God at Work: a Testimony of Prophecy, Provision and People Amid Poverty

GOD AT WORK

a testimony of

prophecy, provision and people amid poverty

by Drew Snider

Distributed by Smashwords © 2019 Drew Snider

Second Edition

Author of A Very Convenient Truth; or, Jesus Warned Us There’d Be Days Like These, so Stop Worrying About the Planet and Get With His Program!

Check out Drew’s (almost) daily blog, Two Minutes for Cross-Checking!

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture used in this book is taken from the New King James Version, copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The cover photo was taken on Carrall Street on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side: God’s promise of forgiveness, grace and hope over an area sorely lacking in hope.

Cover design and formatting by Anneliese Walker.

DEDICATION

for The Guys – the men and women who became family during those years

and especially for Amelia, John, Danilo and Gary.

And also for Wesley Chadwick, the current pastor/director at Gospel Mission, Russell Chadwick, chaplain at Gospel Mission, and their co-labourers. I hope this chapter of the Gospel Mission story encourages you as you take it into its next chapter – whatever it might hold.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD AND PREFACE

PART THE FIRST: SAMARIA

1 – Under My Skin

2 – Welcome to Samaria

3 – At the Rainbow

4 – Gospel Mission

5 – They, the People

6 – Death and all his friends (Epitaphs for People Who Might Not Get Epitaphs)

7 – People Gotta Move

8 – The Acts 1:8 Challenge

PART THE SECOND – THE LORD’S RAIN

9 – New York

10 – The Axe Blade!

11 – Ducks in a Row

12 – Disaster – and The Ram in the Bush

13 – Right Place – Right Time

14 – Thank you for letting me feel human again!

15 – Collaborative Caring

16 – A Question of Integrity

17 – Our Little Room – and where we go from here

18 – Poverty: who allows it?

19 – The Lord’s Rain & Basic Human Needs

20 – Pastor Barry

Epilogue – I will never cross the street again!

One More Thing – a 2022 Update

Acknowledgements

About the Author

FOREWORD

Drew Snider tells a moving story of what God has been doing in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver over a ten-year period. An inexhaustible capacity for disappointment is a requirement for ministry, but so is the ability to see nuggets of gold along the way. This story is full of unpredictable twists and turns, but gold is mined, and lives are changed by encountering the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

Charles Price, pastor-at-large, The People’s Church, Toronto

PREFACE – A Partnership with God

"It’s a crazy, hare-brained, ridiculous idea …

AND IT

JUST

MIGHT

WORK!"

Neither Barry Babcook, the senior pastor at Gospel Mission, nor I actually said that when we first started talking about building a facility to provide showers on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (it’s a cliché, and as a writer, I avoid clichés like the plague); but I’m sure we both thought it at first. Certainly, we had no money and, officially, no space to build it, but we had a vision, faith in God to pull it together, and a couple of signs that He was going to do just that.

The end result was truly a partnership with God; proof that, when He gives a vision and someone takes a step in faith that it’s going to happen, nothing will stop it. In this case, we’re talking about The Lord’s Rain.

For over a decade, The Lord’s Rain provided showers to people on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. It also became an early-morning gathering-place for street people, where they could get coffee, a bite to eat (depending on supplies) and, if they wanted it, prayer and encouragement to get through another day. While it fulfilled the basic human need for cleanliness, The Lord’s Rain also provided another basic human need: to know that one has not been forgotten – not by God, not by Jesus Christ, and not by other humans.

After all, if the Gospel could be boiled down to a hashtag for today’s social-media society, it would be #YourLifeMatters.

That’s one purpose of this book. Another is to bring to light the people who live in the Skid Row areas of most cities in the world: the street people, the homeless / underhoused / unsheltered; political correctness has created a bunch of labels for the same thing, labels which gloss over the fact that we’re dealing with people, like you and me. Any one of us is only one misstep away from landing in a similar situation.

That’s one inconvenient truth. Another is that ministry to the urban poor is a mission field just as important as anything in South America or Africa. But somehow, the fact that we can’t fly home from Skid Row after a two-week stint doing a mission project adds to a barrier of fear that separates the urban poor from the urban wealthy. How do you break down that barrier? I hope this book will help to do that and that you’ll see that this is a place that’s crying out for hope in the midst of a society that’s basically written them off, and that you have gifts you can bring. In ten years of ministry on the DTES (Downtown East Side), I was struck more by the similarities between those two solitudes than the differences.

