“Hungry Minds” a piece by Ian Frazier in the May edition The New Yorker was the best example of church history, homeless ministry description, and engaging writing I have ever come across.  Ok, well I haven’t come across anything like his piece before, but it’s brilliantly done.

That said, Frazier angered me with the first sentences,

The Church of the Holy Apostles, at the corner of Twenty-eight Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, is a church only two-sevenths of the time. The other five-sevenths–every weekday including holidays, no exception made for weather, fire, or terrorist attack–it is the largest soup kitchen in New York City.

I hope this screams out to others as well.  The distinction between “church” and “soup kitchen” may be more of a linguistic trick than theological assertion, but it does sting.  Perhaps it stings, though, because that’s a distinction so commonly made in our culture today.  “No we’re a church, we don’t serve the homeless. We have programs, and outreach, but no way, we don’t invite the needy into our building, let alone our sanctuary to be fed.  Come on, we’re a church after all not a charity.”

The rest of Frazier’s article shows exactly how this first sentence is misleading, so I won’t hark on it because it may have been intended to push buttons just as it did.  Anyways, I loved the rest of the story.

Frazier and friends run a writers workshop once a week after lunch.  As happens, the homeless guests bring amazing stories and personal experiences, and the workshop gives an opportunity to get them out.  The workshop community Frazier describes is quite striking, and Frazier develops lasting relationships with his students.  I love the story he tells of meeting, on the bus, a homeless person who attended the writing workshop.  Frazier’s fifth grade daught was with him, and witnessed the homeless guy catching up with her Dad, chatting about writing, publishing, and the like.  When they got home, Frazier’s wife asked his daughter how she liked the city, “‘It was pretty good,’ she said. ‘Not much happened today.  At the bus station, we ran into a friend of Daddy’s.’”

The piece also follows the history of the church, from its founding in 1836 to its struggle to stay alive in the changing community, its destruction by fire, and its eventual finding itself through the mission of the soup kitchen.  No denominational authorities were going to shut down a soup kitchen serving thousands of meals a week, even if the congregation numbers in the low hundreds.

Unfortunately, The New Yorker doesn’t have online archives at the moment, so I can’t link to the full article.  If you can find it, though, it’s certainly worth a read.

Frazier ends his piece with a description of the last session of the writers’ workshop, at which there’s a public reading in the church followed by sandwiches and soft drinks.  Church members, soup-kitchen donors, editors, arts administrators, clergy, and students attend the reading.  Frazier ends:

Usually, the reading is on a Wednesday evening in late May.  With luck, the weather is mild, and the church’s front doors are open.  People arrive dressed up, and some of the soup-kitchen staff are in white shirts and black bow ties. The ambient New York City air comes in; you can imagine that the floor of the church, the pavement of Ninth Avenue, the asphalt in Chelsea Park, and the shiny surface of the Hudson River a few blocks away are all connected, one continuous terrestrial floor. As the evening advances and the sunset fades, the lights inside the church brighten. It’s a benign time of day to be in a church, or any public space open to the evening. For a moment, the whole city seems to flow in with the air.

image by Megan Stevens