WAYNE MILLER: I sold a silver dollar about three years ago for $525,000.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The Book of Matthew says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Wayne Miller takes that scripture seriously.

WAYNE MILLER: I have a concern for these people when they go up, and I believe in a heaven and a non-heaven, when they go up there how are they going to explain, you know, what they’ve done with their money?

SEVERSON: Miller knows about money. He’s made enough of it. His little coin shop in downtown Helena, Montana has done more than $325 million in business since it opened 45 years ago. This is his son, Dave.

DAVE MILLER: Seriously, when they get any money their first thought is who can we bless? Who can we give this money to? I say that out of every $1,000 my dad gives $999 of it away without even thinking.

SEVERSON: Over the years, Miller has given away millions of dollars to charities all over the world, especially to the people of Helena. He knows that some have taken advantage of his and his wife’s generosity but says they would rather err on the side of love.

WAYNE MILLER: God doesn’t ask you about your ability or your inability. He asks you about your availability, and we happened to be available at a time when people were wanting to start a shelter.

SEVERSON: They called it God’s Love, and as homeless shelters go this one stands apart.

ANN MILLER: Unconditional love—you know, everybody talks about that, but what that means to us is that before they ever walk in the door the first time, we already love them. We don’t wait to see who they are or how they act or what their problem is or if they’re lazy. We already love them.

SEVERSON: Joe Wojton, one of God’s Love managers, has worked in other shelters around the country.

JOE WOJTON: Everybody who comes through our door are people with problems, not problem people, and we treat everybody with love when they come through our door because we realize the people we’re seeing—some have never been homeless before. This is a very scary experience, and we try to love them up the best we can.

SEVERSON: The shelter usually accommodates about 40 homeless downstairs and has rooms for nine families upstairs. But most of the people they feed here are not homeless. They have jobs and live in the community.

DAVE MILLER: People rely on us in the middle of the month to eat down here. They know the food stamps and the food boxes are only going to make it a couple of weeks, so they rely on us to come down, on their ability to come down and eat.

ANN MILLER: It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the street these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now.

SEVERSON: Dave Miller runs God’s Love and gives 10 percent of his salary back to the shelter.

DAVE MILLER: Yeah, we’ve seen a big change. Every day we have families that come in and say, “My husband had a great job making a lot of money. He got laid off. We can’t make next month’s rent.” Unfortunately, it used to be just couples. Now we’re seeing them with children.

SEVERSON: People like John and Krista Loweman, who is pregnant. Both were employed in South Carolina until they lost their jobs and came west looking for work and landed here.

(speaking to John Loweman): So you came here looking for work?

JOHN LOWEMAN: Yes, looking for work, anything, just a better life for me,my wife and my baby.

SEVERSON: But there was no jobs?

JOHN LOWEMAN: No, sir.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Nothing, not even for me, and I’ve been to school.

ANN MILLER: We tell them that they can have three days no questions asked, just rest, eat, do their laundry, but after that they have to have a plan, and their plan usually is to find a job. But they can’t find a job.

SEVERSON: But if they can’t find a job, it doesn’t mean they have to leave, as long as they keep looking.

JOHN LOWEMAN: You have to put in five applications a day at least, and I do that every day but, you know, it’s kind of hard.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: It’s better than living in a car, though.

SEVERSON: Better than living in a car. You lived in a car for how long?

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Six weeks.

SEVERSON: Darcy Pfeiffer and her husband and baby boy live here. He works but can’t afford the rent. Brenda Rutecki’s husband died a year ago. She had no income, couldn’t get a job, came here while she attended school to become a certified nursing assistant.

BRENDA RUTECKI: You can’t get a job if you don’t have a phone. You can’t get a job if you don’t have a car. You can’t get a job if you don’t even have an address. So this is like our holding spot. We’re all good families. We’re all good people, but you’ve got to have a start, and that’s what they give us.

SEVERSON: One of the first things the Millers did was create a park next door to God’s Love just for the homeless. Having a homeless shelter and a park near the center of town was not exactly pleasing to local businessmen. But Toby DeWolf, owner of Bert and Ernies, says any opposition has faded away.

TOBY DEWOLF: I’ve been here 25 years, and I have never seen a better run shelter. I don’t think there’s a problem. I don’t think that anybody has seen an issue with any kind of violence or crime or anything by any means with having a shelter down here.

SEVERSON: The Millers both graduated from Catholic University in Washington, DC with master’s degrees. They have nine children, four of them adopted, and all of them, according to their father, are involved in one charity or another. There was a time when Wayne Miller, who is an expert on silver dollars, was measuring his life by the increasing value of his personal coin collection.

WAYNE MILLER: You know, I open up these catalogs, and they’ve got coins there, $30,000 or $40,000, $50,000 coins that I would dearly love to have, and I look at them and I say okay, I chose my path. If I did that I would be obsessed with that, and again, my whole measurement would be how advanced is your coin collection? And I didn’t want that to be.

SEVERSON: It doesn’t mean the Millers live in poverty. They travel, eat in the best restaurants, live in a very nice home with a swimming pool, but customers often wonder how successful a man can be if he rarely wears shoes.

WAYNE MILLER: People say can’t you afford to wear shoes, and I say I can afford not to have to wear shoes.

SEVERSON: He provides the bulk of the funding for God’s Love, millions of dollars over the years, but the shelter also receives a federal grant, money from the United Way and from other private donors.

WOJTON: It’s amazing when I go out to a church or to the local college, and I speak, and I hear from people, and they say, “Oh, we just thought the Millers pay for everything,” and that’s not the case. Wayne and Ann are wonderful, and Wayne donates a lot of money to God’s Love, but we need the entire community effort to keep God’s Love up and operating every year.

ANN MILLER: And I think over the years we’ve learned to love God more and more, and he’s always been there for us. When we were thinking that maybe we weren’t going to have enough money or whatever, he’s always supplied it. It’s been wonderful—abundance, just like the Bible says.

SEVERSON: The Millers are also helping in various ways about 150 Helena families who don’t live in the shelter. Altogether, he gives away about one-third of his gross income and is firmly convinced that it’s what God wanted him to do.

WAYNE MILLER: I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like. I’m fascinated to learn what it’s going to be like, but I am as certain as I can be that there is an afterlife and that I’m really going to have fun.

SEVERSON: The truth is he’s having a pretty good time right now.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Helena, Montana.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, Correspondent: Among emerging nations, Brazil is a leading power. It’s booming economy is now the world’s seventh largest. Yet this nation of 200 million remains very divided. Its poverty is on display along the hillsides, not far from Rio de Janeiro’s glittering skyline, or along the sidewalks of Sao Paolo, despite recent government attempts to address it.

MARIVALDO DA SILVA SANTOS: There’s still great inequality in Brazil. There still are people who don’t have a place to sleep, don’t have clothes, any happiness in their lives.

DE SAM LAZARO: Santos works for a Catholic social services agency in Sao Paolo called Bom Parto. Brazil’s government has increased the minimum wage and created a social safety net, and it’s relied on several faith-based groups like Bom Parto in its anti-poverty efforts.

