Must Reads

Last week a team of us - four middle-aged, mid-western and Southern white women who talk way too much about menopause - gathered to serve in some dark corners of East LA.

We walked slowly, deliberately through trash and needle-strewn streets, delivered food in LA’s largest housing project, and talked to people living in the sidewalk complexes built from pallets, bike parts, cardboard and tents. With us were the blue shirts - the staff and volunteers of the Los Angeles Dream Center, which for the last 30 years has been feeding, clothing and helping into recovery the residents...

Eleven years ago today, I got baptized at the Angelus Temple, after spending a pretty intense week serving the urban poor at the Los Angeles Dream Center. 

Tomorrow morning, I’m headed back, and this time I’m taking a few clients with me.

The Backstory

This is Matthew Barnett in the picture baptizing me. He was 22 years old in 1996 when he purchased a decrepit 400,000 square-foot former hospital in the heart of Los Angeles intending to build a church without walls - one that would act like Jesus did.

I was so lost at that time, just desperate to...