Living among the least of these

By Joy May

The corner of Peachtree and Pine in downtown Atlanta is milling with people crowding the sidewalks. It isn’t the address for a trendy nightclub or a popular tourist hangout. Instead the toughest shelter in Atlanta is housed in a warehouse on this corner, and the crowds are men — up to 1,000 in the winter — looking for a place to sleep for the night. Men who’ve fallen on hard times. Convicts, fugitives, addicts, alcoholics, gay, straight, mentally ill. All looking for shelter. If they’re early enough, maybe even a mattress to sleep on — even though it hasn’t been washed in months, and they don’t know who had it last night.

Even in daylight, Peachtree and Pine is scary. Sneakers, broken bottles and discarded clothing litter the parking lot where daily commuters leave their cars — if they dare — for the day. The homeless who don’t make the shelter’s curfew sleep off their hangovers and highs in the doorways. Just around the corner, Peachtree is a different place — high society, the Fox Theater, the nicest hotels in Atlanta. But at this intersection, it’s downright intimidating. And this is just the place where Andy Odle BA ’96 spends his life ministering to the poor and needy through Church on the Street. He lives, locked in, upstairs above the shelter and trains youth, college students and adults how to feed the homeless food for the body and the soul.

In the beginning

Odle has been sensitive to injustice since childhood. “I always rooted for the underdog,” Odle says. “In school, there were the bullies and the bullied. I was never bullied by anyone, but I always felt for the little guys.”

That compassion followed him to AU, where Odle majored in Christian ministries and minored in Bible and psychology. He spent a lot of time taking sociology classes — an intentional move in his education process that provided practical experiences he still remembers to this day.

“There were a lot of different things that helped shape my ministry and continue to help shape my ministry,” Odle says. Dr. Joe Womack’s introductory sociology class and learning experiences in Chicago opened his eyes and his mind to some of society’s spiritual and physical needs.

Odle’s classmates recognized his open-minded nature and elected him student body president for two years. In addition to participating in prison ministries, and his more active role in violence prevention after his mother’s murder, student government allowed him to speak out on social issues. One event continues to serve as a reminder for why his ministry to the needy in Atlanta is so important.

“There was a homeless man sleeping in a dumpster in Anderson. When they emptied the dumpster, the truck started crushing the garbage, and the man was in there. He died and no one knew who he was. Dr. [James] Lewis said, ‘It’s un-Christian that this man should not be honored — he should not be looked upon as a nothing, a nobody.’ Because I was student body president, I helped spread the word about Dr. Lewis’ vision for something better than a pauper’s funeral, and a large number of students attended.

“Although attendance was important, it was more the awareness that there are unknowns out there people don’t look at or care about and write off as part of the scenery. Christians have a responsibility to care for and love those people and to treat them with dignity as God’s children.”

The word became flesh

By the time Lori Salierno visited AU in 1993, the seeds of compassion had been planted in Odle’s heart. As the speaker for Spiritual Emphasis Week, she ministered to students from the platform and spent time with them over lunch. After meeting and talking with Odle, she suggested he apply for an internship with her and her husband, Kurt, in Phoenix. The result was a valuable youth ministry internship the summer between Odle’s sophomore and junior years, and the beginning of his vital connection with Kurt, founder of Church on the Street.

After graduation, Odle joined the staff at East Side Church of God in Anderson as the youth minister. He continued to build his relationship with the Saliernos, visiting them in Phoenix, and then in Georgia, where Kurt first served as senior pastor at Town Center Community Church of God in Marietta and then founded Church on the Street to serve the city’s homeless population. Odle suggested taking his youth group to Atlanta for a “ministry weekend” with Kurt — a program Odle developed to allow students to travel to large cities for a few days in the summer and participate in street ministry or nursing home visitations.

Do unto others

After three years at East Side, Odle resigned. While he was “trying to figure out what God had in store next,” Kurt called with an offer: Come and organize the summer missions program for Church on the Street. Kurt was doing carpentry work to subsidize his income while trying to run the street ministry, and he found it impossible to organize trips for missions groups. Remembering both Odle’s internship in Phoenix and his pastoral experience at East Side, Kurt felt Odle could serve the ministry well.

“I believe in mentoring,” Kurt says, “and Andy just picked up on that. We have a common heart for caring for people, and sensing he has a heart for the poor and seeing how they related to him when he was in Atlanta, I asked him to do more.”

That included helping establish the ministry as a corporation, overseeing the visiting missions groups — youth, college and adult — and organizing other programs. Odle agreed to stay permanently.

Kurt acknowledges that Odle’s presence makes a major difference in Church on the Street. “He has freed me up to spend my time on the streets, passing out hot dogs and being with the guys. We’re the only street ministry in the Church of God training and equipping young people for a lifetime of this kind of service, and we’re proud of that partnership. Andy’s been a big part of that, too. My hope is that he can establish this same ministry elsewhere.”

Odle would argue he’s not an administrator; Church on the Street’s only salaried employee is the administrative assistant. Instead, Odle is responsible for directing visiting groups, teaching about building kingdom relationships, taking groups out to do ministry and supervising the summer interns.

However, Odle is instrumental for getting Church on the Street to the corner of Peachtree and Pine. He and Kurt attempted to acquire a facility where groups could come and train and live for a week, instead of housing them in a hotel on the edge of the city. While they have a trailer capable of storing supplies, all of the sites available for a building were in suburban areas. Odle felt a need for an inner city connection, so he approached Anita Beatty, president of Atlanta’s Task Force for the Homeless.

“The Task Force is an independent, non-religious organization, although they’re all Christians. But they own this shelter, they have a hotline that you can call, they have an intake office where you can get whatever help you need,” explains Odle. “We’d been [at the Peachtree and Pine shelter] before to do ministry. I said I’d talk with them and let them know they needed to give us room to do ministry here, to build our dorms. I told Anita what we wanted, and she made it happen. They gave us this space in return for labor.”

