We arrived home around 5pm Sunday from a weekend away in North Carolina. On the way to our apartment I decided to drive by the shelter at Peachtree and Pine Streets to see how things were going. The shelter, if you don’t know, is located conveniently at the end of the exit off of Interstate 75 situated on the most storied of streets in Atlanta. Across the street from the shelter is the newly minted, Emory University Hospital Midtown. Surrounding the shelter are businesses, restaurants, town houses and condominiums. Within a stones throw are two of the most respectable churches in the city, St. Luke’s Episcopal and North Avenue Presbyterian. As we drove by the shelter there were no less than 50 homeless men filling the sidewalk immediately outside of the building and across the street. Hundreds more were inside. The enormous warehouse-like building itself, built in the 1920’s, gives off a dingy dark presence despite the paint and new windows toward the Peachtree Street side of the building. There is a ...

This is worth a quick read if you are interested in how culture tries to influence the church.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19douthat.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Back in 2001, still the early days of Church on the Street, the alumni magazine for my undergrad alma mater, Anderson University, decided to do a feature article on me and my work with the homeless.  (You can read that article here)  The cover of the magazine featured me with one of the guys I spe ...

We have had a lot of rain recently in Atlanta.  Thunder storms, torrential downpours and tornado warnings have been with us for a few days and are forecasted to be with us the whole week.  So today, when the rain stopped I went out with my backpack filled with socks, t-shirts and hand towels.  Since it had been raining so much I knew my homeless friends would be out in force having been cooped up in the hot, crowded, dark, dirty shelter for so long.  I was right.  I saw many of the same folks I usually see and I ran into a man I had never met before.

This is a new posting of an older post from last September.

I’m preparing to leave for England tomorrow for an ethics conference at Cambridge University.  Amidst all the preparations for the trip I was debating if I would have time to go out for a while to say hello to our men and women living on the streets.  After much thought I decided that since I would not be around for the rest of the week I would make a quick trip through the neighborhood.  Often on these quick walks I will take my daughter Ainsley along for the ride (in her stroller) as she is usually able to bring a smile to everyone’s face with ...