East to West director Andy Burns explores why the Church is often apathetic in responding to young homeless people, and asks: what can we do to help a young person who turns up at our group with nowhere else to go?

I live and minister in some of the most affluent areas of the UK: Surrey and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. So please don’t read this and think it only applies in a metropolitan setting.

In our area, a young homeless guy called Mark spent a few weeks knocking on several local Minister’s doors asking for help. Those same Ministers then phoned my wife (who is a homeless project manager) for advice, and so it came to be that Mark landed on our doorstep and we were confronted with the question of how would we respond to the need right there in front of us.

Our response was to take him in for a week, get to the root of the issue and we hoped, put him back on his feet. I say ‘take him in’ – it was more akin to a nativity scene as there was literally no room in our house so he spent the week in our campervan parked on the drive. What surprised me was the high level of praise and affirmation we received from members of our church and the local Christian Community. I personally wondered what was so spectacular about our response to Mark’s need. Wasn’t it simply a natural outworking of people seeking to follow the teaching and example of Christ? OK, not everyone has the confidence or means to respond in such a way to this kind of situation, but surely it’s to be viewed as normal and nothing exceptional for a Christian. Please don’t hear me say that good works aren’t to be praised or that those who serve can live without a pat on the back; yet it saddens me to think that the act of taking a homeless guy in was viewed as being so monumental.

If it’s OK for Revd Martin Luther King then I hope its OK for me. My dream is nothing short of wanting to be unsurprised by the justice, mercy and compassion shown by the Church to those who are not their own. That it would become the norm that the church fed, clothed and set free those who were or are caught in destructively
hopeless lifestyles, not simply maintain the norm and their own. However, I fear we have some way to go before this pipe-dream becomes a reality.