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Newtown Mission Church
So a few weeks ago I was at Newtown Mission Homeless Drop in and in the chapel service Pastor Brian invited one of the patrons to come up and sing a song! I have known this guy for about two years and had no idea that he could play the guitar and sing so well! He sings this song on the street as part of his street evangelism ministry. Its called: ‘God Gets the Blues’. I recorded it caus I thought it was really good.
I hope you enjoy!
Newtown Mission Church. Photo by Guy W http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghee/3421322164/
Newtown Mission is an evangelical church that is located on King Street in the heart of Newtown. Each week the church opens their doors to hundreds of homeless men and women (and sometimes heir children) for a chapel service and a free hot meal. I have been involved at Newtown Mission for a little over two years now and I am convinced that if you want to learn more about homelessness or if you want to start getting involved then Newtown Mission Homeless Drop in is the place to do it!
Every Monday, Tuesday and Friday Newtown Mission runs a lunch time drop in and on Thursday nights they run a dinner time drop in. I go to the Thursday evening drop ins so I will speak about them, but the lunch time ones are also great – and very easy if you have a few hours off during the day if you’re at Sydney Uni/Moore College.
Every Thursday night at around 5:30pm a group of volunteers from Sydney Uni, Moore College, Newtown Mission church, Christians from around Sydney and other various people who see the drop in and want to volunteer come together to prepare for the evening. Most weeks Pastor Brian (Newtown Mission Compassion Pastor) or Christian Anderson (Moore College Student) will begin with devotion and then allocate the various jobs for the evening (e.g. serving the dinner or dessert or serving up the tea and coffee). At 6pm the doors to the chapel open and some of the patrons come inside for a short informal talk, usually given by Brian.
Pastor Brian
While this is happening a small group of volunteers go upstairs to a separate room and pray for the night, for specific individuals and for the ministry of the chapel service.
At 6:30 it is officially dinnertime! This is my favourite part! It is my favourite part for two reasons:
1) The food is always great! I hate when people ask me about the ‘soup kitchen’ that I go to, it makes me think that we serve the food that the poor orphans had to eat in Oliver Twist! No, the food that is served is always a hearty warm meal; there is always meat a well as several types of yummy veggies and some bread, and if that’s not enough to fill you up there is always seconds. Then afterwards we have dessert – usually jelly or cake or custard or ice cram or fruits! Dinnertime at Newtown Mission is great
2) The second reason that dinnertime is my favourite part of drop in is because this is the time that you get to know the patrons who come along. There is nothing like sitting down at a table and sharing a meal with someone to break down barriers and chat to people about their lives. There is something about food that helps people to open up and share what they really think about things – what they thought about the message at chapel or why they are struggling with something (loneliness/drugs/alcohol/etc). Sharing a meal with someone is also a great equaliser in our culture, something that is very important if you want to really witness to people’s felt and actual needs!
At 7:30, after a great dinner and dessert, its time for the patrons to head off, but that doesn’t happen till about 8pm as people are still chatting and eating and enjoying themselves. At this point several of the volunteers head into the kitchen to chuck stuff through the industrial wiz bang dishwasher and of course dry up
After the patrons have left the volunteers meet again in the upstairs room to chat about the evening. People may share about a conversation they had or talk about someone who may need prayer (things remain confidential of course) or if it’s their first night they will share how the evening went for them. We then have a time of open prayer where we pray for the patrons and for the mission.
So that is your average Thursday night at the Newtown Mission Drop in! But of course it is a lot better for you to come along and see how it works for yourself! You can come along as a ‘one-off’ to see what it is like and to increase your understanding of working with homeless people or you can commit to coming each Thursday night. If you would like to come along email me at Jeremy_s@hotmail.com and I can arrange to meet you before drop in starts! If you are a Sydney Uni Student and this interests you then you might want to join ESSIR (Evangelical Students Serving in Redfern) I can point you in the right direction with that if you email me. Alternatively there are other ways that you can support the work of the mission – check them out here
Why are people living in Sydney homeless? That’s a hard question that I get asked, think about it: they do receive regular Centrelink payments! The government has set up a department of Housing to house people who are in real need and there seem to be lots of organisations that help the homeless, e.g. Mission Australia, Anglicare, Salvos, St Vinnies, Hopestreet, Newtown Mission, Haymarket Foundation, Uniting care etc. So why are people living in Sydney still homeless?