As they say – come on in! The water’s fine!

To begin, let’s meet the people.

Back to Top

Part the First:

POSTCARDS FROM SAMARIA

1 - UNDER MY SKIN

Let’s set the stage.

It took me a while to realize it, but for much of life, God was setting me up to be connected with the DTES.

The 300-block Carrall Street. Gospel Mission is in the brick building with the white facing. Or was.

He started early, with my parents sending me to a private school in the East End. The school was called The New School, one of those progressive schools based on the principle of letting children learn at their own speed, treating them as mini-adults and not shackling them with such bourgeois, outmoded concepts as exams and homework. The name, though, was an invitation to a Who’s On First? scenario when I’d try to tell other kids what school I went to.

The New School.

OK – what’s it called?

The New School.

"I know it’s new, kid ..."

The school was located on Commercial Drive, in what was then one of the low-rent districts in the city. (There’s no such area in Vancouver today: housing costs start at Not In Your Wildest Dreams and go up from there.) I would leave home in West Vancouver at 7:15, transfer to the #25 bus downtown, and be at the school around 8:20.

The #25 travelled along Hastings, right through Skid Row. (The area hadn’t yet acquired the hipster cachet, Downtown East Side.) I would see the men get on: some drunk, some hung over, often with a couple days’ growth of whiskers. They always paid the fare, unlike some people these days who seem to believe poverty gets you out of paying for things, and sometimes they would talk to me. I got to know the smell of alcohol on a person – not just on the breath but surrounding them. Some would tell tales that seemed far-fetched, like one guy who said he worked with Harold Lloyd in movies (although he did show me a picture) and another who claimed he was former lightweight champion Bucky Harris. I never felt unsafe, and certainly mom and dad didn’t project any fear of the area. I don’t know if I’d send a nine-year-old alone on a bus through the Downtown East Side today.

The bus trip would take me past some of the remnants of the business and entertainment district. There were grand old buildings made of brick or stone. The White Lunch; Woodward’s Department Store; The Only Seafood Restaurant – named for its founder, On Lee: noted for its clam chowder and where, until it finally petered out in 2009, having not quite reached the century, it was impossible to find a seat at lunchtime. There was the Avon Theatre, where my parents met while working in theatre; the Vancouver Museum, formerly the Carnegie Public Library and now the Carnegie Centre; the Ovaltine Cafe.

Fast-forward a few years, when I graduated from university in Montreal and came back to Vancouver with all sorts of ambition as a writer and actor. Some friends and I started messing about with radio comedy, and we found a recording venue at Vancouver Co-Op Radio, which was located in a grand old building on Hastings at Carrall. Outside was a concrete square, known colloquially as Pigeon Park. Some civic leaders tried to name it Heritage Park or something like that, but Pigeon Park stuck.

A couple of years after that – 1979 – a company I was working for was hired to set up a disco in the basement of the Lotus Hotel, best described as a flophouse and dive on Skid Row. By then, the area was becoming known as the Downtown East Side, and in an attempt to attract a higher-toned clientele, Lotus management decided to convert its country-and-western bar to a disco. I was assigned to be the DJ two or three nights a week. By then, more abusable substances were making their way onto the scene; there was a disproportionate number of Indigenous people in the crowd, and you could sense racial tension with the whites. The despair was palpable.

What I wasn’t aware of, was how God was, little by little, reeling me into the area.

So there was this recurring theme in my life, plus some other seemingly random and unconnected events that led to the building of The Lord’s Rain. But we’ll get to that later.

In the meantime, here’s something for you to consider: are there any themes that keep recurring in your life? Could it be that God is trying to tell you something?

Back to top

2 - WELCOME TO SAMARIA

Behold, I say to you: lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for the harvest!

-- John 4:35

Some call it Canada’s Worst Postal Code – or is it the whitest fields?

