Marvin Olasky

Today is Good Friday. Nearly two thousand years ago it seemed a very bad Friday. Jesus, as the Apostles Creed puts it, “was crucified, died, and was buried.” God turned bad into good, as He regularly does. Romans 5:8 in the New Testament declares, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christians are supposed to get used to bad/good Fridays. Communist-turned-Christian Whittaker Chambers wrote, “a man can scarcely call himself a Christian for whom the crucifixion is not a daily suffering.” The idea of “suffering with” homeless people and others in danger (the literal meaning of compassion) is central in Christianity because it was central in the life of Christ. Read More ›

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago. Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work? Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the Read More ›

Three years ago, I began writing my Human Lives column about homelessness on the Discovery Institute website. I’ll be concluding that series at the end of next month, but I’d like Discovery Institute supporters to know about some prizes announced today that will hearten those concerned about journalism, homelessness, or both. Over the years, The New York Times editorially has supported neither Intelligent Design nor the intelligent design of programs to help homeless individuals. Nor is the Times accustomed to getting awards from Christian organizations — but Christian groups that fight homelessness are equally unaccustomed to getting positive stories in the Times. That’s why a story by reporter Jason DeParle four days before Thanksgiving last year was particularly memorable. DeParle Read More ›

This year I’ve written about what I learned in Colorado Springs at the Springs Rescue Mission. But when I stayed there last year, I also thought of the pioneer who, starting in 1983, built a predecessor of SRM just up the highway in Denver. His name: Bob Coté, a six-foot-three-inch ex-amateur boxer who in his forties changed his life by not drinking his usual half gallon of vodka for lunch. Instead, he poured out the bottle’s contents and became in 1983 one of the original residents of a new program, Step 13. Bob became Director of Operation and then Executive Director, pouring what he had learned as a homeless alcoholic into a program that challenged rather than coddled men seen Read More ›

Today’s biggest public policy error concerning homelessness emerges from the fallacy that everyone deserves his own apartment and that true compassion means providing one. The federal government’s “Housing First” mandate sits on the materialistic assumption that an apartment is the appropriate response to addiction, mental illness, loneliness, and purposeless living. Thirty-six years ago, I came out with a book entitled The Tragedy of American Compassion. It included seven ways to fight poverty in alphabetical order. The first two were Affiliation and Bonding: restoring social ties that were broken or weaving new ones. Many recent trends have battered affiliation and bonding, but they are still key. Falling into addiction instead of falling in love is a frequent failure. Although some are Read More ›

In the U.S. Capitol 30 years ago, on March 23, 1995, Rep. Glenn Poshard (D., Illinois) advocated for more federal spending for the poor and homeless. He said spending hundreds of billions on governmental poverty-fighting was not “wild-eyed liberalism [based on building] systems that end up manipulating and controlling the poor, more than liberating them.” Instead, the expenditures were biblical, because “if there is one thing evident in the Scriptures, it is that God gives priority to the poor.” Poshard criticized conservative policy analysts by quoting Jesus “from the Sermon on the Mount. Time and again he says, ‘blessed are the poor.…When I was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked Read More ›

The city of Colorado Springs does not want people sleeping on the streets and stealing or begging for food. The last IRS report 990 that Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) filed (April 2024) shows $5.6 million in food and shelter costs, with $2.2 million coming from governments and $3.4 million from private sources. Their overall income is a healthy $13.5 million. SRM does not owe its life to government, and it does not give beds and meals only to those who sit through a service or listen to a sermon. Part of the argument for city government supplementing the SRM budget comes down to dollars and cents. Colorado Springs spends about $57,000 annually per chronically homeless adult. SRM sees about 220 Read More ›

I’ve learned in my stays at homeless shelters one clear lesson: how hard it is to offer true help. Jeff Cook, chief program officer at Springs Rescue Mission (SRM), wrote this in his dissertation: “When reviewing the reason clients are homeless, it was apparent that they all had some traumatic experiences that caused them to be homeless. This trauma could have begun in many forms: the death of a parent or family member, the victim of a crime, human or drug trafficking, or the loss of a job due to illness.” Such stressful events shatter senses of security. They leave people feeling endangered by normal life, unstable even when placed in stable housing. A faith in Christ can be a Read More ›

The Springs Rescue Mission had humble beginnings thirty years ago, which is typical of programs that last. Unlike Athena in Greek mythology, they don’t spring forth full-grown from the head of Zeus. Starting in 1995, SRM gradually grew its focus on homeless services and addiction recovery. It built slowly but solidly, and started in 2013 to build a resource campus that could serve more people and provide more opportunities for those encouraged to leave homelessness behind. A dozen years later, it serves more than 4,000 individuals each year and has a variety of programs under the authority of Chief Program Officer Jeff Cook — but Cook, to his credit, wondered in his June 2024 doctoral dissertation (Bakke Graduate School, Dallas) Read More ›

The Springs Rescue Mission transients I met had a choice. Those who were addicted could join the recovery program and get a heavy dose of Jesus plus medicine. Others could join the Hope program, maybe enticed by the opportunity to sleep in the same bed every night and get better meals during the day, maybe motivated by faith in Christ. While staying in the Colorado Springs shelter, I sat in one Hope class in an SRM “multi-purpose room” and saw that the name reflects the goals of students as well as how the space is used. The text was Core Purpose 2.0, Fifth edition, authored by Victoria Jeffs. The class emphasized “mindfulness,” a key component of Buddhism’s eight-fold path for Read More ›