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 PrintableVersion A bridge over troubled peopleHow sinners of all stripes find a church home under Interstate 35Lugging backpacks and hefty bags on Sunday at sunrise, they trickle in to the expanse of dirt and gravel under Interstate 35. Littering this city block between 4th and 5th streets in Waco, Texas, are taillight shards and pigeon feathers. The men sit mostly in solitude at the base of support columns, waiting for something to happen. More than a dozen are there when, just after 9.00 am, a van with men from two drug rehab centres eases over the curb and parks. Two pickup trucks follow with trailers of folding chairs and sound equipment. One flatbed truck doubles as a stage. Recovering addicts line up chairs beneath the northbound lanes. A hoodless, bumperless Chevy pickup arrives, made from '73 to '78 parts. Former drug addict and ex-con Kenneth Kucker gets out, slams its blue door, and hands a visitor a peppermint, his smile peeking through a lopped-off zz Top beard. He smells of the axle grease that permeates his jeans, but he's dressed for worship in his best T-shirt that reads 'Church under the bridge'. 'It's a humble bridge', Kucker says. 'Today it's going to be sanctified'. For Waco's homeless and hard-living people, there may be no safer place than this bridge on Sunday morning - as safe from street crimes as from the glares of worshippers in other churches. The interdenominational Church Under the Bridge (CUB) began in 1992 when Baylor professor Jimmy Dorrell, 54, began a Bible study for homeless men who slept under this overpass. The group grew to include more homeless, poor, drug addicts, prostitutes, and bikers. They were later joined by others who had no church experience or felt they didn't fit into area congregations. Now the people who worship under the bridge are a demographic snapshot of this city of 100,000 people and 257 churches. Black, white, Asian, and Latino students from Baylor University, and others from the upper middle class, form the body of Christ with the down-and-outs of all colours. Church for unchurchedCUB's calling is to be a church to the unchurched of all socioeconomic levels and races, and to serve the poor and marginalised. Ex-prisoners and food-stamp recipients worship with the well-heeled and educated. Along with breaking down class barriers, racial reconciliation is one of the church's main pillars. At one service, Dorrell had the assembled break into small groups to talk about any prejudice they harboured, and to pray for forgiveness. 'Several times a year', Dorrell says, 'we address the issue in a sermon, have a couple of different-race friends or marriage folks share their struggles and victories, and then pass out a list of questions for the racially-mixed groups to discuss'. The church's core values include a rejection of attractive 'holy' buildings; 51% of offerings support outreach in Waco, Haiti, and India. Nothing goes to rent and utilities. Should prospective construction work to widen the highway or other events keep worshippers from their usual space, CUB has purchased another piece of land for $3,000. 'It is a backup, next to another bridge where the homeless used to sleep, which we can use if we are ever run out from our current spot', Dorrell says. 'Even at that vacant lot, we have no intentions of building a facility'. From Calcutta to WacoKucker, 54, drove a Cadillac in the 1970s when he earned $50,000 a year as body shop mechanic. He's a Vietnam veteran with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a self-described former 'junkie, car thief, and alcoholic' who became a Christian while in prison. Once out, he drifted, homeless, among the big cities of Texas. He moved to Waco to be near the Veterans Administration hospital psychiatric ward. Churches he tried to attend all threw him out because of his appearance. In Waco he heard about free meals under the bridge. He was hungry enough to check it out. Today, ten years later, he's a church leader living in an apartment owned by CUB's relief and development arm, Mission Waco. Dorrell parks his pickup a few cars over from Kucker's and a couple of rows from a Mercedes-Benz SUV. The plump, grey-bearded pastor in shorts greets folks with handshakes, back pats and hugs so hearty that at times they lift people off the ground. He mingles among indigents and Mercedes drivers alike with gestures of acceptance and welcome. Dorrell's journey to the bridge began in the 1970s, when he was a missionary to lepers in Calcutta and New Delhi slums. There he had something of an epiphany. He believed the church is the primary agent of change in the world, but surrounded by India's abysmal poverty, he asked himself, 'What is the church doing to incarnate Christ?' 'It's Jesus who sat at the well with the prostitute', he says. In contrast, many US churches install burglar bars on their windows and hire bouncers to keep away people who look unusual. Or they move to the suburbs and isolate themselves from things Jesus called his followers to do. Different kinds of sinners'The church has got to rediscover its purpose in a postmodern culture, when absolute truth is no longer accepted by the mainstream', Dorrell says. 