From its founding, its patron saint St. Martin of Tours, the 4th century Roman soldier who cut in half his cloak to share with a beggar, has inspired the ministry of Crossroads. Just as St. Martin recognized in a dream that it was Jesus wrapped in the remnant cloak, McLaren and the volunteers who followed sought to see the face of Jesus in whoever knocked at the door.
When Crossroads added a soup kitchen in 1975, it left the cathedral for an old house around the corner. Eight years later, it moved again, into a brick church building that the cathedral acquired after the Lutherans and then the Baptists moved out.
Crossroads added an eastside Detroit office that includes a job training office, housed in the storefront of now-closed St. Columba’s Episcopal Church.
As the ministry of Crossroads was moved from one site to another in the cathedral neighborhood, the particular structure wasn’t of great concern. With its counseling cubicles awkwardly carved throughout a once-lofty sanctuary, the building was never a good fit. Plus, it was always too cold in the winter and beastly hot in the summer. But again in the spirit of St. Martin, Crossroads remained less committed to the cloak it wore than the cross it bore.
“Through it all,” McLaren said at the time of his 1993 (sort of) retirement as director, “we have tried to minister in the same way. We try to get behind the symptoms that bring people to our doorstep and try to find out who’s really there.”
Last year, the staff and over 100 volunteers conducted 11,000 individual appointments and distributed $45,000 in prescription medicines, $40,000 in local bus fares, $30,000 in essential state identifications, and $12,000 in emergency assistance.
In December, after the success of a $2 million capital campaign, Crossroads moved into a completely renovated building on West Grand Blvd., west of Henry Ford Hospital. For the first time, Crossroads will have a building dedicated specifically to what is needed for its ministry of personal counseling, crisis intervention and job training.
The new building will triple the seating capacity for Crossroads’ Sunday Soup Kitchen, which averages 800 guests per week. While numerous faith groups participate in the rotation, 17 Episcopal churches prepare and serve the meal on 21 Sundays of the year. The new building also has a small chapel that both volunteers and clients will use.
McLaren died two years ago this month, but the ministry that he envisioned continues. As the present executive director—his daughter, Mary McLaren Honsel—explained on moving day, “it’s not the building that’s important. It is caring about and loving each client who comes to the door and seeing the face of Jesus in each one.”
For nearly 40 years, Crossroads has stood in the Diocese of Michigan as a unique ministry, drawing the haves into contact with the have-nots in an exchange that petitions the transformation of both.
Yet even in its new building, the question that launched the ministry a generation ago still hangs in the air—a mission imperative for the next generation: Will someone in there care?
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Detroit, MI