HOUSTON CHRONICLE ARCHIVES 

Paper: Houston Chronicle
Date: SAT 02/27/99
Section: RELIGION
Page: 1
Edition: 2 STAR

A home built with love / MARRIED COUPLE POOLS MINISTERIAL TALENTS 
TO REVITALIZE INNER-CITY CONGREGATION

By RICHARD VARA, Houston Chronicle Religion Writer
Staff

IN a baseball cap, T-shirt and blue jeans, Rudy Rasmus grabs a wireless microphone and bellows, "Good morning, family!"

Hundreds of people halt a happy frenzy of greeting, meeting and chatting to roar a hearty "Good morning" response to their pastor.

A four-member band, playing with the verve of a high-powered soul-filled marching band, fills the 80-year-old downtown sanctuary with a spirited beat that is barely contained by the vaulted ceiling. From a stagelike platform, Rasmus challenges the congregants to look their neighbors in the eye and exchange greetings and hugs.

The sanctuary becomes an ant bed of hugs, smiles and salutations. Exchanging the greetings are millionaires who slept in comfortable beds and homeless folks who slept under a bridge.

St. John's United Methodist Church, located on Crawford almost under the Pierce Elevated, does not offer a low-key, garden-variety United Methodist Sunday service with swelling organ music and people in suits and ties. Seven years ago it was barely a congregation, with only nine official members. That was before Rudy Rasmus , 42, and Juanita Campbell Rasmus , 37, arrived.

Under the husband-wife co-pastors, St. John's has grown to 3 ,600 members and become a social services center for downtown's homeless. It serves more than 6,000 meals monthly. On Monday, the church opens a three-story $2.2 million Center for Hope for children who are HIV-positive or have behavioral problems.

The couples' work earned them the 1998 Distinguished Evangelist Award from the Foundation for Evangelism, a national organization affiliated with the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.

Marsha Bell has attended other churches, "too many to count." For the past six months, she has been coming to St. John's despite the long commute from her home in far north Houston.

"It is the best church to be in," Bell said. "I can be down, but I feel I have the whole world in my hands when I come out the doors."

Not bad for a couple with no ministerial training or seminary education. The Rasmuses, married since 1985 and parents of two children, took on St. John's in 1992 at the request of their then pastor, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church. The couple had been looking for a lay ministry to serve when Caldwell was asked by Bishop J. Woodrow Hearne to take over St. John's.

St. John's was organized in 1890 as Tabernacle Methodist. It became St. John's in 1919. By the 1940s, membership grew to more than 600. But as Houston grew, the primarily white congregants fled to suburbs, leaving a church in sharp decline.

Rudy Rasmus , then a real estate broker, remembers stepping over the homeless sleeping on the church steps on his first exploratory visit to St. John's. Juanita Rasmus recalls her husband's excited cellular phone call that day. "This is it! This is it! This is the place!" she recalls him yelling.

St. John's was more than a place for mission for Rudy Rasmus . It was a chance for redemption. After graduating from North Texas State in 1976, Rasmus worked in banking in Dallas then moved back to his native Houston in 1980. Besides his real estate brokerage, Rasmus operated a liquor store and a motel with a "no questions asked" policy.

"I rented my rooms by the second, the minute or by the hour," Rasmus said in a candid but pained confession. It a was policy tailor-made for pimps and prostitutes, drug dealers and drug users.

When he joined Windsor Village church in 1986, he began a spiritual conversion, realizing he couldn't run such businesses any longer. Juanita Rasmus , who formerly sold securities and insurance in a family business, prayed for God to help Rudy embrace such a choice.

Eventually, Rudy closed the liquor store and motel. He began to sense a divine call to ministry.

"When I said `yes' to God," Rasmus said, "I knew (I would be called) to a group of people I helped to destroy, but I just didn't know where."

When he saw St. John's and the homeless, he identified them with former occupants of his motel and customers of his liquor store.

"I knew what happened," he said of the people hanging around the church. "They slipped off the edge, one (drug) hit too many, one motel room too many, one drink too many."

The couple readily took on the challenge of ministering to the street population developing the Bread of Life Homeless Project.

The former one-bedroom, wood-framed parsonage next to the church became DayBreak Community Center, providing showers, laundry, haircuts, medical and HIV testing services to hundreds of homeless weekly. The center is busy after the 6:30-7:30 a.m. Monday-Friday breakfast that attracts about 250 people daily to the church's sanctuary.

"Folks were hungry so we started a meal program," Rasmus said. "We discovered that people were dirty, so we started a hygiene component where we provide showers and laundry."

Drug-treatment programs, a jobs program and medical care - all developed to meet community needs.

About 75 members of Windsor Village church initially came with the Rasmuses as Caldwell shuttled between the churches for Sunday morning services. But after a few weeks, the Rasmuses became the church's leaders and co-preachers. The congregation grew by word of mouth. Many were homeless, drawn by the Rasmus ' growing ministry to the needy. Homeless or formerly homeless people make up an estimated 25 percent of the church's membership.

A new $600,000 DayBreak facility is under construction on Jackson Street directly behind St. John's. It is being built with the help of a $250,000 grant from Houston Endowment. The church will receive a $100,000 grant from Methodist Hospital to provide medical services at the new facility, which is expected to be completed this spring.

The new Center for Hope, financed primarily by the growing congregation, will house St. John's Academy, a preschool for poor children and children exposed to substance abuse or infected with HIV or AIDS.

The church must meet the needs of the poor, Rudy Rasmus said, because helping the needy was Jesus Christ's mission statement for the church.

Many congregants are attracted to St. John's because it offers hope, its pastors said. "One thing we have found as a common denominator among the congregants is an understanding of human suffering," Rudy Rasmus said.

Congregants at St. John's understand what it is to be poor, to have broken relationships, to lose a loved one to death, he said. "Just because we have suffered or still suffer doesn't mean we have to build a camp or tent around the suffering," he said. "We encourage people to move out."

That's what it means for Kay Fry, a Star of Hope resident who is in a drug treatment program.

"I am a Methodist, but this is unlike any Methodist church I have been to in my whole life," said Fry, 35, who has been attending Sunday services for a month. "This one is real spiritual.

"Coming to this church helps me kick off my week," said Fry, who is trying to kick a 22-year drug habit.

The congregation has grown by 500 members annually, a feat in a denomination that has shrunk from 11.1 million members to 8.5 million members in the last 30 years. Methodism continues to lose more than 40,000 members yearly, according to church statistics.

The Rasmuses take turns preaching on Sundays and also rely on a team of lay preachers to assist them during the 8 and 10 a.m. and noon services. While the couple is not ordained, they are licensed as pastors and are inching their way through ministerial classes.

"One of the things that makes a difference is the unconditional love that people can experience here," Juanita Rasmus said. Hugging, a practice that Rudy and Juanita encourage, helps people find the warmth and acceptance that is often missing in today's society, she said.

Informal attire reduces class distinctions, said Rudy Rasmus . He rarely wears suits, a practice that has attracted large numbers of African-American males who feel out of place in more traditional churches where suits are the custom, he said.

Hope for a new spiritual life to counteract personal pain and suffering that draws many congregants.

"The hurting ultimately find out that this is a place where they can be at home and feel at home," he said. "We don't see any end to folks coming this way."

St. John's Downtown    2019 Crawford    Houston, TX 77002    (713) 659-3237    (713) 659 2236 Fax