By Frank Stirk
DELTA, B.C.—Little did members of Royal Heights Baptist Church know that when men from a nearby drug and alcohol recovery house started coming to their worship services this would soon turn into a vibrant life-transforming ministry to street people.
“We’re taking somebody right from the street,” said Pastor Alan Braun, “to, over time, be a functioning, fully developed person in society who actually could help their brothers and sisters discover who God is and how to function in life. That’s what we’re doing.”
At first, Royal Heights saw its ministry to these men—who Braun described as “very rough, tough and broken”—as basically leading them to Christ. That changed when they found out the recovery house was for sale, which would leave these men with nowhere to go. “We could see there was this need immediately created,” he said. “And so we met as a church and decided we should be more serious with this ministry.”
That was in January. Today, the church rents two “discipleship houses” on small acreages in South Surrey that are now home to about a dozen men with histories of substance abuse and depression. What they receive there is not direct help with their struggles, but instead the good news of Jesus Christ.
“Drugs or alcohol, that’s not the problem,” Braun said, “The real problem is they have no meaning of life or they don’t have life. We believe if they have life, those other things will fall away.”
All that is asked of the men seeking to live at Lazarus House—as the entry-level house is called—is that they have been sober for three days and are willing to hear the gospel.
“We walk them through it and we live within it and teach them over and over and over again all the different aspects of it, so they really see who is this God is and magnify Him,” said discipleship houses director and IMB missionary Nancy Ingold. “If they’re willing to do that, they will grow. If they’re not, they will leave.”
There is deliberately no set agenda and no boot-camp type of regimentation. “We purposely make it kind of boring, because we say they need to sit with God. And as they do that for a month, there’s like this a-ha moment,” Ingold said.
“When it hits them, these guys who came in so agitated just rest in God. This beauty comes over them. It’s peace that passes all comprehension—the joy that is theirs in Christ. They realize they can do all things through Christ who gives you strength.”
Shayne Rooker began living at Lazarus House in March after struggling with drugs and alcohol for 13 years. “There’s been lots of treatment centres, but it was never a full abandonment to God,” he said. “I learned how to do
that here.”
Rooker now lives at Timothy House, where the men who are deemed healthy are transferred. There they begin to discover how to live out their faith and become leaders.
“They’re used to being self-centred, that they’re all about themselves,”
Braun said. “So we start teaching them there are other people observing you in your life. So let’s start living in such a manner that we’re like light, we’re like salt, we’re influencing systems around us without trying.”
And that too is bearing fruit. Rooker is the assistant youth director at Royal Heights. He leads a home group and feels God is calling him into the ministry. Another man, Clayton Davies, is already studying at the Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary and College.
“It’s wonderful,” said Rooker. “They really love us and they’ve really invested in this ministry and invested in us.”
But not only do these men grow as disciples, they are also natural disciple-makers.
“These guys,” Braun said, “won’t put up with any weakness. They see love as very aggressive. It’s something that they’ll die for. So when they are converted, they’re very serious. And they begin to invite their friends, and they lead their friends to Christ.” That includes men and women from homes that have no connection to Royal Heights.
In fact, Braun credits these men in large part for the fact that the church had 50 baptisms last year, a figure it is likely to meet or even exceed this year.
As for his members generally, Braun believes “they’ve really adopted this ministry well”—despite some initial discomfort.
“Some of these men swear. Ninety-nine per cent smoke,” he said. “You’ve got to be comfortable with stink. You’ve got to be comfortable with mess. But you’ve got to take them where they’re at.”
And yet once they have turned to Christ, they actually learn to become “very pleasant people,” he said. “So even though they’re full of tattoos and kind of rough looking, you don’t see that. You can see the kindness in their eyes.”