'Unchurched people are looking for something that speaks genuineness to them.' Church Under the Bridge, he says, serves as a call for renewal for the church in America to be about the Father's business. 'In the church, I have crack addicts, prostitutes, criminals, but I also have materialists, power-mongers and arrogant Pharisees', Dorrell says. 'The gospel is just as much for them as it is the addict. All are accepted where they are.' A 100 feet away, Conrad Lahr sets up a circle almost twice that size, including a small loudspeaker and mike, for the Recovery Under the Bridge 12-step meeting for alcoholics and other addicts. Lahr, 39, began taking drugs as a wealthy New York teen. In and out of rehab and homelessness, he lost his wife to prison and his kids to the state. Hopelessly addicted, on July 21 2002, he prayed, 'God, help me'. That day he was driving 1-35 north toward Dallas when he saw a Salvation Army sign in Waco. He took the next exit and doubled back, where he found the bridge gathering. He thought it was a block party and stopped. Twenty minutes later, he knew he was supposed to be there. A week later, he was in Mission Waco's Manna House rehab, where he became a Christian. Now he directs a Mission Waco halfway house and does freelance carpentry. On Sundays he leads the CUB recovery group. Last year he reconciled with his parents, whom he hadn't talked to in 13 years. Other churches ask Dorrell to tell success stories like those of Lahr and Kucker. But success for Dorrell may be that Howard, a bridge legendary for his alcoholism, didn't get drunk today. God's love'I don't have to tell these people they're bad', Dorrell says. 'The world tells them that all the time.' What is important is that, for at least the 90 minutes they spend at a Sunday service under 1-35, they know somebody cares, he says. 'They may have robbed a store the night before, (but) our role as the church is to love them as Jesus loved them.' It's not that the CUB disregards the need for repentance and obedience, Dorrell says, but God's incredible love - not more condemnation - is what brings people to repentance. 'We do preach the reality that there has to be a change' in behaviour after conversion, he says. During church services, he often encourages people to 'make things right' with each other and straighten out various areas of their lives. Congregant Charmaine Beers adds that repentance happens, but the challenge is believing God's forgiveness for so much sin - or that there's a God who even cares. 'You don't know what it is to have a pure, righteous, upright, holy life when all you've known is sad and ugly', she says. 'I've led people to Christ by example and love - but it took two years before they felt it was real, not another lie of the world or another letdown.' Unco-operative donkeysJust after 10.30, 200 people are at the bridge. Waco's hungry poor queue at the back for the day's meal, this one sponsored by local Methodists. Dorrell's wife, Janet, is strumming an acoustic guitar as she begins a musical warm up on the trailer-stage. Joining her is CUB's multiracial worship team on instruments that include bongos, a washboard and an unplugged electric guitar played by a man with mental retardation. As the chairs fill, latecomers know to grab a chair from the trailer and take care to place it away from a bridge column where pigeon droppings may plop onto worshippers below. Every Sunday is different. One focuses on mission. Another celebrates the church's anniversary with a march for the homeless. There's biker Sunday, recovery Sunday, and Palm Sunday, when a homeless guy on a donkey enters the church, palm fronds strewn in his path over the dirt, rocks, and cigarette butts. One year the donkey wouldn't budge, so a biker put the Christ figure in his Harley's sidecar and drove him in. Easter includes a church wide foot-washing. Every year the church holds a sleep-in under the bridge; the idea is to help those with homes to grasp the plight of the homeless. Kenneth Kucker and others hand out one-page lyric sheets. Among the songs is 'I love this church', with lyrics modified from Toby Keith's country music hit about a bar: We got winners, we got losers, chain smokers and boozers, CUB is not a celebration of sin but an acceptance of people where they are. People aren't expected to clean up their acts before they come to church. The leadership knows sanctification takes time. At the back is the biker who shared Christ with Conrad Lahr his first morning under the bridge. The biker's Harley is parked along the end of chair rows. The Harley's trailer carries a ten-foot wooden cross that bears this inscription: 'There's room at the cross for you'. Deann Alford is a writer and editor in Austin, Texas. This edited article was first printed in Christianity Today and is used with permission. © Evangelicals Now - September 2004 |
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