An Open Door in Atlanta

For poor people, the doors slam hard. In Atlanta, Georgia, 2,000 men and women line up every day before dawn to wait for jobs handed out at the city's day-labor pools. By 7:30 a.m. they know what the day's prospects will be, and many wander off toward the city's soup kitchens.

Most have had doors shut in their faces all their lives: doors to education and jobs, access to good medical care and adequate financial support. And in increasing numbers they are being denied the most basic right of shelter.

As the homeless wander the streets of Atlanta with an aimless and cruel freedom, 1,420 men and women sit on death row in prisons across the United States. They are facing the final pronouncement that will shut them out of life itself.

The Open Door Community in Atlanta stands as a countersign to closed doors everywhere. Its name is an invitation and a reflection of a life marked by warm generosity. Compassion for those who have been locked out—the homeless—and those who have been locked in—the prisoners—gave birth to the Open Door Community and, with a strong reliance on God's grace, sustains its life.

On a chilly night last October, the Open Door family—25 resident guests, four resident partners and their two children, a handful of resident volunteers, and the evening's volunteer cooks—gathered around the dinner table. Joining hands, they thanked God for a partner's recovery from illness, prayed that people without homes would not be hurt by the oncoming cold, and asked that there would be no trouble in the soup kitchen lunch line the next day.

As the hands dropped, someone launched into singing "Happy Birthday to Y'All," in honor of three resident guests celebrating birthdays that week. And 5-year-old Hannah and Christina ran from one to the next, offering birthday kisses to whiskered cheeks lit up with grins.

A rare collection of humanity shared the meal. Everyone carried a former identity: pastor, professor, and business owner mingled with carnival worker, wounded soldier, and alcoholic. What they had in common was that the Open Door had in some way transformed each of their lives.

Coleman Whatley, a veteran who suffered frostbite during World War II and cannot work, has been a resident guest for almost two years. He says of the Open Door, "We're all like sisters and brothers here," and of the resident guests, "We're the family too."

Coleman's medical records were lost at the veterans' hospital, so he is unable to receive benefits. He says he will move away if his benefits ever come through. "I'll let somebody else have the place I got, let another person have a chance like I had a chance. But I wouldn't ever forget the house. I'd come back and eat and so forth. This is the best place in the world here."

Carole Jordan, a resident guest who was hit by a car 10 months ago, talked about the particular vulnerability and hardships for women who live on the streets. She shared her gratitude for a safe place to live and a loving environment without harsh regimentation.

She said the Open Door is "not just a physical environment, it's a spiritual environment, like a loving home. These people live like Christ did—surrounded by people who are sick, poor, and destitute. They live it, they don't just preach it."

IT WAS A desire to live the gospel that took hold of the Open Door's founders 10 years ago and turned their lives upside down. In 1975 the first crack of light came, and eventually led to a door being flung wide open.

Ed Loring, a professor at Columbia Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, was called to pastor Clifton Presbyterian Church, a dying inner-city parish in Atlanta. Murphy Davis, also an ordained Presbyterian minister and Ed's wife, was in a Ph.D. program in church history at Emory University.

With the commitment and charisma that Ed brought to the work, young people soon flocked to the church and its life was revived. Though Murphy and Ed had never given Scripture or prayer much priority in their lives, they decided to begin a Sunday night Bible study at the church. Their eyes began to open to new possibilities, and scriptures such as Isaiah 58:6-7—"Is this not the fast that I choose ... to let the oppressed go free ... to share your bread with the hungry; and bring the homeless poor into your house"—soon started to change their lives.

They turned their backs on promising academic and ministerial careers to follow the gospel to new ground.

Rob and Carolyn Johnson were among those drawn to Clifton in search of a church community. Foundational to their individual lives and their marriage was a commitment to serve the poor, and they had worked for a number of years as social workers in Georgia and South Carolina. They had grown frustrated with the "professionalization" of ministry and social work and came to Clifton seeking a more faithful way to serve.