About 70 percent of Brazilians are Catholic. Church attendance has dropped sharply in recent decades, except in newer Protestant evangelical congregations. But the demand for church-run social services has not dropped.

Bom Parto, short in Portuguese for “our lady of good delivery,” is the biggest such provider in Brazil. It’s headed by Sister Judith Lupo.

She grew up in a wealthy family, was educated in Brazil, the U.S. and France after joining her religious order, where she soon became its chief finance officer.

At Bom Parto, she combined government contracts with private philanthropy and built a single day care center three decades ago into an organization with 58 locations and 1100 employees, serving 10,000 people each day. It’s all pulled together with a modest $4.5 million annual budget—reflecting financial acumen; also a simple philosophy.

SISTER JUDITH LUPO: I think the first, first thing is to love people. They need money also to survive, but it’s not just to get money or to learn things, it’s to learn in a way that it’s with love.

DE SAM LAZARO: As an example of the approach, she says this homeless shelter provides much more than a roof and a meal for its 600-odd clients. There are baths, clinics and career counseling among other services—even entertainment, like this traditional dance called capoeira.

DA SILVA SANTOS: Bom Parto has given me continuity. It took me to college, it helped me understand public policies not only to help myself but others. It offers not just food and bathing services, it teaches about need to work, instruction, training, pleasure, culture. It enables you in a way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-six year old Santos is a poster child. He came here in 2002, an alcoholic down on his luck. His life is more than restored, he says. Bom Parto employs him and is also helping with part of the tuition to complete his degree in social work.

DA SILVA SANTOS: Sister Judith insists that people on her staff come out of places like this. She has this poem called “I Am You.” She’s put herself in our position, feeling our pain, feeling our situation. That’s how she’s able to help us and that’s the same thing she is getting us to do.

SISTER LUPO: I feel the young people and children, adolescents, all of them, they all need an opportunity. It’s, I don’t think poverty has to take them out of a normal life. They should not live always in a bad house. They should not be always in a favela. And to go out of those places, they need a good education.

DE SAM LAZARO: Poverty is endemic in Brazil despite its bountiful natural resources and a modern economy. Sister Judith blames much of it on an unequal education system that traces back to slavery, which was abolished in 1888.

Bom Parto serves a wide range of needs, caring for abandoned HIV-infected infants. Also destitute elderly. However the major focus is on education and training to enter the prosperous mainstream of Brazil’s economy.

On the outskirts of Sao Paolo, where many of the city’s poor reside, Bom Parto’s day care facility is at its capacity. It cares for 3,300 preschoolers across the city. Eventually, many of them will enter this school…

SISTER ADRIANNA APARACIDA ROMAO: Here in this place, we serve about 1,100 kids. And given our waiting list, we should have at least three spaces this big in order to serve all of our community.

DE SAM LAZARO: Public education is widely perceived as substandard in Brazil, and that accounts for the strong demand for schools like this one, run by Bom Parto.

SISTER ADRIANNA: In the 27 years that this school has been here, we’ve seen great change, improvement in the community and in the lives of these children. The evidence is when we’re watching them during recess. They’re calmly interacting with their friends, not supervised, not gated in like the public schools, where they’re still very unruly. Here they’ve learned to behave.

DE SAM LAZARO: Older students receive vocational training. Most are placed in good jobs and the school sends promising students into a college prep program. A few miles way, a Bom Parto-run program trains auto mechanics and machinists.

LEANDRO AGUSTO DA SILVA, Shop Teacher: Traditionally this eastern edge of Sao Paolo has been excluded, marginalized. The general view is that people who come from here are not going to be able to climb the economic ladder. But we provide opportunities to the kids who are leaving here that differentiates them from the rest of the population in this area. We’ve already had several examples of students from this program that have graduated and gone on to work in the elite areas, other areas of the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: Some graduates have returned as teachers and mentors.

SUELEN RIBEIRO DE CAMARGO, Teacher: In terms of vehicle repair, maintenance, et cetera, I’ve always been interested. In terms of being a teacher, I thought maybe but my sister really pushed me to consider this. I didn’t think it would happen so soon after finishing this program. I was able to get several different apprenticeships and while doing that, this job opening came and I was invited to come back and teach here, and my whole family told me to jump at it. It was an honor for the whole family.

DE SAM LAZARO: About 25% of students here are female, keeping with a trend in which women—from the country’s president on down—are in jobs historically held by men.

SISTER LUPO: If you can cook well, you can repair car well.

DE SAM LAZARO: If you can cook well you can repair a car well?

SISTER LUPO: If you learn, why not?

DE SAM LAZARO: Asked about her own outlook, 68 year old sister Judith Lupo offered few words. They come from the scripture, she says.

SISTER LUPO: It’s from the gospel. We have to give opportunity to everybody. Everybody was created to have life and to have life in fullness.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in Sao Paolo.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Question: What do this longtime alcoholic, this up and coming project manager, this receptionist who was homeless, and Noah Haynes, who just turned one, have in common? Answer: The chance at a better life because of this former corporate high-flyer and mother of four.

NANCY MURRAY (Builders of Hope): We’re building houses. We’re rescuing houses that are slated for demolition, rebuilding them and making them available and affordable to families who otherwise would be living in pretty substandard conditions.

FAW: For the past five years, her program, Builders of Hope, has found houses about to be demolished and put in a landfill.

MURRAY: So far, to date Builders of Hope has rescued eleven million pounds of debris from the landfill. The only inventory that we work with is inventory slated for demolition. I’d say 99 percent of the homes that are donated that are older have hardwood floors in them. We’re able to restore those. The roofs, the rafter systems, the floor systems—all in really great shape and very usable.

FAW: Nancy Murray’s nonprofit group rescues houses from commercial, road and hospital expansion as well as private donors who want to build larger homes. The houses are rebuilt and refurbished into energy-efficient green houses, as Josh Thompson learned when he moved into his Builders of Hope home.

JOSH THOMPSON: All the paints that they use are all low-chemical and designed to kind of produce a healthy environment.

FAW: Now that’s what we see. What we don’t see—tell me about the insulation.

THOMPSON: Yeah. What you don’t see is spray-on foam insulation across the whole house—amazing energy efficiency with that. You got all these windows are the double-paned.

FAW: In Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and other North Carolina cities, Nancy Murray’s Builders of Hope, with help from private and government funds, has restored nearly 100 houses, selling them at an average cost of $135,000. Putting them on land she has bought or that has been donated, Murray sells them at cost to low- and moderate-income wage-earners she calls the working poor.

MURRAY: You say affordable housing and everybody thinks, “Oh, those people.” Well, those people are your teachers, your firefighters, your police officers, your nurse. It’s 70 percent of the working population of any major city, and those are the people who need affordable housing.

FAW: People like Noah’s parents, Dana and Robbie Haynes.

ROBBIE HAYNES: There’s houses like this in the downtown area, but it’s just not with our price range. We couldn’t afford to have those upgrades and different things.

FAW: New home owners like receptionist Nikki McKinnon who also could not afford to buy much of anything on her $25,000 a year salary.

NIKKI MCKINNON: Just having your own—it’s nothing like it. It gives you just a sense of pride and worth. It’s just wonderful just to say that I actually own a piece of land in this world, you know. It’s nice.

