Photo by Matt Collamer via Unsplash
CV NEWS FEED // The theme of the FOCUS SEEK24 conference this year was “be the light”—and a Denver-based homeless street ministry put that into action this week as missionaries trained student volunteers and led them on three street walks in downtown St. Louis.
Founded in 2010, Christ in the City is a street ministry that seeks to bring the light of Jesus to the homeless through establishing relationships with them. According to Joe Burns, a second year missionary, the ministry has since grown to include 30 missionaries who live in an old school building in Denver.
“We live together, work together, play together and pray together,” he told CatholicVote at SEEK24 this week. “And then three or four times a week, we go out to the streets of downtown Denver, we walk the same routes, and we talk to homeless people.”
This week, Christ in the City missionaries gave students and young adults at SEEK24 the opportunity to “be the light” to the homeless of St. Louis and experience what a street walk is like. Olivia Firsching, another second year missionary, said that she was “really proud” of the college students who volunteered to minister.
“They were bold and outgoing,” she told CatholicVote. “If I was a college student, I would not have given two hours of my free time to come walk around a cold city and meet people.”
Firsching said that the Lord’s providence was evident in the street walk she led on Wednesday.
“I ended up taking on people in my group that I wasn’t expecting, and it ended up being the exact set of people that the Lord willed to go out and meet the people that we met,” she said, adding that the group prayed before the walk and asked God to guide them to the right people.
“We walked over toward a shelter and just talked to some of the people outside, and it was lovely, seeing the connections that people made with each other that you weren’t expecting,” she continued.
While the missionaries were only able to minister to the homeless in St. Louis for three days, in Denver they walk the same route multiple times a week and get to know the people they serve. Burns added that the ministry is focused on demonstrating Christ’s love through intentional relationships without always speaking about it.
“We show and we don’t tell—well, we do tell, but we show first. By showing up consistently, by listening, by showing an interest, we speak volumes without saying any words,” he said.
Firsching agreed and said that the goal is “to meet [the homeless] with a witness of love.”
“I think some people see us and they see ‘Christ in the City’ on our shirts, and they fear that we’re gonna proselytize,” she said. “But then they’re surprised when we just want to talk about them and where they’ve lived and that we have absolutely no agenda. A lot of the time it happens where we don’t talk about God for a while or in those initial conversations.”
She continued:
Our prayer is that through the dignity that we bestow on them with our listening and with our eye contact, with our presence, and with our love, that they will feel the love of Jesus, even if at first they don’t recognize it as such.
