To the Rescue

Shivering men, shoulders hunched against the chill, standing in line at a rescue-mission door. Rag-wrapped drunks, unsteady on their feet, sitting down to hot soup and a sandwich. Evening prayer services with one basic message: Jesus saves. The picture hardly seems to belong in an affluent society where Jesus has moved up to Broadway and popular myth has people growing fat on the largesse of the welfare state. But it is a contemporary reality--as some 450 rescue missions across North America, to say nothing of another 100 or so abroad, can testify.

With alcohol still the No. 1 drug problem and welfare agencies closing their doors before supper, the rescue mission is very much alive. Last year alone, twelve new missions joined the International Union of Gospel Missions, the umbrella organization to which most of the independent operations belong. (The Salvation Army's network of missions is not counted among the independents.) Last month, rescue missions celebrated their centennial: the 100th birthday of a Manhattan gospel shelter known as the McAuley Water Street Mission.

Jerry McAuley was an Irish-born river thief who found religion while doing a stretch in Sing Sing, backslid into booze when he got out, reformed and finally became a full-time evangelist to the wharf rats who had been his pals. He opened his Water Street Mission in 1872 under the sign HELPING HAND FOR MEN in a neighborhood so rough that one hotel even had a tunnel to the river for the convenient dispatch of murder victims. Within a few years came other pioneers: Duluth's Bethel Society, Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission (where Billy Sunday was converted), and New York's famed Bowery Mission. By 1891 Los Angeles had its Union Rescue Mission, now the nation's largest.

Today the missions are a fiercely autonomous lot, each legislating its own rules. Some, like the Bowery, offer meals, clothing and prayer but no beds for transients (in cold weather, Bowery's homeless are allowed to sleep on its chapel pews). Some take in alcoholics but refuse drug addicts. A number now operate dormitories for women, but others still limit their mission to men.

Low Cost. At the McAuley Water Street Mission, which was forced by a housing project to move from Water Street to new quarters near by, men in need who want to come in for supper, bed and breakfast can do so as often as they like--provided they register each night and attend the prayer service. Men who want to stay longer must join a spiritual regimen that includes daily Bible study, complete abstinence from alcohol and no smoking on the premises. Results of such rehabilitation programs can be disappointing to the staffs, who are often rehabilitated men themselves. Jerry Dunn, president of the International Union of Gospel Missions, says that only 25% of the men who complete such courses remain "recovered." "The Lord never asked us to be successful," sighs Dunn. "But he did ask us to be faithful."

Materially, the rescue missions' output is prodigious. They served 14 million meals in North America last year, according to one estimate--usually without any public financial aid and often at a low cost that public institutions would envy. More to the point, says Connecticut Psychiatrist David Morley, a consultant to the McAuley mission, "the mission's love goes to a segment of humanity that we like to ignore." Founder McAuley would have been one of the ignored ones, says Morley. "In the medical understanding of today, he would have been written off as an incurable psychopath. This kind of person is 'impossible' to reach."

The most criticized aspect of rescue missions is the almost universally required attendance at worship services, a sort of sing-for-your-supper attitude But mission directors insist that their spiritual work is far more important than the food and shelter they offer "Christ spoke to 5,000 people all day before he fed them," says Jerry Dunn. "If a man is really hungry we will feed him, but we don't apologize for requiring attendance at worship. If we don't give them a foundation to build their lives on, we give them nothing."

According to many rescue missioners, providing that foundation is going to become an overtime job in the next few years. General Manager Arthur Bestvater of Los Angeles' Union Rescue Mission reports a startling drop in the average age of derelicts--from the upper 50s a decade ago to the lower 30s today. Bestvater believes that missions have just begun to experience a wave of ruined minds and lives left over from the drug culture. He also notes a rising number of drifting young who often find themselves without a place to sleep. Far from being outdated, he says, the rescue mission of the '70s will be jammed to the doorsills.

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