In the fall of 1978, Ed, Murphy, Carolyn, Rob, and a few other church members began to meet on Wednesday nights for supper, Bible study, and prayer at the Johnsons' apartment. This group came together after the larger Clifton congregation had been unsuccessful in attempting to focus its mission. For eight months the group focused on one central question: "God, what would you have us to do?"

The first answer to that prayer came, according to Ed, as "Cast our lives with the poor. We recognized then that the call to serve God is a call to serve the poor."

"How, God, how?" was the second question begging for an answer. On a January 1979 trip to the Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York, Murphy and Ed were deeply touched by the generous and warm hospitality offered to the homeless people there. On the train returning to Atlanta, they tearfully read through The Long Loneliness, an autobiography of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. It was then that they embraced the call to hospitality.

Murphy and Ed shared the conviction with Carolyn and Rob, who responded with enthusiasm. They considered opening Clifton Church as an overnight shelter for homeless people, but decided by April 1979 that it "just wasn't practical." The church was too small, and the problems too big. Both Carolyn and Murphy were pregnant, and Rob needed back surgery. They decided they were going to "study the issue" for another year.

But as cold weather came on in the late fall, they felt compelled to open the church's doors to up to 30 homeless men on November 1, 1979.

They faced almost overwhelming odds. Hannah Loring-Davis was just 10 days old when the shelter opened, and Christina Johnson was just a few months old. Rob was flat on his back following surgery a week before. Ed broke out in sores on his hands and face from all the cleaning up of the shelter he did with disinfectant.

They opened the shelter during the time that so many black Atlanta children were being murdered, and white people in a van trying to invite people off the street were greeted with the deepest suspicion. The first night they had only three people, and by the third day they were down to one.

But word soon got out on the street that there was a church serving good food, and the numbers swelled to capacity and beyond. The overnight guests enthusiastically pitched in with the work, and some of the burden began to be lifted.

Carolyn reflects that one of the strengths of the community is that "we've always started things before we're ready, and we always do a little more than we can." In their risk and sacrifice, the grace has always been given to them to find a way.

TWO FEELINGS GREW over the next several months. The first was a deepening commitment between the two families that had begun the shelter. In July 1980 they went off together on retreat in North. Carolina and wrote and signed a covenant, affirming their commitment to one another as the basis of their ministry. The Open Door was born.

The second feeling was a dissatisfaction with the limits of their ministry. The walk the homeless had to make from downtown to the church seemed to grow longer and further. Carolyn, Rob, Murphy, and Ed found it more and more painful to put the guests back on the streets and close the church door each morning. And many needs of the homeless still went unmet: simple needs like showers and clean clothing, as well as need for medical care or legal help in many cases.

The four discovered that Atlanta's population includes 4,000 homeless people, and that not one place existed for round-the-clock care and hospitality. Their desire to live with those they were serving intensified.

In February 1981, during days of prayer and reflection at the Trappist Monastery in Conyers, they decided to leave Clifton Church and find a place to develop a residential Christian community and house of hospitality. The decision felt very frightening, a choice to "put everything on the line." But for them it was the only choice.

After a long and frustrating search for a building to call home, they finally found a former Women's Union Mission at 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue. It had plenty of space for guests as well as the two families, and was, according to Murphy, "clearly a gift of God."

The doors officially opened in joyful celebration on Christmas Day 1981. The chef of an exclusive Atlanta restaurant offered to cook Christmas dinner at the Open Door for 100 people from off the streets. The meal was a gourmet feast including stuffed mushrooms, oysters and pecans, broccoli with Hollandaise sauce, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Murphy recalled the words of the Catholic Worker's Stanley Vishnewski, "Nothing is too good for the poor."

Since no one at the Open Door produces an income, such gifts—though not all quite so fancy—are important to the community's sustenance. The Trappists at the Conyers Monastery deliver 200 loaves of freshly baked bread each week, and donations also come from the Atlanta food bank and the convention center; 1,000 pieces of fried chicken after an insurance convention was a recent windfall.

