Arloa Sutter has been called to minister to street peoples, and she knows it. The founder and executive director of Breakthrough Urban Ministries, she's an Iowa farm girl who has ended up ministering in urban Chicago. That, in itself, is evidence that some other hand is at work in guiding her life. “I love 1 Corithians 1,” she says. “It says God chooses the weak, the foolish, the lowly, and the despised, and that makes me a prime candidate for God to use. So many times I’ve been tempted to quit, but it’s a calling. I know I’m supposed to be here.”

The evidence is clear. God is using Sutter to help transform the lives of countless members of the homeless population in East Garfield Park, a high-unemployment, high-crime neighborhood in the Windy City. It is in this community that Sutter oversees two homeless shelters, a day center with counseling and medical care, an outreach ministry to women in prostitution, a job placement program, and a youth and family program.

The ministry started in 1992. That was the year the state of Illinois cancelled its general assistance program, leading to significant increase in the homeless population, particularly outside the First Evangelical Free Church Sutter attended in the Edgewater community. Hungry people were turning up at the doors of the church, and she wanted to do something about it. “The church had a room that wasn’t being used, and my kids were in school all day,” she says, “so I asked if I could put on a pot of coffee, welcome them, and perhaps serve some sandwiches.”

She began building relationships and talking with those in need. Rather than just handing out cash, Sutter applied her compassion and competence to the issues they faced. Quickly, she saw that these needs went further than food and shelter. They included counseling, recovery services, employment training, and much more. “It doesn’t enhance people’s dignity to give them handouts,” she says. “It’s far better to empower homeless people by engaging them in productive activity rather than letting them remain passive recipients of service.” So she took action, found donors, gained non-profit status, and went to work.

One innovative way Breakthrough goes beyond the giving of handouts is through its successful Cleanstreet Program, in which ministry participants provide street-cleaning and window-washing services for businesses in the surrounding community. The program allows homeless individuals to reconnect with the work force, gain work experience, and earn a paycheck while providing community service, and has grown to include 23 service contracts throughout urban Chicago.

“What we’ve found is that the biggest need is for hope,” Sutter says of those Breakthrough serves. “There is a kind of poverty of purpose, and they’ve lost any incentive to try anymore and have just given up and gotten caught in the cycle of hopelessness and despair. So we’re able to share Christ with them and see lives really transformed by the power of God.”

Sometimes the transformation that occurs in these lives is quite visible. Sutter recalls sitting in church one Sunday worshiping in a row of people from her ministry. “I was moved to tears,” she says, “because I knew the stories of the people in that row. There was an alcoholic who had come to faith in Christ and had entered into his sobriety. There was a woman who had prostituted herself for crack cocaine for years, who had been set free. And there was a man who had recently been released from prison and had found Christ and been reconciled with his family. I am just in awe to worship in that kind of setting with people whose lives have been changed.”

And yet, she’ll be the first to tell you that, in many ways, her life is the one that has been changed for the better. She frequently tells the story of a certain homeless man who entered the church back when Breakthrough was just getting started. Over a cup of coffee, he told her his feet hurt. “I asked him if I could take a look,” she says. “I remember taking off his old shoes full of holes, and these brown, worn socks, and finding his feet crusty, cracked, and bleeding.” She brought him a tub of warm water, soaked his feet until they finished the coffee, and then rubbed them with lotion.

“I remember, at that moment, having an epiphany experience and thinking, Oh, my goodness, this is what Jesus was doing for His disciples. This is what He calls us to do,” she says. “When we do these kinds of acts of love as unto Jesus, we experience a special intimacy with Him that can’t be matched.” That intimacy inspired her to take on a leadership role that dramatically transformed her life.

Sutter believes her calling is, in some way, a universal one. “While we aren’t all called to live in East Garfield Park,” she says, “we’re all called to reach out in love to our neighbors. You can’t be a Christ-follower and not care about people without coats.”

Arloa Sutter is proof of the power of responding to that calling with obedience.

**Sources for this article include Christianity.com and Moody Radio.