When Jesus spoke those words, He was looking out on Samaria. In Old Testament times, when Israel and Judea were separate countries, Samaria was the capital of Israel. Over a relatively short historical period, Samaria was besieged, conquered, sacked and eventually populated with a macedoine of nationalities: a sort of ethnic dumping ground. A lot of religions were practiced there, and the Bible tells us of plagues that befell the people, which were reversed when they got right with God again. Even though Samaritans claimed to be descendants of Abraham, recalled the captivity in Egypt and recognized Moses as the mediator of God’s commandments, they were rejected by Jews because of their impurity – whether due to intermarriage or their differences on whether to worship on Mount Gerizim or in Jerusalem.

Samaritans were outcasts.

Today, every urban area has its Samaria: for example, The Bowery in New York; East LA, Pioneer Square in Seattle, and on and on.

Vancouver’s Samaria is contained within three parallel streets – Cordova, Hastings and Pender – along a 10-block stretch. The people who live there come from a variety of origins: mostly Indigenous, then English and French-Canadian; also blacks, Hispanics, even some Middle Eastern. Some are Christian, some are Indigenous who have gone to the ways – trying to improve their lives by the traditional belief systems that pre-dated European contact. The vast majority are drug addicts or alcoholics, many are mentally ill. Despite a harm reduction strategy initially sold to the public as a way of cleaning up the streets and reducing crime, people still shoot heroin in back alleys and smoke crack cocaine pretty much anywhere while drug deals go down in the open.

"Really: I’m fine ..."

Most of the people have rotten teeth or no teeth at all; their faces and internal organs are ravaged by substance abuse (NOTE: reduced harm is still harm). Because they’re stoned, mentally ill or have physical disabilities, their movements are often sudden and uncontrollable. Because of that, the place looks scary and Vancouverites tend to drive through the area with the windows up, doors locked, avoiding eye contact and praying for green lights. Tourists, walking through the DTES en route between Gastown and Chinatown, look as though they’re planning to write a strongly-worded letter to their travel agent.

Some call the DTES Canada’s Worst Postal Code. That’s as may be, but to an evangelist, it’s Vancouver’s Whitest Fields. As I say, people on the DTES are, like the Samaritans, outcasts, dumped there by society because they're not wanted anywhere else.

You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.

-- Acts 1:8

The Bible teacher, Charles Price, has pointed out that that verse shows an order of operations: Jesus commissions us to spread the Gospel first at home, then in our neighbouring region, then in the land of the outcasts, and then to faraway countries. Hearing that teaching reinforced, in my mind, the importance of preaching Christ on Skid Row.

None of all that was on my mind when I landed back in Vancouver in 2003. My marriage in Victoria had fallen apart. I had led a less than righteous life up to a few years before and was what one might call a ChrINO – Christian In Name Only. My own redemption is a long story: the short version is that I repented, but much damage had been done on the home front. I found myself without home, family, or job at age 47.

I (finally) placed everything in God’s hands, and He manoeuvred me out of Victoria and into a new job at a Christian TV station based in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. I moved into a nanny suite in a house belonging to one of the on-camera personalities, a woman named Laura. The TV job didn’t last, but I was in an Evangelical environment with time to spend reading the Bible, praying, and learning to trust in God.

One thing I knew was that I wanted to preach. Even as a child in a non-church-going family, whenever we went to church for a wedding or some other service, I found myself wanting to be that guy up there. Despite my mother’s rejection of religion, I felt an unrelenting draw, which I thought was just a desire to perform. It was, to a degree: successive career attempts as an actor and standup comic had come to naught: I had the makings of a successful broadcast career (one boss told me I could be a field general, not a foot soldier), but for some reason, my career trajectory was a cycle of moving forward, then stalling and slipping backwards. Such situations could either be frustrating, or, like the repeated visits to the DTES, a case of God trying to tell me something.

In spring of 2004, a job opened up at a radio station in downtown Vancouver, and that meant commuting from Surrey through Granville SkyTrain station at any time of the day or night. This became my new encounter with Vancouver’s street people, running a gauntlet of panhandlers, homeless people and drug addicts, some of whom could get belligerent if you turned them down or ignored them.

I rarely had any cash to give them, and I would feel guilty about that. But one day, I heard something clearly, and I know it was the Lord.

These people, He said, "don’t need money. They don’t need