So in partnership with the Task Force, Church on the Street serves the city’s poorest and neediest population and teaches groups year-round how to take this ministry and make it their own.

Sermon on the mount

In July, Odle worked with a group from Bayside Community Church of God in Tampa, Fla., for one week. AU junior Nicole Hollis and senior Mandi Pierson were there with the youth, and sophomore Nathan Heywood was interning for a month with Church on the Street. Bayside pulled into the pay parking lot across the street from the shelter late Monday night, and Odle exited the building yelling instructions to grab bags and get inside immediately. Once sufficiently intimidated, the group went through orientation with Odle and then to bed. Tuesday they spent four hours with Kurt doing manual labor throughout the shelter. Lunch and showers came around noon, and then the group learned how to treat the homeless they’d be interacting with.

“The only difference between most of these men and me is a paycheck and bar of soap,” Odle explained to the group. “They’ve been robbed of their dignity. It’s been stolen from them, stripped away. One of the biggest things you can do is restore their dignity, restore hope. It’s very simple. You recognize they’re people. When you walk down the street, don’t walk past them like they don’t exist. Shake hands. Sit, have a conversation and pray with them. But acknowledge their existence, and you’ll restore dignity.”

They left Tuesday’s orientation and headed for the famed Stone Mountain of Georgia. The students began the climb together, but as they continued, strong ones led the pack and left other students in the dust. At the top of the mountain, Odle gave his own version of a “sermon on the mount” about the kingdom of God as community and how we must not leave one another behind.

Wednesday morning found the students hard at work again, and at the King Center in the afternoon, where Odle talked about social justice and the similarities between segregation of race and social status. Then students began the real work of the week — time in the shelter with the men, playing checkers, and offering water to drink and Living Water for life. They spent their evening at a park making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eating with the homeless who crowded the benches. When it was over, Odle spoke about the “costs of the kingdom” through the story of the Good Samaritan. “Get your hands dirty. Ministry will cost you time, and it will cost you money.”

Thursday was similar, but the day began at 5:30 a.m., as the students traveled across the city to serve breakfast. Their afternoon was spent in a part of town called “Little Five Points,” where satanic cults and stores selling occult paraphernalia are located. Kurt had told them about alternative lifestyles in Atlanta. Students heard about places like the crack house where prostitutes sell themselves for a hit of cocaine, and the Masquerade club with three levels: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, each more twisted than the previous level. That evening, the kids headed for a parking lot, where parking spaces are homeless “apartments” littered with clothing and belongings. Some students went under the bridges with Odle, sandwiches and brave hearts in tow, unsure of what they might encounter, but radically changed when they returned. Odle’s speech this night talked about the tensions of a life of service.

“What am I most afraid of? That what I’m doing is in vain. That I’m enabling these people to continue a life on the streets. I don’t want to be part of the problem. But it’s about building relationships. And I remember that Christ said, ‘What you do to the least of these, you do to me,’ and that means that I must treat each man as if he were Christ.”

Friday the students spent all day in the shelter doing labor and were treated at the end of a tough week: a Braves baseball game, something lighthearted to lessen the sensory overload. They processed their experiences on Friday night, and were gone by Saturday morning.

What’s the final payoff? “When they leave, they are educated and trained to do ministry,” Odle says. “I don’t care if they do street ministry when they go home, because the principles we teach are transferable to just caring for people and having a changed life as a kingdom person. I care that they’re obedient to God and that they’re caring for people who are left out of life.”

Blessed are the poor in spirit

As Odle tells it, Church on the Street trains people for the kingdom. “We’re not only a ministry to the poor, but a training center. We want groups to understand they’re people of a kingdom, and there are responsibilities when you’re in a kingdom to live a certain way.”

Odle believes Christianity is more than believing — it’s doing. “You can’t be a Christian and not care for the needs of people. It’s an oxymoron. I don’t think you’re being a Christian if you’re not concerned with social issues, the plight of the oppressed, the least of these. You can’t read the Gospels and get around it. We have to understand the mindset that what I have is not mine, but the Lord’s, and when someone needs something, I don’t hold onto it selfishly. I give it up freely.”

Odle’s lifestyle is also more simplistic. He says his ministry helps him remember what he has. “Here people can begin to understand their own need for God. But if you’re not in this kind of ministry, you’ll never experience the awareness of your own need. Because I am, it keeps me grounded in the kingdom.”

So grounded that Odle returned to Anderson last year to attend the School of Theology. He is pursuing a master’s degree in theological studies for eventual doctoral studies in ethics. “I want to begin all of my study of sociology in seminary,” Odle says. “My education informs what I do; it’s on-the-job training. I bring my books, and I read and write papers here, and my experience helps me with my coursework. I want theology to be my foundation.”

And like he tells his students, everything in ministry — including preparation for ministry — comes with a price. He logs road-weary miles between Atlanta and Anderson to spend as much time with groups during the school year as he can. But the real cost is tuition. Tuition assistance is one reason he returned to Anderson.

“With the Blackwelder scholarship, this is an opportunity to go to school as a Church of God pastor and have financial help,” Odle explains. “My family is here, too. And if it weren’t for my father’s help, I couldn’t do it.” Odle is also bi-vocational. He substitute teaches when he’s in Anderson and does carpentry in Atlanta.

Odle and those who serve with Church on the Street aren’t doing this for financial gain. “This isn’t about money, and it isn’t about me. It’s about experiencing God where you know He’ll come through. He’s in the tension and among the oppressed and taken advantage of. He becomes real when you put yourself in the middle of that, when you live like a child of the kingdom. That’s all I want to teach others to do.”