Trafalgar Square in London
[Adventures in Faith: England; 1992] We decided to launch a new evangelistic outreach. It would be to homeless people in England.
We began this new outreach in Birmingham. As we did in Japan, we would be homeless ourselves.
Being homeless was our way of practicing solidarity with the homeless people we were reaching out to with the message of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We found a population of homeless people in the downtown area of Birmingham. As the days went by, we got to know some of them.
One young woman always had a mouse under her clothing. At any moment, she could summon it. It would emerge from a sleeve or her trouser cuffs or her cleavage. Her boyfriend said it was cute.
Then we moved to London.
Soon, we found a place in the heart of the megacity called Trafalgar Square.
During the day, it was a huge attraction for tourists. In those days, about 15 million people visited it each year. That made it the fourth most popular tourist attraction on earth.
We spent a month there. We ourselves were homeless, and we were acting as missionaries to the homeless people at Trafalgar Square.
You might not think that there would be homeless people there, but there were. There was a little park nearby. I can’t remember the name of it.
But in the evening and night, it was a very busy place. Each night, about 200 homeless people slept on the ground there.
Alexander got to know some of the homeless people. He told us that some of them were glue sniff-ers.
They put model airplane glue in a paper bag, put the bag over their mouth and breathed in the fumes. It made them high. It would also make them loudmouthed and violent and abusive.
Sometimes the homeless people would scrape together enough cash to buy a beer.
They’d buy it one bottle at a time.
We bought one of those beers once, just to try it.
We divided the one bottle among the four of us. I pretty much passed out from my little share. It hit us all pretty strongly.
Maybe that was because none of us had drunk any alcohol for a long time. And because we were on a starvation diet. And because, as we found out later, the beer was 11% alcohol!
I saw several different religious groups at Trafalgar Square They took turns practicing hospitality for these poor people.
Free of charge, they provided food and drink. If a homeless person had other needs, the religious groups tried to help meet those needs as well.
The best food was from a Hindu group called the Hare Krishnas. Back in Birmingham, I had visited their temple.
Their food was far better than what the Christians provided.
RESOURCES
At Wikipedia:
Hare Krishna movement (“International Society for Krishna Consciousness”)
ADVENTURES IN FAITH
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