Many professional people donate their services at the Open Door. Lawyers do advocacy work for the resident guests and others who come by to the monthly legal clinic. Once a month an ophthalmologist tests eyes and gives out used eyeglasses, offering clear vision to many for the first time. Art lessons are offered every other Saturday, and 17 resident guests participate in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a rare and crucial gift for homeless people, many of whom battle alcoholism.

Perhaps the most unique ministry offered by the Open Door is that of Ann Connor, known as the "foot angel" among Atlanta's street people. Once a week Ann, a registered nurse, bathes and cares for the sore and blistered, sometimes bleeding and frostbitten feet of people who spend their lives walking miles and miles on concrete and asphalt, usually in shoes that don't fit.

Five days a week the clothes closet, organized by one of the resident guests, is open. People from the street can exchange their old clothing for a new set and get a hot shower. Lunch is served at the soup kitchen every day.

The various services of the Open Door have grown in response to the needs of Atlanta's poor people. A breakfast program was begun downtown at a day-labor center when Ed discovered that those who get jobs go off to a day's work on empty stomachs. When the Atlanta city government forced them to stop serving, they moved the daily breakfast to Butler Street Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Ed has spent many hours in Atlanta's day-labor centers talking with those who have been forced by desperation to wait for such work. Financial insecurity and exploitation are inherent in this system, in which companies pay the labor pools for work and they in turn hand out only minimum wage to the workers. The labor pools also often deduct fees for transportation to the work site.

The work, according to Ed, is always "the most difficult, dangerous, or demeaning," the kind of work permanent laborers will not do. He told stories of people he knew who worked three or four days at a time at an aerosol oven cleaner factory until their skin broke out in sores and burns from contact with acid, and of a man who fell from a dangerous bridge and broke his back. "It is worse than the slave market. At least slave owners had an economic investment in the flesh of the slave. There are so many people seeking work, it doesn't matter what happens to them."

While spending time at the day-labor centers and on the streets, Ed learned that most homeless people will spend some time in the city jail following arrest for public urination. Atlanta had no public toilets, and people were being arrested for something for which they had no alternative. The Open Door and the Atlanta Advocates for the Homeless, a group formed to address the needs of people on the streets, began a "toilet campaign" that generated a great deal of publicity around the city.

The Advocates got the Atlanta city council to hold public hearings on public toilets. The group was asking for toilets in 10 locations.

The downtown Atlanta business associates marshaled their top forces and came to the hearings armed with maps. Their arguments were that public toilets would make Atlanta a mecca for the homeless and raise criminal activity in the city, and that the city would lose convention business. Ed laughed as he pictured homeless people in Washington, D.C., saying to one another, "Hey, have you heard about Atlanta?"

On December 1, the night before the city council vote on toilets, 25 people spent the night on the steps of city hall in a 24-hour fast and vigil. The Advocates won a small victory: one "experimental" Porta John in Plaza Park in the heart of downtown Atlanta. They were so pleased that they went to the park and took pictures. Murphy remarked, "Not everyone has pictures of a toilet in their family album!"

That same month Roosevelt Richardson, a man who lived on the street, suffered the freezing and loss of his legs after the day-labor center where he usually hung out closed one day due to snow. Twenty people froze to death over Christmas weekend.

The Atlanta Advocates for the Homeless put pressure on the city government to improve the day-labor pools. In April 1983, $100,000 of federal money had been received by Atlanta for renovations of day-labor centers, including the construction of showers and toilets. A year later construction still had not begun.

On June 8 Ed took a toilet to city hall and sat on it reading Scripture, promising to stay until the city government signed a contract to begin construction on a day-labor center toilet. Murphy led the singing at the demonstration, and Ed and two others were arrested and spent the weekend in jail. That same day a contract was signed.