Photo of Homeless man in brand new Dr. Martens courtesy of Ted Szukalski
This is not only a very hard question but it is a very important question to ask if we want to help the homeless living in our city. Just as a doctor can’t provide the right sort of treatment without knowing why the patient is sick so too for us without an accurate knowledge of why people are homeless we will not be able to provide assistance that will meet the person’s felt and actual needs.
Today I am going to give my top 3 reasons people are homeless in Sydney. This is not an all encompassing answer to the question I have raised; every homeless person is unique, with their own reason for ending up on the street and their own mix of issues, (it would be an endless list if you were to include them all – a near impossible task)! However most of the homeless here in Sydney would be affected by one or more of these three factors. These factors are: Mental Health; Alcohol and other Drug abuse; and Family break down.
1/ Mental Health is probably the biggest reason for homelessness in Sydney. It is estimated that 75% of homeless people in Sydney suffer from a mental illness, the main ones being: schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and bi polar.
The second half of the 20th century in Australia saw a policy of deinstitutionalising mental health; that is, it was decided that the best way to manage mental health in Australia was to not cram people into insane asylums, but to spend money supporting NGOs as they support people living with a mental illness individually or in small groups. However the financial support never really came, and those who suffered from a mental illness who weren’t connected with a supportive family or organisation often found themselves living on the street. Things haven’t changed much and as I said earlier, 3 out of every 4 people living on the streets in Sydney are living with a mental illness!
Those who are living on the street with a mental illness are of course more likely to use alcohol and other drugs, which of course as you can imagine can exacerbate their mental health issues (e.g. adding a depressant like heroin to someone suffering from depression or adding an hallucinogen like cannabis to someone suffering from PTSD can intensify the suffering from their mental illness). Although mental illness is probably the biggest reason leading people to become homeless, it is rarely mental illness by itself; it is usually coupled with alcohol and other drugs, which brings us to the second reason.
2/ Alcohol and/or other drug abuse is extremely widespread amongst homeless men and women here in Sydney. I have been told that 50% of homeless men or women in Sydney are substance abusers (as opposed to simply recreational users). I think this estimate is as close to a statistic as you can get on this issue and seems right from my own experience. Now let’s do the math: 75% living with a mental illness + 50% substance abusers = a large crossover mentally ill men and women using drugs! That is a large number of people who are using to cope with their mental illness and whose substance abuse is making their mental illness worse.
Alcohol and other drugs are also incredibly addictive. I think we can easily make the mistake of oversimplifying the process of breaking an addiction. Addiction isn’t merely an intellectual dependence on the drug; it is a physical one too, so that when the body doesn’t receive the drug it begins to violently oppose making you physically sick, nauseous, in pain. In fact kicking a habit is incredibly dangerous and can be life threatening. You should never encourage someone with a drug or alcohol addiction to go cold turkey to get over their habit, quitting cold turkey can and does kill. Indeed alcohol is the most dangerous drug to quit, more people die through quitting alcohol cold turkey than they do from any other drug. Never encourage someone with a drug or alcohol addiction to go cold turkey to get over their habit. I say all this to illustrate the mountain that people have to climb to get off drugs; addiction is a real prison that keeps people in homelessness. Even if people get off alcohol and other drugs they usually need to take a safe(ish) substitute like methadone for as long as it takes for their body to let them get off the drug completely – and even then each day is a battle to not relapse into use. When you couple this reality of addiction with the huge peer pressure that often comes when after kickingt he habit they go back to hang out with their friends – who are themselves still using, it becomes nearly impossible for someone to break out of the prison of addiction and get back on their feet in mainstream society.
