Project Serve, Toronto, April 2010

Streets of Pain... And Hope

It's Friday night on Queen Street, the road is bustling with taxis, cyclists and shoppers, the restaurants are full. We dip into the shelter doors, and get ready to spend the evening sharing a meal and giving the women who call this shelter home manicures. For three hours, we sit and chat, talking about our hometowns, the weather, and listening to sometimes schizophrenic conversations. As we drive back to the church where we will crash on the floor for the night, I ask the girls what impressions were left on them after the night. "They're just regular people" they tell me, struck by the face of humanity that is so often overlooked when we think of those who experience poverty and homelessness.

I (Danielle) just returned Sunday from another Project Serve experience with three of our young women from Collingwood, and fourteen other youth and leaders from the Huntsville and Shelburne satellites. This is my third Project Serve trip to Toronto, the first for the majority of participants. During our 48 hours in the city we partnered with the Salvation Army in their shelters and their vans that serve hot breakfasts and reach out to youth on the street, we joined a number of churches in the downtown core who house shelters in their halls and basements, joined a group of Sisters who offer subsidized housing, community gardens, and adult drop-in programs, and we handed out sandwiches throughout the downtown streets.

Many of the youth who joined us this past weekend come from rural towns. They come from different socioeconomic and family backgrounds. Some of them have what we sometimes refer to as the 'R.W.K.', or rich white kid syndrome, and for them, this trip blows their world wide open. It isn't an easy trip, we give up our ipods and cell phones, relinquishing our money and debit cards, and sleeping on a floor instead of our pillow-top mattresses. On Sunday, I had an opportunity to ask the girls who came with me how this trip had impact on them. They wondered how they would integrate what they had experienced into life at home, knowing that the things we complain about and take for granted (perhaps a better word would be 'exploit' sometimes) were in a new light after this trip. They felt a need to become active in the issues of poverty and homelessness. And they understood the depths pain and of joy that many on the street experience. Pain from unimaginable circumstances and issues in life, and joy from simple things that allow them to get through the day, or from lives that don't have so much peripheral junk that the important things in life are lost.

The challenge that we left them was with the words 'justice' and 'compassion', and those begin in the lives of an individual who allows their gut to be torn apart so that they are moved to action. We've had ten youth from The Door Youth Centre in Collingwood participate in the Project Serve trip to Toronto. That is a pretty good starting point to instill change in our centre and our community, I think.

Community Brunch

This past Sunday we were privileged to host a community brunch that also supported The Door, in partnership with Mayor Chris Carrier, town council members, The Knights of Columbus, and emergency service teams. Here are some pictures from this event that raised nearly $2000 for The Door.

Idols Revisited

This past weekend we had the rare and exciting opportunity to host Idols Revisited, a gathering of seven past Canadian Idol contestants benefitting The Door Youth Centre. We were blown away by the response, over 500 tickets were sold, and we were able to raise a significant amount of money to support The Door (no final amount yet). The concert was spectacular - these guys have so much talent, and the acoustic set was perfect for our venue of New Life church here in Collingwood. Local artist and third place runner-up Drew Wright organized the pack, which included Earl Stevenson, Sebastien Pigott, Adam Castelli, Oliver Pigott, Omar Lunan, and Paul Clifford. For sure check out the material that these guys have put out. I've had Earl Stevenson's Ghost on continual rotation for the past 3 days. Here's some pics from the concert.

Drew Wright, Omar Lunan, Adam Castelli
Earl Stevenson

The Pigott Brothers, Oliver and Sebastian


Paul Clifford (best pic I have, sorry)



We auctioned off a guitar signed by all of the performers.

All of the artists and our gang from The Door

If you missed the concert, or would like to relive it again, you can check out the videos on YouTube. Thanks to Eric at Big Screen FX for his work on them! I'll link them below.

Paul Clifford
Adam Castelli
Adam Castelli, Omar Lunan, & Drew Wright
Omar Lunan
Omar Lunan & Drew Wright
Oliver & Sebastian Pigott
Earl Stevenson
Earl Stevenson & Drew Wright
Drew Wright - Pt. I
Drew Wright - Pt. II
Drew Wright - Pt. III
Finale

Spring Letter

There are lots of people on our mailing list who receive our quarterly updates. For those of you who aren't, or who are environmentally conscious, you can download a .pdf of our letter here!

Relationships, In The Messy Bits

I remember in college doing a group assignment for a course in Group Dynamics. Each week our small group of four had to meet, and while working on a project, had to assess the dynamics our group was experiencing. The first week that we met, one of our group members said very frankly, "I will build friendships with all of you, but don't ever call them relationships. Friendships are fine, but to me, relationships mean something more." Most of us were thrown off a little by his admission, but we complied. In the end our group ended up demonstrating more dysfunctional dynamics than we'd hoped, likely because we were all at arm's length from one another.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about relationships. Particularly as we have walked with our youth through some very dark times. There are points where we think, "This is too hard! It's so much easier to walk away, or simply be with the kids who have it 'together'." I've been reading Andrew Root lately. I saw him at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and his expertise is true relational ministry*. He examines the difference between building relationships for the sole purpose of leveraging influence (i.e. I will build a relationship with Joe so I can influence him to make a decision for Christ), versus building relationships for "place-sharing", that is, entering into the depths of suffering and humanity, to really be human together. I have found that he summed up what I was already thinking. He talks about a ministry he was a part of, and driving home with fellow youth workers. No one said a word because they were so exhausted from ministry; they had not expected the youth to insult them and push them away. Sometimes, we feel like that.

This should put to rest anyone who feels that the ministry of The Door is to take advantage of youth when they are vulnerable by coercing them into a relationship with Jesus. Instead, we stick with them through the dark parts, because we believe that they should not have to go through them alone. When we send them home week after week for breaking the code of conduct, we welcome them back the following week, and we talk about their decisions, behaviour, and consequences rather than putting it under the rug. Recently, we've been dealing with a couple of young men (the term 'trying' would barely be adequate), who seem to be purposefully looking for buttons to push every week. We try to be consistent in our discipline and expectations, and continue to plug through. Sometimes they shock us with great insight in the middle of a discussion, when it appears that they have been sleeping or distracted the whole time. At the end of the day, we pray that by sticking with them we are truly living incarnationally. We are being human together, and despite their behaviour, we are committed to walking along with them. Root puts forth the challenge to actually live an incarnational life, rather than use it as just a good ministry model (which I've been guilty of).

I would not be where I am today if it hadn't been for people who cared enough to stick through my messy bits and live out Jesus in my life. I may have appeared earlier as though I don't care about proclaiming Jesus to our youth, that is not the case, I just want Jesus to be a part of their reality, not a bandaid solution. That happens in our darkness, when the light shines through. Keith Green sang about when God's love broke through. There are few better descriptions of God's transformation in life. Getting there, slogging through the mud, is never something we should have to do alone.



*If you are in youth ministry, I'd highly recommend his books Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry,
and Relationships Unfiltered.