Murphy described the scene at the trial. "First a city solicitor asked a friend if Ed always carries a toilet when he makes business calls. Then a city hall official began telling what happened: '... and then two men came in carrying a commode.' The Harvard-educated judge interrupted, 'A what?' and he responded, 'A toilet.' I thought the judge would die and fall off her bench." Ed added, "We're learning what it means to be fools for Jesus."

Ed considers it part of his spiritual discipline to go not only to the day-labor centers but also to other places in the city he considers "listening posts" for hearing the cries of the poor and the voice of God. "I go as a homeless person. I know that on one hand I can never be, and on the other hand I can experience the reality of the suffering of the poor."

He goes and sits at Grady Hospital with the lame, blind, and broken. He goes to the blood bank, where the ragged poor sell their blood plasma once a week for $10. He sits in municipal court, the public library, the soup kitchens, the park. He walks alongside those raiding dumpsters for aluminum cans to sell.

He considers the regular pilgrimage a Protestant version of the "stations of the cross." It is a journey into suffering, a reminder, an experience of Jesus.

MURPHY DOES MOST of her listening in prison. She is founder of the Atlanta branch of Southern Prison Ministry. She found it difficult at first to get support for her work. "A lot of people told us that if we dropped prison work, we would get a lot more support for our work with the homeless. People think the hungry are deserving, but people on death row are criminals."

In her work Murphy is both a prophetic advocate and a pastor. In Georgia 118 people are under the death sentence. "I used to try to meet and keep up with everybody, but with more than a hundred, I can't know them all deeply." With the current resurgence in executions, "We're forced into a crisis orientation. Last summer about all I could see were those with active execution dates or those going to trial."

When an execution takes place, Murphy organizes press conferences, worship vigils, and statements from the religious community. "These feel like foolish, little efforts, but they just can't keep killing people without somebody saying something."

Murphy ministers to prisoners' families and helps facilitate family visits to both death-row prisoners and inmates at the women's prison. She is persistent, despite the fact that prison authorities do their best to make her work difficult.

She claims that the story of the widow and the judge in Luke 18 is "one of the most instructive in dealing with prisons. The judge cared nothing for God and had no regard for human beings. But it was more expedient to give the widow her rights than wear out. We have to go back and go back and go back and make a nuisance of ourselves or we'll never accomplish anything."

Most of all, Murphy upholds the humanity of the prisoners to a society that views them, like the homeless, as expendable. She emotionally told death-row stories, such as Billy Moore's first experience of Hannah: "Hannah had more murderers as friends than the usual baby. When she was six weeks old, I took her to meet Billy. He held her and rocked her and cried over her. Billy had a son he hadn't seen since his arrest. He told me that when he knew I would bring Hannah, every night before he went to sleep he practiced holding his pillow to be sure he would hold the baby just right."

The compassion and pain come through when Murphy recounts the candlelight vigils on execution days, the contacting of families and claiming of bodies. She described their first funeral for an execution victim. "When somebody has died in a terrible way, after living an oppressed life, the way you bury them becomes so very important. It's a way to claim dignity, a symbol of life, humanity, and community."

Murphy remembers driving to Augusta with Carolyn in a blizzard to pick up the body of Pop Campbell, who had spent 45 years in prison, beginning at the age of 13. They had a donated second-hand casket, one used at a funeral home wake before the body was cremated—in fine shape but for a slight indentation in the pillow.

They brought Pop home and set his casket in the dining room, where the community shared stories about him, laughed and cried and prayed. They planned to move him out before breakfast, but when the morning shower line started, there was Pop lying on the dining room table next to the refrigerator. One man showed up for a shower, and with eyes widening exclaimed, "Is that what I think it is?!" He left in a hurry and never came back.

Pop was buried on a snowy day at Jubilee Partners, a sister community with a ministry to refugees 90 miles away in rural Comer, Georgia. A bonfire was kept burning for warming up the hands that struck into the frozen ground over and over with hand shovels. The refugee guests from El Salvador at Jubilee did most of the digging, explaining that they knew how to dig graves. Pop was put to rest among a family of friends and refugees.