Finally in regards to alcohol and other drug abuse it should be stated that substance abuse is often the slippery slide that makes people homeless. By this I mean that people don’t wake up one day and decide to be an alcoholic or a drug user, rather they turn to alcohol or other drugs following a significant emotionally taxing event. The two main ones (in my opinion) would be turning to alcohol and drugs when made unemployed/redundant/sacked/retrenched and secondly turning to substance abuse during or after family breakdown. This brings me to the third of my reasons for why men and women in Sydney are homeless.
3/ Family Breakdown. Family breakdown is an umbrella term that I am going to use to include the impacts of divorce on (predominantly) men; the impacts of domestic violence (DV) on women; and children who flee from harmful home situations.
If you take a walk around the homeless ‘hot spots’ in Sydney (e.g. Frogs Hollow in Surry Hills, Tom Uren’s place/Talbot lane in Woolloomooloo, Central Station’s country trains, Parramatta Mall and Kings Cross/Potts Point) you will see an overwhelming majority of men. Why? Well the answer to that would take up a new blog post – but let’s leave it for now with women are more likely to seek external help whereas men are more likely to slide into homelessness and reject outside help. When you begin to talk to these men you start to realise that many of them have children! You then discover that they used to be in normal functioning families until something happened – (here you could insert: gambling addiction; started drinking to cope with work; lost their job and started drinking; did something illegal and went to gaol; lost a child and couldn’t handle it emotionally; started experiencing shock and PTSD from the Vietnam war; and many more things). From here they fall onto the slippery slide to homelessness, often thinking it would be a temporary thing and then getting trapped in it.
Secondly, women who are fleeing a DV relationship often find themselves homeless, especially if they were not the primary income earner and hadn’t worked in years. I have met women who have waited till their children leave school before they decide to leave an abusive relationship; sometimes leaving after not working for over a decade. It can be incredibly hard for women who have come from this situation to find appropriate long term and secure employment.
Finally children from the ages of around 13 onwards run away from abusive family situations. I was having dinner one Friday night at the youth off the street’s food van in Green Park (near Oxford Street) when I met a 16 year old kid, Tom (fake name) who had been living on the streets for three years. He had been sexually abused by his father and so ran away; found himself sleeping in a park until another homeless guy showed him where he could get a free feed and where he could sleep out without the cops moving him along to another location. This story is true for many young people who are homeless here in Sydney. Of course it doesn’t take long for an impressionable 16 year old to start abusing alcohol and experimenting with drugs.
These are just three of the main reasons. They are often entangled and interconnected with one another, making it virtually impossible for them to lift themselves out of homelessness, it just becomes a way of life – indeed homelessness in Sydney is in itself a subculture! This requires Christians to try to get their head around the complexities of homelessness and the reasons that lead people to homelessness. Furthermore I have only mentioned three reasons, I have not even touched: gambling addictions, rehabilitation after gaol time, lack of government housing, shortage of affortable private housing, being the victim of child abuse, being raised as a ward of the state, failed businesses, unemployment etc etc.
If you would like to read an excellent book that talks about these issues from a unique perspective than may I recommend you read a book called: “Down to This: A year living with the homeless” by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. It is a diary of a journalist in Canada who after a severe break up with a long time girlfriend found himself living on the streets for a year. It provides an insider’s insight into how people cope with homelessness, why people become homeless, unique reflections on Christian services as opposed to secular ones and thoughts on how to best help long term homeless men and women.
I know this has been a long post, but think of it as only an introduction to these issues, feel free to get in contact with me at jeremy_s@hotmail.com if you would like to chat about any of these things further, alternatively leave a comment.
Other posts on Homelessness:
How many Homeless people live in Sydney?
Newtown Mission: Serving the Homeless
Its now time for our weekly segment here at Micaiah Sells Out called:
“4 quick questions and 1 strange one with…”
Our second “4 quick questions and 1 strange one with…” is with Richard Glover. Richard lives in the heart of Newtown on King Street and has a passion for talking to the homeless men and women on his street or at the church drop in. Richard is currently studying Arts and Secondary Education at Sydney Uni but prefers to stay busy working as ESSIR President and serving as the EU Education male faculty leader. Richard is by far the biggest U2 fan I know and will happily tell you how all of their songs in some way relate back to either the doctrine of justification by faith or God’s call to help the poor. Richard recently returned from Cambodia and is the author of the blog “I woke up this morning with a frappacino in my hand“
Richard and some kids in slums of Phnom Penh
1/ Richard, you recently returned from spending some time in Cambodia. What were you doing there, who did you go with and why did you go?