FAW: Nancy Murray gave up her job as a marketing and advertising executive to start Builders of Hope with money she inherited from her father and with the knowledge of one of his businesses—construction.

MURRAY: We were building million-dollar vacation town homes, and we were displacing people when we bought property that were renting. We would tear them down and build something else, and I thought, wow, what we’re doing is wrong. You know, I started getting a conscience, like this is terrible.

FAW: So she traded in her stilettos for steel-tipped boots, even bought her own earth-mover. It is, she says, a kind of ministry.

MURRAY: There’s a verse in Matthew that states that you shouldn’t store your money up, you know, where moths and rust and decay set in, but to take that money and invest it in Kingdom work and to really be able to use it to make a difference in loving others and caring for others while we’re here on earth.

FAW: With a staff of 60, her Builders of Hope scours a 60-mile radius looking for houses, some donated by homeowners like attorney Bryan Brice, who get a handsome tax write-off and satisfaction.

BRYAN BRICE: This is reuse and recycle and and hope in a way that is affording home ownership to lower- and middle-income families, and if you look at this whole neighborhood it’s just amazing what they’re doing here to rebuild this area. We’re glad to be a part of it.

FAW: But there is more here being rebuilt than houses. Once, this neighborhood was crime-infested.

MURRAY: Gang members were giving some problems to some of our first homeowners here, actually. This was gang territory.

FAW: Now the area is virtually crime-free.

MURRAY: That demonstrates that revitalization really does work.

FAW: Her Builders of Hope also refurbishes and rebuilds rental units. That restoration and the rebuilding of the houses is performed in part through a mentoring and training program established by Murray. Her organization hires hard-to-employ men who’ve had prison records or substance abuse problems, like the long-term alcoholic Kennie Byrum.

KENNIE BYNUM: I could see that they cared about not only just me, not focusing on let’s stop what we’re doing and care about Kennie, but let’s bring Kennie along and show him that he can be part of something that deals with caring about others. It’s a fellowship that I’ve never witnessed before or been part of before.

FAW: So lives are also being transformed here as well as houses. Phillip Brickle, once a longtime drug addict who became a pastor, now owns one of Nancy Murray’s houses.

PHILLIP BRICKLE: It’s a place of peace. It’s a place of joy.

FAW: What’s it do to someone like that? Do they change because they now can live in a home like this?

BRICKLE: I believe it gives an individual self-worth. You know, it also gives an individual a feeling of ownership, and any time you have a feeling of ownership it gives responsibility. So I do think it does bring about responsibility, and whenever you have more responsibility, it brings about change.

FAW: Juggling house moving schedules with city zoning permits, among other issues, is a true test of Nancy’s faith.

NANCY MURRAY: I would get mad at God, you know. It was like, okay, you brought me here, you convinced me to do this, you know, this project is about to fall apart. Everything is going to go by the wayside.

FAW: Finally, she says she put her fate in God’s hands to guide her to make the right decisions. It was then, she says, Builders of Hope took off.

MURRAY: You’re saying, okay, we’re here for a reason. Why are we here? What do I need to learn? What people are going to interface with me because we’re in the midst of this problem that maybe because I’ve met them something else is going to happen? So you trust that everything happens for a reason, and it’s all connected, and ultimately gets you to the place where God wants you to be.

FAW: In addition to the projects in North Carolina, Nancy’s Builders of Hope moved, refurbished, and relocated 76 homes in New Orleans that were about to be demolished to make room for a new hospital. It’s estimated about 250,000 houses a year in the United States get torn down. Cities like Detroit and Dallas have contacted Nancy about her work.

MURRAY: This is a model that can replicate, and then it does have very important ramifications, I think, nationally in terms of being able to rebuild neighborhoods and to get people back in housing, but we do need funding. We need supporters.

FAW: With the constant fundraising it is a struggle, but the satisfaction, she says, is worth all the uncertainty and aggravation.

MURRAY: You move them in over there, and the eyes and the excitement and the warmth and the pride—it’s just so sweet to see that when you do give them an opportunity and you give them a chance and something beautiful that they deserve, they take care of it and they blossom and they grow, and they really create a new community for themselves.

FAW: Here, where because of one woman’s faith a house is not just a home, it’s a new beginning.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Raleigh, North Carolina.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Driving through downtown Port-au-Prince, it’s difficult at first to see much change since we were last here nine months ago. The presidential palace is still in ruins. Thousands are living in a massive tent city across the street, and according to aid officials, more than a million Haitians are still homeless. Around the corner from the palace, people are living in tents on the grounds of the destroyed Roman Catholic cathedral. There, piles of rubble and broken stained glass still fill what was once a beautiful hundred-year-old sanctuary. But despite appearances, faith-based workers who have been active here over the past year insist there has been progress in dealing with this humanitarian catastrophe.

NICOLE PETER (Haiti Operations Director, World Vision): The progress is slow, maybe not as quick as other emergencies, but we’re moving forward.

LAWTON: Nicole Peter is the Haiti operations director for the Christian group World Vision, which has already spent more than $100 million in post-earthquake work. They’ve been involved in a variety of projects including shelter, water and sanitation, job creation, education, and family support. One example of their work is the Corail displaced persons camp on a windy, flood-prone field outside the capital city.

In April, the government of Haiti moved almost 7,000 people to this location about an hour outside Port-au-Prince. But there were no preparations. There were no essential services or infrastructure, so nongovernmental agencies had to step in to help the people. World Vision and other agencies provided sturdy tents to help withstand the elements. Groups brought in latrines and clean water and set up schools. The government still hasn’t developed a long-term housing and resettlement plan for the people here, so World Vision has begun building even sturdier transitional shelters.

MARY KATE MACISSAC (World Vision): We had to negotiate with donors to convince them that timber frames were necessary. They said that those were perhaps too permanent, but we said no, these people need something strong.

LAWTON: The houses are designed to last up to seven years. They can withstand winds up to 100 miles per hour, and in typical Haitian style they all have a front porch. One of the residents, Jeanne, invited me to sit on her front porch with several of the seven children who live here with her. She says she loves this house, and she’s grateful the kids are able to attend school. She says she’d like to get a small business going, so she can feed her children better.

Mary Kate MacIssac says there’s been a lot of criticism from the outside media—and even some donors—that more hasn’t been done. She’s also frustrated by the slow pace, but she says people don’t fully understand the realities on the ground.

MACISSAC: Haiti was a country that was facing humanitarian crisis even before the earthquake. Then you have a massive earthquake hit an urban center, the capital of a country, and it’s a complexity of urban disaster that agencies have not had to deal with before.

LAWTON: Adding to that complexity is a rising cholera epidemic. World Vision has set up cholera treatment units near various tent camps. Visitors are disinfected before they enter and when they leave. According to the official numbers, more than 150,000 people have now come down with cholera, and nearly 3,500 have died. Aid groups say the numbers are vastly under-reported. On this morning, 10 people have already been brought in for treatment, including a five-year-old boy who is also being treated for malnutrition.

PETER: It’s a new emergency within an emergency, so it’s basically heightening issues that existed previously.

