Welcome to Spotlight! In each issue, we focus on someone who calls Harvest Fellowship home. It may be an artist, a missionary, a businessperson, a teacher or an astronaut. In addition to our featured cover story, previous stories are also archived by year.
2010, 2011.

 

 

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Joe & Doreen VanOoyen

Each Thursday night, you'll find Joe VanOoyen on the streets of Fort Wayne, hanging out in back alleys, under bridges and in secluded areas that he visits often. He's there to see people who have become friends of his; people who are homeless. Doreen often goes with him, but frequently her time is spent in preparing snacks, gathering blankets, provisions, and anything else that will help their friends be a little more comfortable.

They call the ministry S.O.S., or Saints On The Streets. You can follow their occasional journal posts here on the Harvest Fellowship website.

I met with Joe and Doreen at their home recently and asked them how they got involved in this work.
 

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brad:  Joe & Doreen, explain what S.O.S. is and how you got involved with it.

joe:  Three years ago, Doreen came to me and told me she had heard, through her friend, Mindy, about a guy named Mark Scott who walks the street and deals with homeless people. She thought it would be a ministry I would really enjoy getting involved in.

doreen:  And something that would work with Joe's work schedule.

joe:  So, we met Mark and he went through this little impromptu training session, an hour of questions and answers, what you should do, what you shouldn't do out there on the streets, what are the safe ideas, what are not safe ideas.

doreen:  He actually had one of the homeless girls there with him. She just kind of shared her testimony about what Mark and his group of guys had done for her and for the homeless community and how she became like the mediator for the homeless. She would call Mark and let him know what the needs were out on the street, and then he would find the resources to bring back to them, whether it would be socks or sleeping bags or food or shoes or whatever.

brad:  So, this was something that he just started on his own?

doreen:  It was a prompting, obviously, from the Lord.

brad:  It wasn't an outreach of a certain church or organization?

joe:  No, all on his own. He was actually doing missionary work in Thailand. He was helping in an orphanage there and he was thinking, "Hey, this is an awesome place, I get to live by the beach, I'm going to live here forever!" But he said that the Lord put it on his heart to return back to Fort Wayne, Indiana. At first, he didn't want to. But he did what the Lord asked.

 

Maybe six or seven years ago now, it was impressed upon his heart that he should just pray for the city; that he should walk through the streets of downtown Fort Wayne and pray for the city, pray for administrators, the mayor, the police department, people living in certain homes, shelters, etc. However, as he was doing this, one night, two nights, three nights a week, he kept encountering homeless people. So he just gradually started bringing stuff like water, snacks, whatever, and as he started to get to know these people, and as they would share their needs, he would bring more stuff, and that's how it evolved. It started out as a prayer ministry and evolved into this thing helping the homeless, and Mark actually coined the phrase, S.O.S., or Saints on the Streets.

 

And it was always his vision that it was never one church's ministry or one group's ministry. This was God's ministry. Whoever showed up to help, showed up. Whenever somebody had a tangent idea, like, "Hey, I'm going to go do this with the homeless," Mark would always encourage it and say, "You don't need to incorporate it with us. If the Lord is putting something on your heart specifically, you go do that. If the Lord put something specifically on my heart, I'll go do that.

 

So this mismatched hodgepodge of people just started congregating around doing this, and now we have probably 30-some people going out on various nights. Monday nights are usually the biggest group that shows up and goes out, but there are guys that go out Tuesday nights and there's another couple of ladies who go out on Wednesday nights. I go out on Thursday nights. I've been told that there are people going out on Saturday's during the day now. Another church has people coming out on Sunday night.

brad:  Does someone choreograph it?

joe:  No, everyone just does what they do. A gentleman named Jim Bell, a guy who goes out on Monday nights, started writing a blog. He writes about what he experiences with his Monday-night group, who he met, who he talked to, what was new on the streets or whatever.

 

So, that's how I got started. After meeting Mark Scott, and going out on the streets with him on Wednesday nights, the Lord opened my heart to it and gave me a joy of doing it. I began to love these guys on the streets, and I just go out and basically just show them love, acceptance, and respect. That's it. It's not really about the material provisions that we give to them. It's more just showing these people that God loves them and so do we.

brad:  Somebody cares...

joe:  Somebody cares, and how the Lord revealed that to me was, after about three months or so of doing this, we met this Vietnamese guy, Huong. He could not speak English, didn't understand it, and I didn't understand his language at all, but he was on a park bench in Freimann Square when I met him one evening. I had sat down about three feet away from him and I just tried talking to him. The language barrier made it difficult. I tried to hand him things and ask questions like, "Do you need socks? Do you need food?"

 

As I asked the questions, I would pull stuff out of my bag. "Do you need toothpaste? Do you need this, do you need that?" He would just sort of look at me, not knowing what I was trying to convey or say. He would say a few things I didn't understand, but everything I would show him or try to give to him, he just brushed off and didn't respond.

 

Finally, after trying to communicate with him for about five minutes, I just grabbed a bottle of water and just pushed it on him, tapped his body with it, like "Here, just take this. Go ahead and take it." He finally accepted it, and when I looked back at his face, his whole countenance was different. He had this huge smile on his face. It was ear-to-ear (He was missing half the teeth in his head!) and he was smiling bigger and bigger. It caught me by surprise. I looked at him like, wow, what's just happened here, because before it was just this unexpressive look and now there's this big, happy, huge smile.I thought it was odd. I was thinking, "It's just water!" and I wasn't sure what to make of it.