I was in Cambodia with a group of people from the church my family attends, St. George’s Anglican in Gerrigong on the south coast of NSW. The trip was what has become a regular part of the church’s commitment to Christian mission; this is the third trip to Cambodia the church has undertaken, having previously travelled there in 2006 and 2007.
Tabitha, who work in Cambodia alongside Cambodians to sustainably improve the lives of the many poor in the country.
I don’t know how much you know about Cambodia’s history. It has a long and magnificently rich history, but its modern history is highly traumatic. Most people will have heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who took control of Cambodia in 1975 and were responsible for a terrible genocide there. It’s a long, sad story; go here for more information.
For the purpose of understanding the nature of this particular mission trip, it will suffice to acknowledge that Cambodians have suffered enormous trauma, and no one in the nation has been left untouched by the violence done to them. Our contribution to the house-building, apart from raising the money for the 10 houses we built, was simply to finish the buildings off by nailing on the walls and the floorboards. This may seem a little lame; surely someone could do that locally! The reason Tabitha ask foreigners to assist with the building in this way is that Cambodians have a highly defeatist self-perception, due to the years of oppression they have suffered. They have been taught that they are worthless, and have experienced the isolation of the Western world watching from the sidelines as great atrocities were committed.
They also get Western TV. So, they know how we live, and to them it seems easy for us to shell out a couple of thousand dollars to provide them with better housing. Indeed it is. But for us to actually show up and help with the building, and get out of our incredibly wealthy comfortable environment to meet them in person, now that’s a huge thing. In that way we on the mission team, as Christians, were seeking to bring hope to a dark place. Christians, I think, have a calling in the world to make visible signs of the hope that we have in Jesus. Helping to improve the lives of these people points towards the ultimate restoration that we are waiting for when Jesus returns; coming into their place and their lives shows them that we believe they have worth and dignity. I think that’s what Jesus would have us do where we see suffering in His world. After all, the grace of Jesus Christ is seen in the way he left His riches in heaven and became poor for our sake, so that we ourselves might become rich (2 Corinthians 8.9).
One of many Hagar projects thet TEAR supports
On this same theme, we visited two of TEAR Australia’s partner organisations in the capital city, Phnom Penh. TASK works in the urban slum communities, educating the community about caring for children with disabilities, running an HIV clinic, and doing sanitation work. Hagar works with women who have come out of the sex industry, both Cambodians and women who have been trafficked into Cambodia. They also run children’s programmes, so that these women can remain with their children during their rehabilitation. The programme begins with counselling, and works up towards a career pathways programme, giving the women skills to re-enter the workforce and the community. Exciting organizations, who are having amazing success, and, although neither of them are directly evangelistic, they are finding themselves in situations with wonderful opportunities to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We also visited some churches, and spent some time with some missionaries who are serving in Cambodia through CMS Victoria. They have planted a new church this year, and have since begun a restaurant and catering service, managed by members of the church. The purpose for this is twofold: a desire to serve a community suffering severe unemployment, and a desire to disciple the church in the knowledge that following Jesus is about all of life–including their business ventures!
Acts declaring hope in dark places; bringing reconcilliation and new life. Exactly the things Jesus calls His church to be busy doing while we wait for Him to return! Shameless plug: I’m busy thinking about these ideas over at my blog. Eventually I’ll get around to thinking about the implications for the church back here in Australia…
Richard building houses
The focus of the 10-day trip is two days spent building houses in a poor rural community. The church does this work in partnership with a Christian NGO named
2/ How did you become interested in working with poor and marginalised communities? Could you recommend any books or organisations/groups that could help people get involved in social justice work?