LAWTON: Rick Ireland, administrator of the Free Methodist Haiti Inland Mission, is also all too familiar with the complexities here. After the earthquake hit, denominational officials asked him to get to Haiti immediately. The Free Methodist mission had suffered tragic losses. This multistory building on their compound was completely destroyed. The American administrator of the mission, Reverend Jeanne Munos, was killed. Two other American workers and a Haitian staffer also died in the collapse. Ireland had to oversee rubble removal, restore missions operations, and help coordinate relief and reconstruction.

REV. RICK IRELAND (Free Methodist Haiti Inland Mission): Everything is just a little bit harder here, and that does get discouraging.

LAWTON: The Free Methodists have been working through local churches like this one. Sunday morning services here start at 6 am. Shoe-shine vendors line up out front to help congregants look their Sunday best, while local taxis called “tap-taps” keep bringing more worshipers. With over 2,000 people, it’s standing room only. Ireland says this is the best resource to aid Haiti’s recovery.

IRELAND: They knew their community. The pastors, both their church people and the non-church people, were very aware of where the needs were.

LAWTON: They’ve been rebuilding churches and schools and training people how to construct something that will withstand any earthquakes in the future.

IRELAND: We trained Haitian civil engineers how to build earthquake-resistant buildings, and from that group the Haitian teams went out all over Haiti and did a number of seminars teaching people how to build earthquake-proof buildings.

LAWTON: Across from a UN displacement camp is one of those schools. It isn’t quite finished, but enrollment has already doubled from last year. They are also providing clean water for the entire community.

IRELAND: We really have tried to step alongside the Haitians and say, “Here are the resources we have, here’s the challenge. How do you think we can best do this?”

LAWTON: One local pastor who has been leading the Free Methodist efforts is Jean-Marc Zamor, who also has a larger vision for Haiti. He took us down bumpy roads heading to a remote location where he wants to build a Christian university that will focus on character and leadership development and train people to work in the public sector.

REV. JEAN-MARC ZAMOR: After the earthquake, it’s become more and more difficult to find good professionals, and that’s give me even a higher conviction that this is what we need to do now. We need to train people that will carry on the work.

LAWTON: He and a team of other Haitian leaders used their own money to buy 200 acres of land. They’ve hired local workers to begin pouring the foundation of their first building, and they hope to have students by the fall. He gets frustrated that many outsiders see all Haitians as needy victims.

ZAMOR: There are a lot of people living with cholera, a lot of people in need. But Haiti is not only that. At the same time, there are a lot of people doing a lot of things, a lot of work going on. Otherwise, we would not survive.

LAWTON: Local leaders are also active in the response of Haiti’s Episcopal Church. Crowded Sunday morning services here are now being held in an open-air structure with a tin roof. It’s right next to the ruins of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, which was completely destroyed in the quake. The church had been known around the world for its magnificent art work. Once a month, the congregation takes a special offering for the reconstruction of the cathedral. Episcopalians have been active in post-earthquake recovery. I asked the bishop how they will decide whether money should go to helping people or rebuilding the cathedral.

BISHOP JEAN-ZACHE DURACIN (Episcopal Diocese of Haiti): It is a symbol. People may think that, people may say, oh, there are so people in tents and we are going to build big cathedral, and so on. No, it is a symbol of faith. It has always been so.

LAWTON: And, indeed, for many in this predominantly Christian nation faith has been key to survival.

IRELAND: They’re filled with tremendous hope. It’s unbelievable, because it would be so easy just to give up, and they haven’t given up. They really believe that the future can be better.

LAWTON: At the Corail camp, World Vision’s Mary Kate MacIssac says she sees hope in the gardens people are planting near their temporary shelters and in the small businesses that are popping up—and in people like Jeanne’s daughter, Diana. She and her sister wrote a song that says despite the earthquake, they will always believe in God.

MACISSAC: People who continue to believe in a God that loves them is really quite remarkable.

ZAMOR: Haiti is not dying. I think we have taken a lot of time to get started. Once we get started, we will be well on our way, and we will be where we need to be in a couple of years. We are not dying.

LAWTON: Given the enormity of the problems that still exist, that hope is likely to continue being tested.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Kim, welcome back.

LAWTON: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: How representative, how typical are those people, those hopeful people you talked to?

LAWTON: Well, I was surprised to hear anybody even mention the word “hope,” given the enormity of the situation there, but I did hear people wanting to say we are moving forward. Yet no one is suggesting that things are great or things are where they should be. There’s a lot of frustration. A lot of people are tired. And so that is definitely the reality, but within that they are hopeful that they are laying the basis for some real long-term improvement.

ABERNETHY: But the general impression I have is that most people here think that these relief efforts, these emergency efforts, are not going very well and that they are taking an awful long time.

LAWTON: I kept hearing a lot of frustration in Haiti about that criticism. They are saying look, we’ve been doing so much but the situation has been so complicated. I talked to one relief worker. She’d been in Gaza. She’d been in Iraq. She just came from Afghanistan straight to Haiti, and she said Haiti is a lot more difficult than any of those other places, and people in the outside don’t realize that. They don’t realize the realities they are dealing with and the layer upon layer of complication that make things take time.

ABERNETHY: What are the worst problems?

LAWTON: Well, obviously the government. There’s been a government in transition. We are awaiting a new election. There’s been political unrest surrounding that. A lot of the international money is tied to the government having a plan, and so the donors from the outside don’t want to give money or legally can’t give the money unless the government has a master plan. Well, if there’s not a good government, a strong government, there’s no government plan, then that money can’t come in and people can’t move forward. That’s one problem. There’s corruption. Haiti was in a bad situation before the earthquake, very little infrastructure, and so all of those things piled together on top of they also had a hurricane and then the cholera epidemic. So it’s just complication upon complication.

ABERNETHY: There are two phases—the relief effort, the emergency relief effort which seems to be going on still a year later, and on the other hand long-term development, investment in new jobs and things like that. When are we going to get—when are the Haitians going to get to that second phase?

LAWTON: Well, some of it’s happening hand in hand, or the beginning of development is happening even as relief work is going forward. A lot of the Haitians I spoke with want to do it themselves. They want to be able to be self-sustaining, and they believe that for any lasting solution that’s the way it’s going to have to be. But they admit that takes time, and so that’s part of the problem as well.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, welcome back.

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BOB ABERNETHY, Host: This week marked the six month anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti which killed more than 230,000 people. Humanitarian groups say while there’s been some recovery, an overwhelming amount of work still needs to be done. An estimated 1.5 million Haitians continue to be homeless, many enduring the rainy season in flimsy tarps and tents.

Our managing editor Kim Lawton has been covering faith-based efforts in Haiti. She’s been there twice since the earthquake. Kim, welcome. What do you hear?

KIM LAWTON, Managing Editor: Well, obviously there’s a lot of frustration among the humanitarian community. The people that have been down there for six months now working. They’re frustrated by so many problems that have kept them from doing all the good they’d like to do. I mean, there’s just so many obstacles. You’ve got still a ton of rubble that’s around, nowhere to put it. Bureaucracy, the infrastructure of the country was so devastated, so that the bureaucracy in place is cumbersome.