 

Later, as I was driving home, and I was praying for the people that we had met that day and thinking about why Huong had responded the way he did, all of a sudden it came to me. It was like God reminded me, "Joe, you showed him love and acceptance, something he hadn't experienced lately." It's not about the stuff we're giving the homeless folks. It's not about trying to make sure they have some food or water or clothing or whatever. It's accepting them, exactly who and where they are, at the moment they're in and loving them, accepting them, loving them and respecting them for just being another creature of God.

brad:  It's kind of the thing, really, that everyone needs, homeless or not: To know that someone cares about them, that someone is concerned about them. The logical application of this might be that, as you show these people that you care, they might be able to draw the conclusion that maybe God could care for them also. We probably think of the homeless being in larger cities, but it sounds like there are quite a few in Fort Wayne. Do you run into the same people all the time or different people?

joe:  80-percent of the time, we run into the same people. Then, sometimes, new people show up, and maybe they show up for a short time, we might see them a few weeks in a row, and then, all of a sudden, they disappear. They came into Fort Wayne, and they left Fort Wayne for whatever reasons. Usually, as in other cities, the reasons these folks are on the streets, is because of their life choices that they make. They can't go home because of either drugs, alcohol...

doreen:  Burned bridges.

brad:  Do they have the basics? If S.O.S. weren't out visiting them, would they have enough food to survive or might they perish on the streets, or do they take advantage of rescue missions as a solution?

joe:  Yes. In Fort Wayne it would be very hard to be homeless and be hungry because you can go to the rescue mission early in the morning and get breakfast. Anyone can go to the soup kitchen from about 11 to 1 and get soup, bread and milk. You can go back to the rescue mission in the evening to get dinner. Every day you can go get food. There are other places, like Ave Maria house, run by the Catholic church and a lady named Dottie. She opens up the home from 10 to 2 every aftenoon (except for Sundays) and allows people in. You can do your laundry there, and even take showers.

doreen:  You can make phone calls there, and get on the Internet.

joe:  And they can do that at the library also.

doreen:  They can use Ave Maria House as their home address, and get their mail delivered there.

doreen:  One of the important thing we give these people is companionship. They look forward to the S.O.S. visits. A lot of the homeless will wait up knowing that on Mondays, Jim Bell and his group are coming out, on Tuesdays, Andrew is coming out, on Thursdays, Joe is coming out. So they expect or kind of wait for that; it's a highlight for many of them. They get to see these guys, and as they get to know them, the people that are walking will spend time with them,and sometimes, that's the only real one-on-one conversation they may have with somebody outside of their homeless community.

brad:  So, it's very different than going to the rescue mission where they're expecting to find something to eat. Here, there are people who are actually coming to see them and showing them friendship.

joe:  Exactly! We care about them. God loves them. I always say, God loves them and so do we. It's not our job to fix them because we can't fix them anyways. There's nothing we can do to really change their life. We're not going to drag them out of the pit, so to speak. That's not what my role is. You can't just reach down into the pit, so to speak, and try to pull them out. You actually have to get in the pit with them, and if they choose to walk out, you can walk out with them, and if they choose to stay in there, just let them know that they were loved and accepted, and God over time will change their heart.

brad:  Is it sometimes dangerous?

joe:  Yeah, it can be. And that's why we always go in groups.You should never go out by yourself.

doreen:  You don't want to go with too many either.

brad:  Tell me how it works to be living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the middle of a very cold winter, under a bridge?

joe:  Well, how it physically works is you need to have a lot of padding to keep yourself off the ground. I mean, four, five, six, seven, eight sheets of cardboard are ideal, a couple blankets or so as padding on top of that, and a whole stack of blankets that you slide in between. In winter, normally, they're all covered up in their blankets, stuffed in their sleeping bag. When you stop to see them, they might peek their eyes out through the blankets a little bit, but they don't want to get out because it takes a lot of energy to heat everything back up.

brad:  Sometimes, as Christians, we have it wrong, don't we? We want people to get cleaned up and start acting normal before we befriend them. It sounds like you just take these people as they are. Do you sometimes see some spiritual awakenings?

joe:  Yeah, a lot of these guys have come to know the Lord just through the love and acceptance of groups like us or Salvation Army. Some groups have just wanted to cram the Word down somebody's throat, and it's not going to work this way because they've never seen you, they have no idea who you are and they have no reason to trust you. You've got to just be real with these people, love and accept them, and over time as we get to know them, we start to have conversations,

doreen:  S.O.S. groups don't necessarily share the word with them when they first get to know them, but they build that trust and then can talk about the spiritual relationship later.

brad:  Corrie ten Boom, the writer of many early hymns in the church said, "I think, first, you make friends, then you make converts." I think that's a good way of saying it.

joe:  Yeah. Early on, the Lord also put this on my heart: Share the word of God with them, and if you absolutely have to, use words. Don't just say stuff to them, but show them.

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You can read more about S.O.S. on this blog, written by Jim Bell, including stories of the groups experiences, short bios on some of the homeless they work with, and a list of needs that you can help with.

If you'd like more information, you can email Joe or S.O.S. for more information. You can also visit their Facebook Page.

This story is part of a series called Spotlight on the Harvest Fellowship website. As new stories are added, you can check out other people's stories on the archive page.

Written by Brad Wieland. Feature & Family Photos by Brad Wieland. Other photos by Brian Koehneke. You can view a series of photographs that Brian made about Saints On The Streets here on the S.O.S. website. You can also view Brian's photography website at www.knaqi.com.

 

published 02/01/2011