By Thea Jarvis

"We see ourselves as a Presbyterian Catholic Worker house," said Ed Loring of his Open Door community.

The former pastor of Clifton Presbyterian Church in Atlanta traced his journey from church historian to metro pastor to jeans-clad, work-shirted street minister with good natured candor and insight.

In the past, Loring found himself greatly attracted to the person of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, which included houses of hospitality welcoming those whom society was all too ready to reject.

Preparation for his own involvement in a like enterprise came through a thorough perusal of Day's writings, as well as intensified prayer and scripture study within a small group at Clifton.

Ed Loring's wife, Murphy Davis, herself an ordained minister, and Clifton members Rob and Carolyn Johnson, began to discern a call "to serve the poor and live our lives based on the scriptures."

A night hospitality ministry at Clifton Presbyterian and the Southern Prison ministry were outlets that led both couples to a fuller commitment to alleviating the suffering they encountered among the needy and homeless.

"We … discovered our vocation," Ed Loring said, attributing this enlightenment to the action of the Spirit and the "mystery of God's grace."

"Once you take that first step, everything is easier," he continued, admitting he was "scared to death" when he opened the doors of Clifton's Night Hospitality to Atlanta's homeless in 1979. Moving to Open Door's Ponce de Leon headquarters in 1981 was effortless by comparison.

The Lorings and the Johnsons form the leadership core of the Open Door Community. They consider themselves "an intentional Christian community, covenanting to share our lives together with ministry as the central focus."

Together they live out a theology of sanctuary, attempting to create "free space" for those who come to them in genuine need. Their fidelity to Catholic Worker theology is nowhere more evident than in this concept of sanctuary, giving the homeless and hopeless a place to be themselves.

"We try to create … space with the fewest demands," Ed Loring explained, allowing for "interpersonal relationships that grow and flower. Out of personal relationships comes advocacy. Out of need comes action."

Such commitments are not carried out in a vacuum. Open Door leaders are flesh and blood folks who feel pain and discouragement as well as joy and elation.

"I understand what it means to be dependent upon God for (our) daily existence," Loring admitted with a humility borne of experience.

His greatest struggle emerges when, as a "white, middle-class person," he can occasionally become "angry at (the) victims (of society) for their victimization." Loring's striving to purge himself of his own prejudices and strengthen his "dependence on God's mercy" would, however, seem to make him the right man for the job -- one who has seen the brokenness in himself and can embrace the brokenness of others.

Open Door flourishes in a family setting. The children of the house -- Neely, Susan, Hannah and Christina -- enter into the spirit of the setting as age and interest allow.

Ed Loring has noticed that the children respond to Open Door guests no differently than their parents and the adult volunteers who come to serve. "There is always pain, just as there is always joy and love," he observed. "They live in a place that's really real."

Most painful for the children is the separation that eventually occurs when guests -- who have become more or less permanent fixtures in their young lives -- take their leave.

"They come in crisis, where there is intense relationship-building," Loring said. "The pain of departure is still very immediate for children. I as an adult expect that when (our guests) come in here, they will leave."

While the faces that appear on the steps of Open Door change on a daily basis, the future of the ministry will, presumably, be formed by the hand of the Lord its leadership follows. But Ed Loring sees the possibility of "a different kind of advocacy" being added to the list of Open Door concerns.

"The most difficult (part of our work) is that we're still too small a community for the work we're doing. We're overburdened," said Loring, adding that such a statement is not a complaint but an acknowledgement of the limitations they had expected during their first year of operation.

"There are a lot of things about homelessness in Atlanta that I want to address," he said emphatically. "The job market is terrible. Twenty thousand people in this city."

Identifying the root causes of unemployment and homelessness, as well as finding solutions to economic and political problems, are avenues that Open Door hopes to follow on a long-term basis.

For now, the presence of Open Door in the Atlanta community bears testimony to the fact that answering simple human needs in a quiet, caring spirit can go a long way toward humanizing a society that sometimes seems bent of forgetting its priorities.