A Global ‘Ministry of Mercy’ Leads to Skid Row

When Ralph Plumb joined other college students on a church mission to Turkey in the summer of 1971, it moved him deeply. So did his tour four years later of Christian missions and orphanages throughout India.

“I realized the comfortable world I grew up in wasn’t everywhere,” he says. “In fact, it was very few places.”

Fresh out of Oral Roberts University with a bachelor’s degree in communications, he married in 1976, moved to Pasadena, and began working on a master’s degree in divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary. Thus began his commitment to what he calls the “ministry of mercy.”

Now, he is applying his nearly 30 years of experience in helping the needy in 90 different countries to his new post as president and chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles.

In addition to providing meals and shelter to the down and out, the mission offers free medical and dental care, legal aid and addiction programs.

“I stepped over too many people in the street, I guess,” says Plumb, 48, who this year also will finish his doctoral thesis on the importance to the Christian church of helping the poor. “I said, I have to do something.”

Whether delivering a corn-milling machine and hymnals to a Lisu village 10,000 feet up in the Tibetan Himalayas or overseeing Los Angeles’ oldest mission to the homeless on skid row, Plumb says, his life’s work is consistent.

“I don’t see it as international,” says the ordained Congregational minister. “I see it as human.”

Plumb was appointed by the 110-year-old mission’s board of directors in July. For him, overseeing the efforts of the privately funded, nonprofit Christian mission is the next step in a lifelong calling.

From 1978 to 1989, he served as program director of Monrovia-based World Vision International, which conducts child- and family-centered relief and development projects worldwide. In 1990, he began a decade-long stint as president and chief executive of the similar International Aid, which took him to impoverished communities around the world.

As chief manager and spokesman for the Union Rescue Mission, one of the nation’s largest urban missions, Plumb says he now will advocate for the indigent in his own backyard.

“Many in the U.S. tend to think of the homeless as a pejorative,” says Plumb, who adds that he is motivated to breach the “walls of isolation” surrounding poverty, addiction and mental illness.

Often, he says, the unenlightened belief that all homeless people are addicts prone to commit crimes adds to that isolation. It’s an inaccurate profile of many of today’s homeless, he says.

Plumb says his work abroad has taught him that at the root of most poverty lies injustice--which results in little or no opportunity for education, housing and employment.

In the United States today, he says, injustice can be found in undiscerning welfare-to-work policies, and a housing crunch compounded by landlords who turn away families with federally subsidized housing vouchers. Domestic violence, he adds, also is driving more women and children into the streets.

“What if you had to vacate your home with 10 minutes’ notice because of abuse from a spouse?” he asks rhetorically. “There’s more and more women and children that had a sudden and catastrophic change in their lives.”

The Union Rescue Mission serves about 2,400 meals a day and houses 620 homeless people a night. The mission has had to triple the number of beds it makes available to women and children since opening its five-story building on South San Pedro Street in 1994.

In 1995, about a third of the mission’s homeless clients were women and children. Now they account for nearly half. Plans are underway to add long-term housing at the mission for single mothers.

Plumb and his wife, Ann, have two daughters, ages 19 and 17. He says it was the death of his own firstborn, Bristol, that sparked his interest in helping single mothers and their children.

While working with World Vision in 1980, Plumb was set to take a post in Taiwan when doctors told him and his wife that Bristol had a terminal degenerative nerve disease.

The emotion still seeps into his voice at the memory. “She was 2 years old,” he says, “and the doctors said she would be dead by 3.”

He turned down the overseas assignment and took up vigil at her bedside with his wife. Bristol gradually lost her motor skills, sight and hearing before dying at age 10. “We watched her disintegrate,” Plumb says.

But he says the “crucible of life” profoundly inspired his family.

“What it did emotionally and spiritually for us is it cemented the time in our life to work with women and children,” he says. “What I’m passionate about,” he adds, “is talking to a mother and her child.”

That connection between mission staff--from CEO to secretary--and those they serve is important to Plumb.

He says that being an adopted child raised in a working-class family and his many travels among the poor abroad have taught him that anyone can become one of the world’s countless unfortunates.

But it was one of his first experiences as a Fuller student and intern chaplain at a hospital for the mentally ill, he says, that confirmed just how thin the line really is between the more and the less fortunate.

Shortly after he began the internship, he approached a man in the hall and began to “minister to him,” he recalls. “It turned out it was the resident occupational therapist,” he adds with a twinge of embarrassment even now.

“I realized everyone has human dignity,” says the now-seasoned minister of mercy. “Dignity is how a person acts, not what they wear.”