I first got interested in these issues late in high school. It’s an odd story: I was watching TV late one night, and came across a doco about an HIV-positive orphan in South Africa. I was surprised to find myself in tears by the end of the programme. I knew inwardly that the God I trusted could not look on such suffering and remain unmoved. I suspected that He expected me to do something about it.
I didn’t really know how to articulate this new series of thoughts and feelings. So, I started reading books! I learned more about the situation of the extreme poor in the world. You’ve probably heard the stats before: 30,000 children die each day from preventable causes; 1.2 billion human beings live on less than US$1.25 a day. As I looked into it, the problem grew and grew. It’s hard to ignore, despite the fact that so many people seem to be able to ignore it every day.
Wilberforce
I also found out that evangelical Christians have a long history of social concern. Wilberforce and the campaign to end slavery. Bonhoeffer’s political engagement. Calvin’s city-state in Geneva. Martin Luther King’s leadership of the US civil rights movement. All the way up to the World Council of Evangelical Churches’ ‘Jubilee 2000′ and ‘Drop the Debt’ campaigns, which spawned the secular Make Povery History movement. I also found that God is in fact deeply concerned with these issues, and expects His people to be engaged with them too. It turns out that God expects not just me to be concerning myself with these things, but His whole church! Here’s a stat you may not know: there are 200 million Christians living in extreme poverty (let alone the rest), and the Western church has the resources to easily lift all of them out of their present situation, without a significant decrease in our standard of living. Food for thought. Where are our priorities? Where is our treasure?
I love books. Books are rad. Here are some helpful ones. On Christian engagement with these issues, and how social engagement forms part of the mission of the church, the best thing I’ve ever read is Ron Sider’s Good News and Good Works. Also, Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope,and Hauerwas & Willimon’s Resident Aliens. Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics is also good, although I have issues with some parts of it. It’s set in the American context, and in some ways it’s too political!
Ministries of Mercy, by Tim Keller
For a great overview of wealth in the bible, Craig Blomberg’s Neither Poverty Nor Riches. For an introduction to Christian political engagement, with an overview of the theology and philosophy as well as practical analysis of particular issues, Nigel Oakley’s Engaging Politics. The relevant chapters of John Stott’s Issues Facing Christians Today are a brilliant overview of the ‘so why should we care about this?’ question. On the issues from an economic and political perspective, and how we can work towards fixing them, see Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. Next on my list to read, although I haven’t started yet, is Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy.
That should keep y’all going for a while… 
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some great organizations which have helped me deepen my understanding of these issues as a Christian, and given me opportunities to do something about it. One of those is Newtown Mission, an evangelical Uniting church in the wonderful Sydney inner west suburb of Newtown (where, incidentally, I now also live!). If you’re in Sydney and you want to see what effective, integrated service among the poor and marginalised looks like, visit the drop-in at Newtown Mission! The staff and volunteers there are fantastic at loving whole people. More churches should be like this one. Helping out at the drop-in on Thursday nights is the highlight of my week. I’ve been doing it for three years now and I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. You can hear more about Newtown Mission on the Pilgrim’s Podcast, over at All Things New.
Probably the most helpful organisation in terms of thinking through these issues has been TEAR, an evangelical aid and development agency. Someone invited me in my first year of uni to go along to TEAR’s annual conference (wait… Jeremy, wasn’t that you?). They have a fantastic biblical foundation for their work, and through meeting each month with other uni students and young workers in a TEAR group I’ve learned heaps about development and how social engagement forms a part of the life of the Christian and the church. Also, through TEAR, I’ve been able to participate in advocacy events, such as travelling to Canberra late last year to lobby federal MPs and senators on foreign aid issues, as well as receiving training in how to be effective in communicating with politicians on things I care about. TEAR has also really helped me to think about ways to get my church and uni Christian group excited for social engagement.
3/ Richard, you are the president of a Sydney Uni Christian group called ESSIR. Could you tell us what ESSIR stands for, what its about and how someone could get involved if they were interested?
