The Impact of StreetLight & StreetChurch in Downtown Windsor

This past Autumn we launched StreetLight and StreetChurch as a response to the increase of neighbours with no fixed address. We asked ourselves, ‘could we change the narrative from suspicion to curiosity towards our neighbours with no fixed address?’ As a response, a group of residents go out a few times in a week to ask questions, listen, and care as one neighbour for another, with those living on the streets. 

Once a month we have been setting up 'church' in the alleys and parking lots where folk hang out. It is on their turf, we are the guests, welcomed into the houses of peace. It is a stumbling attempt to incarnate rather than extracting persons to a building and culture that can be uncomfortable - out of their element. 

StreetChurch starts with our attempts at incorporating 'church' in a foreign environment. And it blows up in 5 minutes. Each attempt evolves. 

Imagine this time 8 chairs for each folding table.  Each table has 3 of the StreetLight team sitting for conversation and prayer.  Then on the table, we have sandwiches, fruit and cut-up veggies and juice boxes and coffee carafes. We are, over a period of months, shifting the culture of food handouts grabbed and eaten on the ground or a cold ledge by oneself. It is a multi-month process of setting the culture of sitting at the table. Instead, imagine a taste of what the supper table is in health. A lingering conversation, a sharing of food, a rest in a chair (now a luxury in which we put bars on benches, spikes on fences to discourage loitering and shouting you are not welcome).

Over the months as a new pattern is set, we gain confidence folks will sit longer.  A set of guided questions spur conversation about spirituality and sensing God's loving presence in a tumultuous day that moves from boredom to crisis. Our adjustment comes in realizing that listening to where people are at is worship as well -  like Jesus with the woman washing his feet - surprising, embarrassing, intimate, and unexpected but Jesus senses where the Spirit is moving in the woman's expression.  He sees it through the lens of the reconciling work of the Father to be exhibited in a few days at his crucifixion. 

Our reasonable act of worship is to praise God in the doxology of honouring the ‘imago dei’ in the person of no fixed address breaking bread together.