Emmaus Ministries
Last week, Wheaton College celebrated “Missions in Focus.” Christian outreach organizations set up in the Beamer Center to let students know about opportunities to serve. I visited the ministry tables and met Rikki from Emmaus Ministries.
Emmaus Ministries is “an outreach of hope and redemption for young men in the inner city who are trapped by male street prostitution, generational poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, and HIV/AIDS.”
Rikki gave me a couple of DVDs with the stories of some of those men. This weekend, I watched them. The story of one young man stays in my memory.
He grew up with a violent alcoholic for a father. Sometimes that father would get arrested for beating his kids so badly. But he would always get out of jail within a few days and come back.
When he came home, he always gave money to his wife to give to the kid who had been beaten the worst, often this young man. “Maybe it was his way of apologizing,” he said. The violence never stopped–nor did the cash “apologies.”
This set up a wierd dynamic in the young man’s experience. He would get beaten, and then he would get paid. So when he ended up living on the street in Chicago after he left home, it wasn’t so difficult to transition to prostitution.
“You get used to it,” he said.
No one should ever have to get used to chronic physical abuse and assault.
Where there has been no prevention of such violence, where the intervention of the criminal justice system has failed repeatedly, there must be a new kind if ministry that offers redemption through the the love of Christ.
Emmaus Ministries does this through street outreach, a drop-in ministry center, and a rehabilitation house. Their ministry meets the real physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of men on Chicago’s streets. I thank God they exist.
PRAY for Emmaus Ministries. I asked Rikki what they needed prayer for, and she said: 1) that men on the street would not freeze from the cold during this winter season and 2) that men would be open to receiving Jesus as they study the Bible together. She mentioned other things I cannot remember, so pray as the Holy Spirit directs!
