Good Works

This week I turned my sights to Good Works, a Christian nonprofit. From the site:

Good Works, Inc is a COMMUNITY OF HOPE for those struggling with poverty in rural Appalachia. We provide biblical hospitality through The Timothy House (our shelter for the rural homeless), The Hannah House (our long term residential care-community), job experience programs, creative volunteer service opportunities and community development ministries in the context of Christian Community.

Of particular interest is the org's founder, Keith Wasserman, who apparently converted to Jewish Christianity in his junior year of high school and used and sold drugs from eighth grade to 12th. In his senior year at Ohio University, circa 1980, he opened a homeless shelter out of the basement of his house.

Keith has chosen to be homeless eight different times over the last 15 years, in seven different cities, including my hometown, Akron, Ohio. He writes that he does this partly to have his "compassion renewed." In
Keith poses before a Good Works sign.

Lexington, Kentucky, he slept next to a man who had threatened someone with a knife earlier in the day. And in Charleston, West Virginia, after being rejected by the police and shelter staff for not having proper ID, he found an unlikely friend in a pimp.

"I learned how to listen to the voices from the streets," Keith writes, "the voices of men and women who are survivors in a world in which they see little opportunity."

Keith's organization goes farther than most other Christian ones in that conversion and assimilation into the church community are its primary goals, besides providing food and shelter. From the site:

As we move along the continuum of success toward the other end, we discover it is not enough to provide another human being with food, shelter, jobs, housing, friendship, counseling or help. It is not enough that we invite them into our Christian community and they come. It is not enough that they become a Christian themselves. We have not achieved success until they become a participating and functioning member in a local Christian Community.

 Volunteers prepare to sing a hymn.

In this way, Good Works resembles Alcoholics Anonymous in its marriage of recovery mixed with dependence on a "higher power"--though with the former, the higher power is a little more defined. It raises an interesting question: do the people they help feel as if they have a duty to reciprocate by participating in the Christian community? Could this be a conduit for false religiosity, or is it likely to make the helped believe more? Let me know what you think.

CORRECTION: Keith Wasserman only sold/used drugs from the eighth grade 'til eleventh, not twelfth. This coincided with his conversion to Christianity.