ABERNETHY: They can’t…they say they can’t get the supplies through customs.

LAWTON: Right, right, building things, getting things through customs, figuring out which office needs to approve what, and who needs to—you know, what fees need to be paid, so that’s really frustrating for them. And, you know, there are land issues. A lot of these tarps and tents have been set up on land that belongs to somebody else, and so straightening out that, you can’t build more permanent housing if you can’t figure out whose land it is.

ABERNETHY: Yeah, I have a friend who’s seen a lot of relief efforts all over the world, and he says he’s never seen any place where there were so many Christian relief groups.

LAWTON: Well, certainly many of these Christian groups and other faith groups really felt connected to Haiti. They’d been working there in the past, and so they have spent a lot of time, and there were just a huge number of volunteers going down trying to help out, and we should say that even amidst all of the problems and the fact that more progress hasn’t been made, they say there has been progress. You know, there are some positive things, too.

ABERNETHY: And some things haven’t happened that might have and that people feared, like epidemics and terrible security problems.

LAWTON: Well, mass starvation. I mean, when you think about it, people aren’t starving to death there. They’re hungry, yes, but they’re not starving to death. And so I think I’m hearing a lot from the faith community, people saying it’s going to take a really long time. We knew that going in, and we’ve seen that six months in, but people shouldn’t give up hope, because they think things can be done.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: A personal moment of prayer for Joey Heath, a Master of Divinity student at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. There was a time it seemed very unlikely he would be where he is today, a time when he was praying for God to make him whole, make him so he wasn’t gay.

JOEY HEATH: At the time I believe that it was something I needed to be healed from, and so I would pray every day that God would just heal me of this, this evil part of me, and that this would be just removed and I would be cleansed and made whole again.

SEVERSON: Today, Joey says he feels whole, but he’s still gay and still facing the kind of condemnation he faced in his United Methodist church when he first came out.

HEATH: I was involved somewhat in the leadership of the campus ministry, and then my campus minister said I can no longer speak on behalf of the ministry because it’d be an endorsement of my lifestyle, which for me was devastating.

Pastor Heidi Neumark

SEVERSON: Pastor Heidi Neumark says that condemnation has led to outright discrimination. She says too many churches have created an environment where it’s okay to bash gays or lesbians or bisexuals or transgenders, known collectively as LGBTs.

PASTOR HEIDI NEUMARK (Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan): Churches have played a huge role, probably the largest roll in fostering homophobia. The church encourages these young people to be viewed as less than human, dehumanized and even demonized, and it creates an atmosphere where it’s okay to be verbally abusive, be physically abusive. So these young people, many of them, suffer profoundly, physically, psychically, spiritually.

SEVERSON: During the day, Pastor Neumark runs a school for young children at her New York City church, which is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At night she operates a shelter for LGBT kids, because she says since churches have been a big part of the problem, they should be part of the solution. Jonathan Sawyer, who sleeps in the church basement every night, represents an alarming statistic. Nationwide, 20 to 30 percent of homeless kids are LGBT. In New York City it is one in three, according to Zak Rittenhouse, who works in a homeless shelter for gay and straight youths.

ZAK RITTENHOUSE (Green Chimneys): Here in New York City, 7,000 kids identify as gay or lesbian, and they’re on the streets for various reasons, and there’s definitely some religious ties to that.

SEVERSON: Zak is gay. He grew up in a Baptist church, where he says he was taught that being gay was sick and an abomination. He says many kids who come out are forced out the house by parents who accepted that doctrine from their churches.

RITTENHOUSE: The parents don’t know how to react when their kids come out, so they push them out on the streets. The kids don’t feel safe at home, so they run away.

Zak Rittenhouse

SEVERSON: Matt Gromlich went to a private Christian school and says what he had been taught in church made it traumatic when he discovered he was gay.

MATT GROMLICH: At some churches that I’ve visited, you know, there’d be messages about how homosexuality is wrong, or they’d throw it in with a list of sins, and, you know, I wouldn’t really say anything, but just not go back. In that time I was really struggling with faith and being gay, you know, and well, if I accept that I am gay, which I had at that point, then how can I still be Christian?

HEATH: The church says these things where, you know, if you don’t change, you’re going to hell, and people get to a point where they feel like, well, I can’t change, so I guess there’s no hope, and so they abandon the church.

SEVERSON (speaking to Pastor Bob Perdue): If I came to you and I said, “Pastor, I am gay,” what would you say to me?

PASTOR BOB PERDUE (Senior Pastor, Old Dominion Baptist Church, Bristol, Virginia): I would say that’s against the creative order of God. It violates the way God has set it up, and so while I understand that you have that attraction and that it developed maybe by no fault of your own, you’re not free to act upon that.

SEVERSON: Bob Perdue is pastor of the Old Dominion Baptist Church in Bristol, Virginia. Like many other Christians, he believes the Bible makes it clear that living a gay lifestyle is a sin. But he doesn’t believe it’s any worse than any other sins.

PERDUE: A lot of times the church will quote Leviticus 18:22 and say, you know, man lying with man is an abomination. What we forget is that Proverbs also says pride and lying and gossip are also abominations to God.

Pastor Bob Perdue

SEVERSON: Nor does he believe, like many Christian conservatives, that being gay or lesbian is a choice. But he does believe that acting on an attraction to the opposite sex is a choice and a sin to God.

When Zak Rittenhouse came out, his parents sent him to a six-week camp that promised to make him interested in women.

RITTENHOUSE: They had told us all that by the end of this six weeks we would all be heterosexual men and women walking in the light of the Lord.

SEVERSON: He says of the 80 kids who went to camp, to his knowledge none came out straight. Though there are no reliable statistics on whether these ex-gay ministries actually work, many, including Pastor Neumark, think it is cruel to try to force change on these young people.

PASTOR HEIDI NEUMARK: There’s members of the congregation here who have been in therapy to try and get them to stop being gay and, well, I haven’t talked with anybody that that’s worked for. I think that’s abusive.

SEVERSON: Pastor Perdue says both he and the church are there to help heal those who are broken, whether it’s sex, pornography, gambling.

PERDUE: I would first ask you why you considered yourself gay, and I would expand that identity to include other parts of who you are and hopefully get you to see that you’re so much more than just that sexual attraction, you know, just like an alcoholic. I do the same thing with them.

SEVERSON: Like an alcoholic, says Perdue, homosexuals need to learn how to control their yearning so they can, in his words, “experience life to the fullest.” The pastor knows of what he speaks.

PERDUE: I was sexually abused at 10 or 11, and those were my first sexual memories, so I developed an attraction, a same-sex attraction, which obviously at first—my first response to that was to suppress it. And then the kind of guilt and shame of all of that led me to a suicide attempt.

SEVERSON: After 30 days in a psychiatric hospital, Pastor Perdue says he came to terms with his sexual proclivity. He’s now married and the father of five children.

PERDUE: I can’t say that my attraction has completely changed. I liken it to my fellow ministers who are married. Their attraction for other women hasn’t gone away, but they’re choosing not to act on that attraction because they’ve made a vow and a commitment in a certain direction. It’s the same for me.

