When I was a teenager, the youth group started going on mission trips to Appalachia and feeding the homeless in Philadephia with Trevor's Van Run's. Back then as a teenager at Trinity Lutheran Church, I never thought that those actions would begin a lifelong yearning to help others. Now twenty years later, as a seminarian, I am once again being called to help those less fortunate than I.
Last semester while visiting a parish, I saw a brochure for something called the San Francisco Night Ministry. The brochure talked about an ecumenical ministry that served the homeless population of San Francisco. It piqued my interest and I decided to look for more information after the term ended. What I didn't know was that another first year student was also interested in the program. So last night, she and I visited the program and walked along with the minister as he completed his rounds.
According to their website, www.sfnightministry.org, their mission is to provide middle-of-the-night compassionate, non-judgmental pastoral care, counseling, referral and crisis intervention to anyone in any kind of distress.
According to Lyle, the minister who we walked with, the mission is to be the face of the church for the people on the street. It is that statement that Lyle exudes as he walks. We met Lyle, Monique, and Keith at 9:45 pm last night. We said a prayer and Keith took to the phones, Monique went to the winter shelter and Lyle, dressed in clerics, Twila and I took to the streets. As we walked, Lyle told us the history of the program, why it was started and the population it originally served. Before long, we were stopped by a man on the street who asked for a blessing and a prayer. He told us that his girlfriend was suicidal and depressed after the recent loss of her fifteen day old child. Lyle was an active listener, and after ensuring that the woman was not a harm to herself immediately, he prayed with the man. We then continued our walk. A block away we were stopped by a woman, visibly strung out on crack. She asked for our prayers to kick the habit and release the demons that have hold of her. She was concerned for her children.
As we walked, different people would come up and just ask for a prayer. Every once in a while, someone would ask for money and Lyle would politely say, we don't give money but I can give you socks, coats or blankets. (He was carrying the socks, the other stuff was easily accessible.) After while, we came to a new neighborhood, and Lyle started discussing the history of San Francisco. It wasn't until the 1970's that homosexuality was legalized in San Francisco. Prior to that, there were many underground clubs and the neighborhood we were walking through was one of the original neighborhoods. He mentioned a bar up the street and said that many nights he goes in, sits at the bar, and drinks a club soda while patrons come over and talk to him. As we entered, he explained this evening was a quiet one since neither Karaoke or a drag show were taking place. The bar looked like any other bar you might walk into except that mostly everyone was the same sex. We left the bar and continued walking. Every block or so stopping to have a conversation with someone.
Lyle showed us how Union Square and all the expensive stores, (Saks, Nordstroms, Macys, etc, photos can be found on the Miscellaneous Photos page) are located not a block from where some of the poorest people on the city live. How the hotels have blocked off their entrances and windows so the tourists cannot look out and see the abject poverty right outside their windows.
As we continued to walk, it became very clear that to the people on the street, Lyle was a friend. They would warmly welcome him, love to tell him jokes, and just be present with him. He was honoring Christ in each person as he met them. A bit later, we entered the next neighborhood which was a pretty trendy straight area. It was filled with twenty somethings oblivious of their surroundings only really concerned with having a good time. For these few blocks, people avoided Lyle, eyes would shift as we walked, people crossed the street. It was very different that before. But as we continued to walk, again the neighborhood shifted. We came to another bar that he serviced. While we did not go into the bar, he explained that it was a bar frequented by transgendered patrons. He mentioned that it took many trips into the bar to build up a trust with the patrons but now there were many times when he had very meaningful conversations with the patrons. I'll be honest, as we stood down the block from the bar, I had a very difficult time wrapping my head around the transgender culture and specifically the transgender prostitution culture. This is not something I have been exposed to in the past so it is completely new to me.
As we wrapped up our time together and walked back to the office, I came to realize that to the outlying population, the gay, transgender, drag queens, homeless, night ministry is their church. The clergy of night ministry are the official clergy of the the drag organizations of San Francisco. The communities look to the ministers in good times as well as bad. Lyle said he presides over many funerals, unions, memorial services for people that don't always fell they belong elsewhere. The relationship that has been built up between all the populations and the night ministers is not only one way though. Night Ministry, as a 501c3 does look to donations to pay their bills. Lyle specifically mentioned the drag queen organization as a large benefactor of night ministry. The community gives back to the people that help them.
After spending a little over four hours on the streets of San Francisco, I am looking to get more involved with this organization and hope that in the near future, I will be trained to be a crisis counselor to man the phones as well as walk along with the night ministers from time to time.
But the bigger thing that I have seen is that while seminary is about learning theology and history, it is also about learning how to minister to all of God's children, whether they look like me or not. There is no way that I would have ever gotten this experience at any other seminary. Once again, my experience at CDSP has helped to broaden my understanding of what it is to be a Christian living out our baptismal covenant which calls us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.
If you would like to learn more about San Francisco Night Ministry, please visit their website, www.sfnightministry.org
Of course, the night ministry would have been an adventure enough by itself but we still needed to get back to Berkeley at 3:00 in the morning. We had gone into the city using BART and Muni busses. At 3:00am BART is shut down, so we were dependent on busses. We got the first bus without an issue but the transbay bus, the bus that crosses the Bay Bridge and goes into Oakland and Berkeley didn't show up. We waited at the bus stop in downtown San Francisco at 3:00 am in 40 degree for an hour until the bus showed up. Once it did show up, the bus driver didn't know the route and got lost in West Oakland. As Twila said this morning, I think the ride home was more of an adventure than the walk along was. Finally at 4:45 this morning, we walked back into the dorm and called it a night.
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