The connections between the prison work and advocacy for the homeless are often clear at the Open Door, but never so much so as in the case of Charlie Young. Charlie Young, part of the family at the Open Door, can often be found sorting donated clothes in the clothes closet. Another Charlie Young sits on death row and has been a long-time friend of the community. Murphy had his picture one day and was showing it at the Open Door. When Charlie at the Open Door saw it, he jumped up and down in the hallway shouting, "That's my son!" Until that moment none of the people at the Open Door had made the connection. Both Charlies had been placed under the death sentence by society—Charlie Sr. left to die slowly on the streets, and Charlie Jr. facing execution. Both were finding a new chance at life through the efforts of the Open Door.

CAROLYN PROVIDES leadership for the community's daily life and work and coordinates the resident volunteers, as well as more than 100 volunteers from local churches. She is one of the leaders of Atlanta Advocates for the Homeless, and has aided churches in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast in opening their doors for shelter. Rob is the community administrator and treasurer, and edits its monthly newspaper, Hospitality. He also organizes peace witnesses and coordinates Georgia's PAX (People Against Executions).

All four adults have a deep commitment to feminism and share the care of Hannah and Christina. The presence of the children, according to Rob, has an uplifting effect on the house residents, and Hannah and Christina are growing up with an understanding of the diversity of people in the world.

Worship serves as an anchor for the partners as resident guests and volunteers come and go. A few of the current volunteers are considering becoming partners, an important step of growth for the community. Some resident guests stay for short periods of time and others make the Open Door a more-or-less permanent home. Some move in after coming to the house for showers or food, and others have more dramatic entrances.

One of the guests lived for years in a cardboard box on the parking lot of a fancy Atlanta restaurant. When the restaurant decided to expand and needed his space, he was convicted of criminal trespass. He appeared before the same judge that tried Ed's toilet action and was "sentenced" to the Open Door.

For many of the resident guests, who have been battered by a society that deems them worthless, the Open Door is a new chance and an infusion of hope. But not all the people who come into contact with the community are appreciative. Two men who had been refused entry temporarily because they were drunk decided to take revenge. They called the Atlanta Fire Department and reported "a fire at 910 Ponce de Leon." Soon the whole block was ablaze with flashing red lights as hook and ladder trucks and rescue squad vehicles made their way to the "fire." This drama was repeated three times.

Guests who have to be asked to leave, usually for reasons of alcohol, are often invited back over and over again. Rob commented that "forgiveness has the element of forgetting what the brokenness was all about." And Carolyn added, "It goes both ways. Our street friends forget some of the mistakes we've made, the things we've said in anger."

The partners struggle to build into their life the things that will sustain them over the long haul as they see the suffering of their friends mount and the newness of community gets further and further away. Carolyn talked about the temptation to go back to former things, to feel that "surely there's a job still open for me somewhere." But she continued, "The important thing is to keep standing on that edge. We can't step back from the edge." Ed reflected, "We represent people that God's been very patient with."

Ed speaks of the call to live on two edges or "front lines." One front line is that of proximity to the poor. The other is confronting the attitudes of the rich. This second call is taking on new meaning as the Open Door faces the encroachment of wealth and business on its block.

"If we live in solidarity with the poor, we will have enemies, because the poor have enemies." Ed cautions that it would be easy to escape the responsibility to face the rich. "But the gospel calls us to be on the front lines of conflict. This is the point at which we make peace."

Murphy added, "It's a gift to be where we are. It doesn't feel like it a lot of the time, but we know it is."

The Open Door Community has been a gift and an invitation to many. On one wall of the dining room hangs a quote: "Christ is the head of this house, the chosen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation." On the facing wall hang the words of a Scottish rune, which ends, "The Christ comes in the stranger's guise."

To share a meal or a conversation at the Open Door is to meet Christ in many forms. It is to understand suffering and hope. And as long as it is recognized that it is Christ who comes knocking, the door will always be open.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.