A compassionate community

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 22nd. This is WORLD Radio. Thank you for listening! Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: shining the light of Christ on the streets of Portland, Oregon.

Homelessness in the city shot up by 65 percent between 2015 and 2023. Drug use is rampant. So are overdoses.

The Portland Rescue Mission helps thousands of people every year. But the city’s prioritization of personal autonomy is threatening its mission.

REICHARD: How do you make a difference in such a challenging environment?

WORLD senior writer Emma Freire has the story.

AUDIO: Howdy! Hey, brother. [Door clinking]

EMMA FREIRE: The Portland Rescue Mission’s homeless shelter in Old Town Portland is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

TIMOTHY DESPER: Last year, we served around 6,000 unique individuals through the doors here.

Timothy Desper is the shelter director. He’s been here 17 years and his work is deeply personal.

DESPER: I was born here. I love the city, my heart breaks for it, and I follow Jesus.

Desper worked in international missions before returning to minister closer to home.

He oversees the shelter’s work providing many different services:

DESPER: We have volunteers here during the day, usually, and then staff overnight. And then individuals are able to use a clean restroom, wash their hands, get socks, check their mail, anything that allows us to support the process of them moving away from the street.

Desper and his team provide daily meals. And only nutritious food is allowed.

DESPER: Breakfast is always a main entrée, a side, and a fruit at minimum. And dinner is always a main entree, vegetable and salad. Minimum. The moniker soup kitchen would be a pejorative to me.

Desper says bacon and eggs for breakfast are particularly popular. At dinner time, fried chicken is always a hit.

DESPER: It's comfort food. Those things that you would associate that just are like they feel so good to eat are the most popular. And sadly, the reality is, the most expensive.

They plan meals around the reality of the community they serve:

DESPER: The beginning of the months are always lesser than the end of the months, because of the reality that food stamps and social security benefits are usually distributed at the beginning of the month.

There are many nonprofits in Portland offering services to the homeless. But the Portland Rescue Mission does something unique. It requires everyone who enters the building to scan a community card. To get a card, a person can give any name and date of birth they want. There’s no verification. But the shelter does take a photo.

DESPER: Which is for Americans or others, like Costco. Stores where you present your card when you come in, and they go, ‘Oh, hey, welcome.’

Holding a community card means people have to follow a few minimum standards like no violence and no using drugs in the building. But that doesn’t mean they have to be clean.

DESPER: If they come in, and they’re maybe struggling with addiction, well, that's who we serve. And we're gonna accommodate them and build a relationship with them and try to help them understand ways to step away from that.

These minimum standards of behavior might sound like common sense. But the fact that the Portland Rescue Mission attaches any requirements at all to the services it offers attracted criticism from other nonprofits.

DESPER: Your ability to be who you are and to do what you wish, how you wish, where you wish, your freedom as an individual is placed on a really high place here, within, especially Portland culture.

Desper is not the only one who thinks Portland’s struggles are rooted in ideology. Mark McConnell is an elder at First Orthodox Presbyterian Church, about 5 miles away. The church has dealt with high levels of crime, including four homicides, near their building.

MCCONNELL: I believe that we have an ideological conflict. There are motives behind this that are humanitarian. There's a trauma-informed kind of mentality. They don't want to add to the problems of poverty and violence that they've been living in by arresting them and bossing them around.

McConnell believes the solutions offered by Portland’s leadership are ultimately not compassionate at all.

MCCONNELL: So they are trying to find some gentle way to provide them options so that they choose to get off the street. And there's no action being taken to remove them forcibly out of an environment that is worse than anything you've ever experienced.

The Portland Rescue Mission believes that true freedom is found only in Christ.

Desper is not optimistic about the city’s future. He believes Portland’s worldview needs to change before drug use and homelessness will drop significantly.

DESPER: We still, as a community and as a society, have to come to terms with: where do we lie on the spectrum of the necessary reality of holding people accountable? And where do we lie on the necessary reality of intervening in the lives of people experiencing crisis?

In the meantime, he and his team offer hope. After dinner each night, they organize a chapel service.

Attendance is entirely voluntary. But Desper says it’s often full.

The services feature singing and a short talk. Desper says the basic theme of the talk is always the same.

DESPER: Hope, hope. Yes it's a message of hope. It's a message of Jesus' love seven days a week.

That’s the message visitors to the shelter most need to hear.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Freire in Portland, Oregon.

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