All Saints provides safe haven in midst of chaos
TORONTO, ON - "All Saints Church-Community Centre is the type of place where someone can interrupt a worship service while strung out on crack-cocaine and nobody bats an eyelid, says pastor David Opheim.
“A 911 call in the middle of a service is not abnormal," he says. “We want to meaningfully bring worship into the mess of our lives. There is a place for ordered worship, where everything is well orchestrated and predictable. However that is not necessarily the world in which many people find themselves today. Life is messy. We need Christ in the midst of the messiness."
Sitting on the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne, in Toronto's inner-city core, All Saints was first established in the 1870s, but was disestablished in the 1970s due to dwindling numbers. With strong support from the diocese, it was then reborn as a faith-based community centre, where daily worship is fully integrated with the hands on grit of practical outreach work.
All Saints is supported by the Anglican Diocese of Toronto's Faith Works Campaign. It runs a community drop-in four days a week, and a drop-in for female sex workers on Fridays. It also rents out its hall to the Toronto Friendship Center for its breakfast program.
“We provide an opportunity for people to come in and rest," Opheim says, “to have a cup of coffee and a snack, to use our computers, to access our pastoral counselling services, to worship or even just to sleep in safety on our floor. We just try to make ourselves available in every way we can."
All Saints also runs a store-front drop-in centre in the nearby Dan Harrison Toronto Housing Complex.
Opheim says, “For the 700 or so under-housed people that live there, we provide a place where they can come to have a sense of community and seek counselling or prayer.
“Under-housing is almost more of a problem then homelessness in the city. Too many people are under-housed in unsafe places, with people they should not be housed with. They are not up to the standard that people's dignity requires... There's a real opportunity the church to have a social justice voice."
Recently All Saints helped facilitate a community safety audit on the complex, where local residents toured the building during various times of day and wrote up a report of what they saw. The report has been submitted to Toronto Housing and the results are expected to come out later this spring.
“In many circumstances, we are the first agency that a tenant has trusted to enter their apartment," says outreach worker John Stephenson. “Many tenants don't have telephones, and we have a cell phone for their use. Bringing in partners like us to listen, refer people to other agencies and visit tenants means that the feeling of community in the apartment complex increases.
“One of our main goals at Dan Harrison was to visit the most vulnerable. In pairs, we go out and visit the sick and those who are too afraid to leave their apartments. Because of our presence in the complex tenants felt comfortable asking us to hold a funeral for one of the tenants here at the church.
“We have also been asked by several people to come and pray in their apartments," as a way of blessing them and making sure that 'evil spirits do not return.' At the drop-in I am often asked, 'John, can you pray for me? Right now, right here?' And in the middle of all that is happening we pray for people's healing and protection."
One resident at Dan Harrison, speaking under the condition of anonymity, says, “There are crack dealers over at the apartment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The church gives me a chance to get away from them."
Another adds, “Coming here helps me get out of a bad atmosphere. I'm an old man, and the apartment is a rough place. This [church] is a good place to be."
“Each day I am shocked at how similar we all are," says Stephenson. “Specifically, so many of our guests have bachelor degrees or master's degrees, and through circumstances that are no fault of their own, our guests end up coming into the church for safety and relationship. It's hard to put a feeling into words, expect that we are all so close to being on the street. People help one another because we are all made in the same image... Everyone needs to be listened to and valued."
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