SEVERSON: There are a number of denominations that accept practicing gay ministers, and Pastor Neumark says as more young people come out, and homosexuality becomes better accepted by society, ever more churches will have to eventually teach tolerance, even if they believe the lifestyle is sinful.

NEUMARK: What really makes me angry is to know that church people—because I love the church, I’m a pastor of a church—have a real hand in creating so much pain.

SEVERSON: Pastor Perdue agrees the position of many churches against homosexuality has been harmful but says he doesn’t know many other pastors who share his view.

PERDUE: They haven’t walked where I’ve walked. They haven’t been where I’ve been. While I haven’t changed my theology on what homosexuality is that I have definitely changed my attitude toward people who struggle.

SEVERSON: After Joey Heath completes his theological education, he hopes to be ordained a pastor.

HEATH: I feel called by God to minister to those that have been pushed out and neglected by the church, and the church to a certain point has created a class of people that are not worthy of church, and I want to go to those people.

SEVERSON: But before he can go to those people, he needs to be ordained, and the United Methodist church, his church, does not as yet ordain self-avowed, practicing homosexuals. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Sometimes there are as many as 50 homeless people, some drunk, some high, most hungry. They’re here outside this empty store in East Oakland every night waiting for the preacherman.

VINCENT PANNIZZO (Preacherman, walking over to the homeless): How you doing? How you doing? How’s it going?

SEVERSON: It may be one of the few things they can depend on — religion at the corner of Foothill and Coolidge every night at 10:30.

Mr. PANNIZZO (preaching): Heavenly Father we pray for the Holy Spirit to enter our hearts and to guide us, to strengthen us, to set us on the right path.

SEVERSON: They know he understands their situation because the preacherman, Vincent Pannizzo, is one of them.

Vincent Pannizzo

Mr. PANNIZZO (preaching): In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ we pray. Amen. I despair every single day, every day, yeah. How would you like to be homeless, living on the street? You’ll say, “Well, you chose homelessness.” I don’t choose anything. God chooses everything for us.

SEVERSON: So you think God chose you to do this?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Of course.

SEVERSON: To minister to the homeless?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Yeah, I’d rather not do it but I have to be obedient to God. I can’t be otherwise. His spirit is already in me.

(preaching): And God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. This is what John says.

SEVERSON: By night this is not a safe neighborhood. Pannizzo has been robbed six times, sometimes at gunpoint.

Mr. PANNIZZO: It wasn’t as bad as getting slapped in the face, which happened to me a couple times. That’s even worse.

SEVERSON (to Mr. Pannizzo): Slapped in the face by?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Just people who felt that they needed to get their aggressions out on a homeless guy.

SEVERSON: Preaching on the streets was about the last thing Vincent Pannizzo imagined he’d end up doing. Religion was not an important part of his upbringing. He was an honors student in ancient history at Rutgers University. Then, when he was in his fourth year of a doctorate program at U.C. Berkeley, he started reading the Bible casually and came across a verse that changed his life in a profound way.

Mr. PANNIZZO: “Give to all who ask.” Luke, chapter 6. This, actually, when I was still on the fence deciding whether this you know was real or not, I decided that the idea was extraordinary in itself, right — giving to everybody who asks. Why not? Why not give to anybody who asks? I began to practice it, and I found that the more I practiced it, the more I had faith in it, and the more I had faith in the Scriptures, and the more I had faith in Jesus.

SEVERSON: He’s been ministering to the homeless and giving them money for nine years.

Mr. PANNIZZO: (walking over to the homeless woman): What do you need exactly?

UNIDENTIFIED HOMELESS WOMAN: I need $20. You should give me $20.

Mr. PANNIZZO: Well, I don’t’ have that.

UNIDENTIFIED HOMELESS WOMAN: Can you give me $10?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Well, I can give you like six . . .

SEVERSON: Five years ago, he became homeless himself.

Mr. PANNIZZO: I used to invite the homeless people over to my house, and I was kicked out of three places doing that, three apartments. After I lost my third apartment I said, well — my wife had already left me by that time — when I lost my third apartment I said forget it. I’m staying on the street.

SEVERSON: His home now is a small camp next to a noisy freeway.

Mr. PANNIZZO: I’m over there. That’s where I sleep.

SEVERSON: Oh, you’re right over here?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Yeah, I’m right over there, that humble place.

SEVERSON: Humble, but neat as a pin. Next to his bedroll, his books and the candles he reads by. Vincent is the leader of this small homeless camp that includes Donna Little Moon and Melvin Bear.

MELVIN BEAR: Even though we’re out in the open, we still feel safe ’cause Vinny’s here, you know.

SEVERSON: Yeah.

BEAR: Yeah.

SEVERSON: This may be the cleanest homeless camp in East Oakland, a refuge for those who are scorned on the streets. Vincent teaches them to love their tormentors.

Donna Little Moon

DONNA LITTLE MOON: Vinny taught us to, you know, treat them the right way. So we say, regardless of what they do, we say God bless. I say God bless.

Mr. PANNIZZO (with homeless guy on a bench): You know you’re welcome at the camp, man. All right? If you have any problems, let me know, and I’ll fix it, okay?

LOUISE HILL: He’s like nobody I’ve ever met before.

SEVERSON: Louise Hill retired from the EPA after 30 years. She met Vincent when he was pumping gas for spare change and now hires him to do odd jobs. He finds some kind of work, like carpentry, almost every day.

Louise Hill

Ms. HILL: He keeps nothing for himself at all. He buys food for people, and he keeps nothing for himself.

Mr. PANNIZZO (after his sermon at night giving money away): You got something right? You got something, too? Everyone got something, right? You need a blanket? I got you, sister.

SEVERSON: But then you end up giving away almost all of the money you earn?

Mr. PANNIZZO: All of it.

SEVERSON: All of it?

Mr. PANNIZZO: I have no use for money at all. I know that God takes care of me. He feeds me, and he clothes me right. He keeps me healthy so I can do his work, so I can take care of others. He provides me with everything that I need so I can take care of people, people who essentially can’t take care of themselves.

SEVERSON: Bill Ward has been homeless for eight years, and he thinks many who show up here each night to hear Vincent preach are not here for the preaching but for a free handout.

BILL WARD: I was the one who told him, look, why don’t you just come here for like a couple weeks, preach the word, and don’t give out anything – food, blankets, you know. See who will be here.

Ms. HILL: He doesn’t judge people. He doesn’t say, well, I’m not going to give this person money because I know they’re ripping me off. He gives money to everybody.

SEVERSON (to Mr. Pannizzo): Do you think some of them might take advantage of you?

(preaching at night): John says do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Ms. HILL: He’s really the only person that I know of that preaches to people that churches probably would turn away. You know, drug addicts and alcoholics, you know, even though they may not specifically go to a church, if they did those are not the kind of people a church, you know, would cater to.

SEVERSON: It was difficult to convince Pannizzo to do an interview because, he says, he doesn’t want what he is doing to be glorified. But he doesn’t like to be ridiculed either by people who believe he’s taken his religion too far.

Mr. PANNIZZO: I mean, it’s painful. I don’t like people to think that I’m nuts. I like to be treated with respect and dignity. I mean, for crying out loud, I once desired a career in academia. Now I’m a homeless guy having nothing, being a servant to everybody on the street and people thinking I’m nuts or on drugs.

