevitable that two of the kids get into a fight, pushing and shoving. The smaller boy begins to cry, provoking sharp words between his mother and the woman with the second child.

The shelter kids sometimes overwhelm a person. Starved for attention, particularly from male adults who might fill in for the father they don't have, they attach themselves immediately to anyone showing them a little kindness. Many have been abused; three mothers in one day told us a father's abuse to their child is what led to them becoming homeless.

Surprisingly normal in the face of such instability, the kids love playing in the yard. Child psychologists worry the virtual absence of home life will scar these kids permanently, and the ripple of homeless families is fast becoming a tidal wave. But at the shelter . . . "You folks are nice. At least I got a roof over my head!" The woman's daughter smiles.

Will they remember this shelter only for being a warm place to sleep, or will they have experienced Christ's love here, in spite of our own weakness and selfishness? There's no time for further reflection; a woman with six children has been brought to us after being beaten by her husband. "It's only for a night or two," says the caseworker. "Only until we find her a place to stay. . . . "³

Our concern for the homeless expanded, and so did our involvement in the pro-life movement's then most-active branch. Operation Rescue came to Chicago, and along with many other believers, a large group of Jesus People knelt in a spirit of repentance in front of an abortion clinic. And though those of us arrested at Tent City were back on the street within sixty minutes, we "rescuers of the unborn" were stuck in jail for twelve hours.

JPUSA also opted for a proactive approach to the abortion question, opening our Uptown Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) at the 939 Wilson building housing the Cornerstone offices. The new CPC provided free pregnancy testing and counseling, and along with explaining the alternatives to abortion, we found ourselves providing informational and material aid to new mothers. Counselors expecting to deal with abortion ended up discussing topics such as gangs, drugs, and (full circle!) housing. Perhaps that concept mentioned by the Catholic bishops, a "seamless garment" of life issues, was being discovered afresh by us. In typical JPUSA fashion, we backed into new responsibilities, each one seemingly opening a door to another.