LA Dream Center

Don’t Let Him Shake Your Tree.

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

My husband Sam loves the word addled. Truly, it’s a pretty good word with great synonyms like muzzy, woozy and befuddled.

He doesn’t apply it to me very often, because I’m usually steady. But in preparing to spend all this week serving the urban poor at the LA Dream Center, I was shilly-shallying and futzing around so badly, I thought I might have dementia. I even threw my wallet in the kitchen garbage and walked away with a soggy paper towel in hand. I worried about it to Sam.

“It’s because you’re going to LA to do something you’ve never done and you’re scared,” he said.

He’s right. I’ve never wandered under a bridge to hand out hot food to a homeless person. I’ve never played with neglected kids in a gang-infested urban neighborhood. What am I doing?

I’ll tell you what I’m doing, I’m climbing out on a limb, because that’s where the fruit is, and when you’re a new climber, like me, it’s good to follow the professional climbers. The LA Dream Center, which is the single largest food bank in LA County and serves 40,000 people every month in its 273 ministries, not only climbs to the best fruit, but they pick it and toss it down to everyone else.

The Apostle Paul said, the promises of God all find their yes in Jesus, and I’ve decided there are too many people (Bob Goff, Katie Davis, Matthew Barnett) doing impossible, God-promised things to doubt Jesus’ extravagant yes.

But I don’t want to just pig out on the grace of God until I’m bloated from hoarding it. It’s designed for sharing. Jesus wants me on my feet, darting nimbly through the world as his little cracked-pot, ambassador. As Katie Davis says in her lovely memoir from Uganda, where by age 19 she’d adopted the first six of her 14 orphans, we don’t have to be talented, we just have to be available.

The problem with shouting this manifesto is, the enemy hears it. And when you get halfway out your limb, he starts shaking your tree, hoping you’ll turn back. The devil doesn’t want me learning to serve people like Jesus did, and he sure doesn’t want me telling you how to do it. So he opposes me using the only things he has, anxiety, fear, confusion, rejection etc. The Apostle Paul explains it like this:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Eph 6:12.

Yes, it’s tempting to bail out when I’m anxious and shaky, and can’t hold a coherent thought or keep my wallet out of the trash, but then I think, “bail out to where?” Jesus blew up all the bridges behind me. The only way left is forward.

And in this case, it goes through LA.

Dreaming in LA

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

If you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably driven past a hulking 400,000 square foot building along the Hollywood freeway, the former Queen of Angels hospital.

In 1996, The Catholic Church sold that building and its nine-acre campus to a 22-year-old pastor named Matthew Barnett, who, alongside his pastor-father Tommy Barnett, founded The LA Dream Center – the church that never sleeps.

In his recent New York Times bestseller The Cause Within You, Matthew Barnett describes how it feels at age 22 to sign your name on the closing documents of a decrepit, $3.9 million facility in a rough LA neighborhood, that you don’t actually have the money to pay for.

Matthew wept.

Fast forward 16 years, the LA Dream Center is now the largest, non-profit food bank in Los Angeles. It serves 40,000 people every month through its 273 ministries designed to help the urban poor with homelessness, drug addiction, sexual slavery, food insecurity, prostitution and gang life.

Their story is a firm reminder that many Christians do much more than stand in line to eat chicken sandwiches, they just don’t make the news.

Barnett’s assistant, a former atheist named Todd, who became a Christian after witnessing the Dream Center in action, was so enthusiastic about his conversion he wrote a paper parsing a doctrinal question. Here’s what Todd said happened next in The Cause Within You:

When I finished the paper, I gave it to Pastor Matthew and told him how hard I’d worked on it and presented both sides of the argument. I told him I wanted him to tell me which it was: are we higher or lower than angels? He looked at me and said “Who cares? Who does this help? Whose life does this change?” And I said I didn’t know and he said, “Nobody! That’s who. Not one. Zero people. You know what you need to do with this? Get rid of it and go feed some hungry people. Then if you still need to know the answer to that question, ask Jesus after you die. For now, that stuff doesn’t matter. Find someone to help and take care of their needs.”

Todd is just one of many who have been swept up into Barnett’s army, doing exactly what Jesus told his followers to do – Peter do you love me? Well then, feed my sheep.

A few months ago, I was in LA and visited the Dream Center. Standing on the roof, overlooking the smoggy, gorgeous maw that is Los Angeles, they told me the place requires $600,000 a month to function. The website says, they do it without government funding, and the original $3.9 million has long been paid in full.

There are 700 people living on the Dream Center campus in various states of education, rehabilitation or crisis and they expect to house a thousand by year’s end. Recently, the LA County court system began remanding juvenile offenders into Dream Center programs. They may soon remand adults as well.

In case you missed that last part, I’ll say it again: The secular, criminal court system in California’s largest city is sending some of its convicts to a non-profit, non-government funded, Christian ministry, in lieu of jail time. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it works better.

That night I hustled over to the historic Angelus Temple in Echo Park, the Dream Center’s church home, which Barnett also leads.

All the people you never see in church were there: The dirty homeless woman with the plastic bags, the Hispanic teenager with tattoos on his neck and the skinny-jean clad urban hipsters. The band played a muscular David Crowder Band song, while a knot of young men bounced around down front praising Jesus Christ with an exuberance more common to Coachella than church.

It was the most fun I’ve had in months. The whole place, its culture, its vibe along with the mission: find a hurt and heal it, made me want to move to LA and take part. But of course, there are plenty of sheep to feed in Texas too.

Generally, sheep are kind of dumb and prone to wandering, especially when they’re hungry. It’s a lot easier to admonish a wandering lamb than it is to gather it up and feed it; and Jesus never said fight among yourselves over why the sheep are hungry, he just said to feed them.

Who knew there was a giant, green sheep pasture in downtown LA?