Mr. PANNIZZO (handing out food to the homeless): Here you go, brother.

Homeless in East Oakland

SEVERSON: There’s little question that Pannizzo feels compassion for the people on the streets, but he says it’s Christ’s compassion, not his. He says he serves the homeless for his own salvation. You don’t do drugs?

Mr. PANNIZZO: No.

SEVERSON: You don’t drink?

Mr. PANNIZZO: No.

SEVERSON: You don’t smoke?

Mr. PANNIZZO: No.

SEVERSON: What do you do?

Mr. PANNIZZO: Suffer. Jesus says pick up your cross and follow me and deny yourself every day. And that’s what I’m doing. I’m denying myself. I’m denying myself a life here. What did Jesus say? He who seeks his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will gain it everlastingly.

Mr. PANNIZZO (handing out food to the homeless): You want some bread?

SEVERSON: He says what he’s doing on the streets is no different from the many stories of personal sacrifice in the Bible, and he can’t understand why people today consider it so unusual.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in East Oakland, California.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There’s a woman in San Francisco, Sara Miles, who used to be a journalist and an atheist. But she had a conversion experience and is now a leader in her church, where she feeds the homeless full-time. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It happens every Friday. Sometimes the line stretches around two city blocks — people who are hungry, poor, some homeless, all struggling to make ends meet, waiting outside San Francisco’s St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church.

SARA MILES (Director, St. Gregory’s Food Pantry and Author, TAKE THIS BREAD): They’re members of the “Church of the One True Sack of Groceries.”

SEVERSON: The woman greeting everyone as if they are old family friends is Sara Miles. This is the same woman who spent most of her life as an avowed atheist and who is now running a church food pantry.

MILES: Church was not part of my family life, and I don’t think I ever expected to find myself being a Christian or, as I used to think of it, a “religious nut.” And again, I met plenty of Christians who I respected. But I think also I had this idea that Christianity was a religion that was kind of fundamentalist, kind of harsh, and more about setting rules of who belonged and who didn’t belong.

SEVERSON: She is the very same woman who as a journalist covered the 1980s wars in Central America up close where people were dying, and later became an editor for the left-leaning investigative magazine “Mother Jones.” It was after that that she found herself walking into St. Gregory Church.

MILES: I was just curious. I’m a reporter. I’m curious. I like to poke my nose in places, and I walked into this building thinking, “Huh, wonder what’s going on in there?”

SEVERSON: What Sara found was a church that offers Communion to everyone, including strangers.

MILES: And then a woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. And I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening to me. Got out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.

SEVERSON: Now she and her hearty band of volunteers collect five to six tons of donated bread and tomatoes and groceries every week, and then give it away. Many of these volunteers were once standing in the line themselves waiting for help. The priest at St. Gregory, Father Paul Fromberg, says many of them still need it.

Father PAUL FROMBERG (St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church): A lot of people here are, you know, addicts that have overcome their addictions. They are people that have been locked up, people that are actually homeless, people that live in marginal housing. But it actually doesn’t matter where people come from because we’re not doing purity checks. You know, we’re not trying to say, “Are you good enough to be here?”

SEVERSON: David first came to St. Gregory looking for food six years ago.

DAVID: This is my workout for the week.

SEVERSON: What do you do the rest of the week?

DAVID: I’m looking for work right now.

SEVERSON: Eduardo has been volunteering for eight months.

EDUARDO: I think it’s just fantastic. It’s a nice thing to do because it fills your heart.

SEVERSON: Mike gave up his heroin addiction in San Quentin prison and has been drug-free 14 years.

MIKE: The whole church and the whole ambience in this church — they’re the most easy-going people, and they don’t try to impose their belief on anybody else.

Fr. FROMBERG: So the good news today is the good news that everybody here is welcome.

SEVERSON: The altar at St. Gregory’s is located in the middle of the chapel, accessible to everyone. The murals on the ceiling honor people of all faiths. On food pantry day, the lay preacher who was an atheist becomes a chef, something she was actually trained to be. She and Father Paul are elbows-deep in the kitchen preparing lunch and a show of appreciation for the volunteers.

Fr. FROMBERG: When I cook lunch for people, I do it because that’s what a priest does. A priest feeds people. And the delight that I take in it is the delight people have when they are able to eat together, sit down at a table with tablecloth and with real plates and real silverware. Like Jesus said, you will know me when you break bread together.

MIKE: Battle stations! Come on. Chop, chop.

SEVERSON: After lunch, it’s time to get to work. Volunteers only let in a few from the line outside at a time, so these people in need won’t feel rushed or insignificant. The goal is to treat everyone with dignity. They feed as many as 500 families every Friday this way, but it’s more like a celebration than a handout.

MILES: We offer food to everybody without exception. We offer food to whoever walks in the door. We’re the people that nobody wanted. You know, we’re gay people and we’re poor people and we’re people living on the streets. And we’re old ladies and cripples and whores and little children and foreigners and exactly the kind of people Jesus liked to hang out with.

Fr. FROMBERG: The Gospel is full of stories where Jesus is eating with inappropriate people. And in fact at one point in the Gospel, the critics of Jesus say the worst thing they can think to say about him, which is this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

SEVERSON: God’s love, in Sara’s view comes down to one thing, feeding the hungry. Her mission and her faith always seem to reach back to that moment she first took Communion at St. Gregory.

MILES: I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine, or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.

SEVERSON: Since her conversion, it hasn’t always been easy. She’s lost some old friends who think she’s nuts. And collecting enough food for her growing clientele is a constant challenge. But she has not looked back.

(to Ms. Miles): You think you’ve found your calling?

MILES: Feeding people and being fed? Yeah, I do. I love doing this. I love doing this. You know, people sometimes say, “Oh, you’re so good. What a good deed you’re doing.” You know, I don’t do it to be good. I just have a blast. I love this work, and I love these people.

SEVERSON: Sara Miles now has plans to put food pantries in schools and community centers. Her most recent book is about her transformation. It’s called TAKE THIS BREAD.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: If you’re homeless in Washington, D.C. and sick, perhaps close to dying, and you end up in a city shelter, the people who work there might telephone a place called Joseph’s House and ask if they can take you in. It was founded by a Christian doctor who speaks about trying to see God in everybody. It’s staffed by a few people on salary and volunteers, and it’s funded by government, foundations and private donors. Lucky Severson paid a visit.

JOSH (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, greeting Melvin White): Hello, how are you doing Mr. White? I’m Josh. Welcome.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Melvin White could not be greeted more warmly or graciously if he were checking into a five-star hotel.

PATTY WUDEL (Director, Joseph’s House, to Volunteer): Would you just hang this up for Mr. White?

SEVERSON: This is Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C., the equivalent of a five-star hospice — an extraordinary place that comforts the dying with a mixture of Christianity and Zen Buddhism. More than likely it will be Melvin White’s last home. He is suffering from the final stages of colon cancer. Melvin says for years he was a cook at a local hotel and a pool hustler on the side. After he got sick, he got evicted.

