Wherever poor live, that’s where you can find him
I ask John Hayes what he remembers about Minnie Street in Santa Ana, the rough stretch of urban turf where it all began in 1985.
He remembers that a stranger had to be lost to find it. That it was roughly one-third Cambodian refugees and two-thirds Latino. He remembers the tension between the two groups and the “almost weird emotional staring contest” as they coexisted on the street. He remembers the slumlord who didn’t mind if people poured into overcrowded apartments. And the police who never went there solo.
Most of all, Hayes remembers that Minnie Street -- the poorest piece of real estate in Orange County -- was exactly where he wanted to be. Exactly where he thought Jesus wanted him to be.
So, in April of 1985, he moved into Apartment 7 at 1014 S. Minnie and spent the next seven years on the street, ministering to the poor, talking to them, getting to know them and building his InnerCHANGE organization, which has expanded to 60 missionaries in eight cities around the world.
And just as Hayes did in Santa Ana -- and as he and his wife, Deanna, plan to do in their new home base in London -- the missionaries live in those cities’ poorest neighborhoods.
The John Hayes story, then, represents one of those uncomfortable challenges to professed Christians: how to put into action Jesus’ teachings about engaging the poor and downtrodden.
“It’s pretty difficult to read your Bible and not come away with some kind of involvement with the poor,” Hayes, 52, says by phone Monday from London. “Matthew 25 says that at the end of our lives, we’ll be evaluated with how much we did or didn’t do with the poor.”
If that sounds preachy in print, it doesn’t in conversation with Hayes, who comes across as urbane and well-spoken, as you’d expect of someone with degrees from Princeton and Yale.
Hayes was in Orange County last week as part of a national tour promoting “sub-merge,” a book about his ministry. His organization is a division of Church Resource Ministries in Anaheim, which develops Christian leaders both for the ministry and as lay preachers.
While the biblical imperative on helping the poor seems obvious, simple observation tells us that some churches either benignly ignore the poor in their midst or, in the worst cases, shun them.
Hayes doesn’t expect every churchgoer to move to the inner city but is critical of churches that preach the Gospel but won’t engage poor people. “I wouldn’t say I know when it’s happening, because I’m not in mainstream churches very often,” he says, “but it’s very costly when people say one thing and do another.... The No. 1 criticism of Christians is hypocrisy.”
And knowing the charge sometimes is true bothers him, Hayes says. “I do take umbrage with it,” he says. “I’m not trying to ferret it out, but I wish churches better understood that non-Christians and other faiths really scrutinize them to see if they walk their talk, and that they drive them away by their hypocrisy.”
Writing a check to support missionaries or doing part-time volunteer work is laudable, says Hayes, who doesn’t want to appear judgmental on the subject. He knows that people are caught in the swirl of their own lives and that not all would be ready to immerse themselves among the poor, which presents its own set of complexities.
He just thinks there’s no better way to understand the poor and to minister to them than to live among them.
Born in Pennsylvania, Hayes and his family moved frequently as he was growing up and he graduated from high school in Guam. After college, Hayes went to Japan and started a business but instead found himself returning to the Christian roots from which he and his family had drifted.
He had become a serious Christian at 25, which for him meant taking the Bible literally. He says there are roughly 1,000 passages about the poor and that they are the only specific group with which Jesus identified. In a sense, Hayes says, living with them was the way to get closest to Jesus.
And that brings us back to Minnie Street of 1985, where Hayes moved when he was 30 and single. In the early days, he financed his ministry by painting houses. He moved into a courtyard apartment complex dominated by Cambodian refugees traumatized by the Pol Pot regime and beset with various diseases. But rather than ignoring the American stranger in their presence, they gravitated to him, Hayes says.
They sent their children to his apartment and invited him to their most important functions, like weddings and birthdays and trips to the hospital. He believes that because he showed them he cared enough to live among them, they embraced him.
He began living in a world apart from mainstream society. But he never wavered in his decision. To the contrary, “it felt like something I didn’t really deserve,” he says. “Within two to three months, I started asking God to bring the street better people than me. I felt it was such a privilege and I felt so inadequate.”
I ask if he prides himself on his rather selfless career path. He jokes that “I tend to be fairly self-affirming and congratulatory by nature,” but that his wife and his chats with God rein him in.
He and his wife have daughters 12 and 8, and are still deciding where to settle in London. Most likely, it will be among African immigrants, he says.
Jon Moore, the executive vice president of the umbrella Anaheim group that includes Hayes’ ministry, considers him a prophet. “He’s basically shining a light on the culture, trying to get people to see the realities of the situation of the poor,” Moore says. “And challenging people to step up and take action.”
Hayes remembers praying as a boy and feeling as though he was being understood. What he’s doing now, he says, is but an extension of the first Bible story that really got to him: that of the Good Samaritan. “God hasn’t chosen the poor because they’re the best,” he says. “He’s chosen them first because we make them last.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana