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The Open Door Community:
A Common Life, Vision, Hope, by Ed Loring
A u g u s t 1 9 8 5
Settling In ˜ 13
On a Friday night in July, visitors Allen and Yvonne King stood in the hot
kitchen taking orders from Sye. A homeless, middle-aged black man, unemployed
since half of his body was severely burned by french-fry grease in a shortorder
restaurant, Sye kept the Kings busy until midnight cooking a birthday
cake for one of the partners at the Open Door. Allen and Yvonne did more than
bake cake during their visit to the Open Door Community. They helped to feed
one hundred people at the soup kitchen in addition to aiding forty homeless and
haggard men and women who came for a shower and a change of clothes.
The Open Door is a residential Christian community which ministers to
the homeless and hungry on the streets of Atlanta and to prisoners across the
state of Georgia. The roots of the Open Door Community stretch back to a
small inner-city neighborhood congregation, the Clifton Presbyterian Church. I
was pastor, and Murphy Davis, my wife, who is also a Presbyterian minister, directed
the Georgia office of Southern Prison Ministry from the church. The
Clifton congregation numbered thirty members, mostly young adults who came
together seeking a disciplined and active Christian life. Living in the midst of
the poor, and in a city with thousands of hungry and homeless people, the
church decided to open its doors to thirty homeless men for shelter from the
mean streets and bitter nights. Every night since November 1, 1979, Clifton Presbyterian
Church has fed and sheltered homeless men in the sanctuary.
The need for shelter discerned by the Clifton congregation was, and continues
to be, much greater than any one church could resolve. In 1979 there were
approximately 1,500 homeless people in Atlanta; today there are 5,000. By the
winter of 1980–81 several churches had followed the Clifton example and began
offering hospitality, food, a blanket, and a foam mat to the poorest of the poor.
A movement was now underway to shelter the homeless. During the winter
there are now thirty churches, representing most denominations, feeding and
sheltering 1,500 men, women, boys, and girls.
During the second year of Night Hospitality Ministry at Clifton Church,
Rob and Carolyn Johnson joined Murphy Davis and me to form the Open
Door Community. We felt a new vocation emerge from our experience of serving
God in the midst of the poor. We wanted to live with those whom we sheltered
and we wanted to form an alternative style of Christian commitment—a
residential community.
After a long and prayerful search for a building, the Open Door and Atlanta
Presbytery purchased an old fifty-six-room apartment building from the Atlanta