MELVIN WHITE (Resident, Joseph’s House): I came home from work from the hospital from chemo one day, start the key in the door, and it turned back in my hand.

SEVERSON (to Mr. White): They changed the lock?

Mr. WHITE: Changed the lock on me.

SEVERSON: Melvin is the kind of person who Dr. David Hilfiker was thinking of when he founded Joseph’s House 16 years ago as a place for terminally ill, homeless, African-American men with nowhere to die but the streets.

Dr. DAVID HILFIKER (Founder, Joseph’s House): This was a very special place for many men. It became the first, the only place that they ever loved, ever had, that said, “You can stay here as long as you live.”

SEVERSON: For probably many of these men, this was the most loving home they ever had in their lives?

Dr. HILFIKER: Absolutely, absolutely. And certainly, I mean, they had been on the street for 20 years, and this is a chance to have a home.

SEVERSON: Although most of the 300 or so patients who have called Joseph’s House home have been black men, more and more are women, like Theresa Batch. She has colon cancer.

THERESA BATCH (Resident, Joseph’s House, talking about Tiffani Boerio): Well, she meets me every morning and greets me, so I call her “sunshine.” This morning, the first word that came out of my mouth: “Hi, sunshine. Praise the Lord for you.”

SEVERSON: Theresa has been here three months, has some good days and some bad. She is surrounded by the proud faces of Joseph’s House alumni.

Ms. BATCH: I look at the families that passed on, and some of them that didn’t, that made it through the cancer that they had in their bodies, you know. And I see the beauty of their souls and their minds and their hearts, you know.

Ms. WUDEL (Commencing the house meeting): It’s a special meeting, because today was the day that Melvin White came to join us.

SEVERSON: Patty Wudel runs the place, to use a phrase of hers, with “exquisite attention.” Patients are treated as honored guests, something they are not accustomed to.

Ms. WUDEL: Folks have suffered with addictions for a long time, suffered with not belonging, not being wanted or missed for a long time, carry a lot of regrets that their life turned out the way it did whether they were really responsible or not.

SEVERSON: She was attracted to Joseph’s House partly because of the emphasis on the social Gospel.

Ms. WUDEL: The Beatitudes sure play a big part for the foundation of Joseph’s House as a place of justice and compassion, with Jesus as an important teacher.

SEVERSON: Patty was also attracted because the therapy here includes the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Ms. WUDEL: It’s developing a self-awareness, paradoxically to be able to forget myself and serve the needs of the person in front of me.

Dr. HILFIKER: Our hope is not to present God to anybody, but to see God in everybody, and to allow that person to have the relationship with God that is deepest for them.

Ms. WUDEL (to Mr. White, at meeting): My wish for you is that you will find deep healing here in all the ways that you really need it.

MARY (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, to Mr. White, at meeting): I’m so happy that you are here, and I hope that you can sort of find physical warmth and joy and peace.

JOHN (Resident, Joseph’s House): You just lay back, man, and let them do all they need to do, and you will be well. I know you’ll be satisfied.

Mr. WHITE: You know, I feel a whole lot better in just in this one day than I have been in the last couple of years, you know.

PRISCILLA NORRIS (Nurse, Joseph’s House): What is amazing to see happen over and over again is those who are sicker are cared for and paid attention to by those who are at that moment are stronger, and I don’t mean us.

SEVERSON: Priscilla Norris is the Joseph’s House nurse.

Ms. NORRIS: It fills my heart to meet another person and serve them, because I’m a well person right now, and they are not a well person. It isn’t a helping as much as it is a serving.

Ms. WUDEL: So many people wake up in the morning and are grateful that God woke them up to live another day. And kind of looking at their day from my point of view — feeling well and healthy — their day looks pretty rough. But it makes me think and wonder about my own gratitude for being alive in my own life.

Ms. BATCH (Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”): “…and the home of the brave.”

SEVERSON: The first day we were at Joseph’s House, Theresa filled the house with blast of sunshine. A few days later, she couldn’t get out of bed. But she was never alone. Her buddy, Tiffani Boerio, was at her bedside.

TIFFANI BOERIO (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): I just want to be with her. I mean, I came to work this afternoon at one o’clock because I knew that she hadn’t been doing well when I left on Sunday. And it was just compelling just to sit with her. And I think for me that is just one way to love her.

Ms. NORRIS: Those of us who have known Theresa all know that she has other times gone into these deep sleeps for two or three days and then popped up like the Energizer bunny. It’s not my sense that she’s going to pop up from this one, but I’m hoping that she will.

SEVERSON: Patty and Priscilla grew especially close to one patient, William. Both were with him when he died.

Ms. WUDEL: I felt the blood stop flowing in my friend. Time stopped still then. It was a profound, sacred moment for me.

Ms. NORRIS: There is so much more to a human being than the body, and the sensation of mystery and of soul is tangible. It’s mystical and it’s mysterious. It is the closest I can possible get to what I see as God.

Ms. BOERIO: In some way the world has changed for me because of that experience, and I think that, yeah, in a lot of ways I will never be the same.

BREY CRIBBS (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): It definitely made me less afraid of death. In our society I feel we don’t experience much first-hand of death, and I really saw how it was a reversal of the birth process.

SEVERSON: Brey Cribbs is a social worker, a seminary student, and a volunteer at Joseph’s House.

Mr. CRIBBS: More and more you become less capable, and you need the support of people to just take care of you. But at the same time there’s a childlike quality of the person that tends to become much more joyful and more peaceful.

SEVERSON: Staffers and volunteers agree they are the ones who learn life’s lessons about things like love and selflessness from people who have never caught a break, like Joshua Murray.

Ms. NORRIS (to Mr. Murray): They can solve it; you’ll still need to let infectious disease know that you don’t need the urgent care.

SEVERSON: Joshua is taking radiation treatments for lymphoma, which he says doctors told him is a result of the HIV virus he was born with 23 years ago. His twin brother escaped the disease.

JOSHUA MURRAY (Resident, Joseph’s House): I don’t blame anybody. You know, I was born with it and, you know, I just have to take care of it. I don’t blame my mother for, you know, giving it to me. I was mad, but I didn’t blame her, you know. So, I’m still living.

Dr. HILFIKER: For me the perfect image of the house is a party going on down here, with music and people that we’ve invited and decorations and people dancing, and somebody upstairs dying at the same time.

SEVERSON: A few years after Dr. Hilfiker started Joseph’s House, he was suffering from bouts of deep depression, and he told the patients he could no longer be their doctor. He says one of them, a former drug kingpin and a tough guy named Peewee, taught him a lesson he won’t forget.

Dr. HILFIKER: Right away Peewee spoke up. “Yeah, doc, we’ve been noticing something wrong. You just take care of yourself, and we will still be here for you.” And it was just very simple. But what it was ultimately was an acknowledgment of my brokenness, from a person who was very broken. It was really the turning point in my accepting my depression.

(Group reciting the Lord’s Prayer): Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…

SEVERSON: Every Thursday the group comes together in prayer. On this day, their thoughts were with Theresa Batch. Theresa died after spending three months with the family at Joseph’s House, and she knew she was loved.

(Group reciting prayer): …and deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.