Also around the time I started uni, I started to realised that poverty isn’t restricted to Africa and South East Asia. There’s plenty of it here in Sydney! Some Christians at uni (again, I seem to remember you had something to do with this, Jezz…) were getting together to pray about how to respond to the people we walked past asking for money at Redfern train station. Eventually, ESSIR was born.
ESSIR stands for ‘Evangelical Students Serving In Redfern’. Bulky, I know. That’s why we stick with the acronym! ESSIR is a group seeking opportunities for Christian students at Sydney Uni to serve the poor and marginalised in the communities around the university, such as Redfern. It has been a modest success in its first three years! We have students serving each week at the drop-in centre at Newtown Mission (see above), as well as at the Wednesday afternoon youth group at Redfern Anglican church. In the past we’ve also had students helping out at the Have-a-Chat Cafe in Glebe, run by a brilliant organisation called Hopestreet. They made coffees for the people living in the housing commission there, had conversations, organised bread runs, etc.
At present, we’d love to have some volunteers who are keen to tutor primary aged kids in Glebe on a Thursday afternoon (also with Hopestreet). Sounds like the perfect volunteering opportunity for Christian uni students! If anyone’s interested in this, or the above things, they can email me.
ESSIR also exists to educate Christian students about the needs of the communities around Sydney Uni. We’ve fallen down a bit on this front in the last 18 months… But we did have an event last year at which Trevor Thomas, the Chairman of the Board of TEAR Australia, spoke about using our lives to serve Jesus by loving those He called ‘the least of these’. Good times.
4/ You also serve on the Board of Global Recordings Australia, could you tell us about Global Recordings and what you do with them and how you have time to do so many things!
Global Recordings excites me! GR have been around for quite some time now. They work to get the bible in the native language of people who don’t have it. It’s that simple, and that complicated! The premise is that God’s Word saves, and that it is easiest to understand God’s Word in one’s ‘heart language’; that is, the language you grew up speaking. GR’s vision is to have the whole bible recorded in every language and dialect in the world, of which there are estimated to be about 12,000. Currently we have at least portions in around 6,500 languages on the massive servers in Castle Hill. If you believe that God’s Word is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, and that by His Spirit God uses it to change lives, then this is a really exciting ministry!!
The network of GR national offices employ recordists who venture out into communities, usually rural areas in developing countries, to translate and record scripture, in conjunction with local churches. Native speakers of each dialect speak on the recordings. From there, GR works to distribute the recordings among the community. For tech nerds, this is the exciting bit: GR builds and manufactures its own playback devices! The latest iteration is a super-cool hand-wind MP3 player called the Saber. GR also has various picture books and gospel presentations which can be used in conjunction with the recordings.
What do I do with them? Well, I sit on the board of GR Australia as a youth intern. Which means I attend board meetings. The purpose of this is to get other young people excited about what GR is up to! So really, the idea is that I get to do things like this–plugging GR on blogs. I’m currently thinking about how to bring down the average age of the organisation. It’s been great to learn about how the organisation works and how it contributes to the global mission of the church of Jesus. I’m excited about it. You should be too!
The time issue is quite easily resolved: I skip classes and hand in assignments late! That said, I was pleasantly surprised by my results in semester 1… Seriously though, if you’ve got a passion for mission & ministry, it just seems to take over. It’s what keeps me going, so it’s where I spend my time.
5/ ’A married man was visiting his “girlfriend” when she requested that he shave his beard. “Oh James, I like your beard, but I would really love to see your handsome face.” James replied, “My wife loves this beard, I couldn’t possibly do it, she would kill me!!”
“Oh please?” the girlfriend asked again, in a sexy little voice…
“Oh really, I can’t,” he replies…”My wife loves this beard!!”
The girlfriend asked once more, and he sighs and finally gives in. That night James crawls into bed with his wife while she was sleeping.
The wife is awakened somewhat, feels his face and replies “Oh Michael, you shouldn’t be here, my husband will be home soon!”‘
As someone who has a beard, could you please comment.
Well you know what they say: beards are a dangerous thing. Only the righteous can endure the social pressures placed upon them by the curse of such glorious growth.
