6 OctOber 12 - 18, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents husband had molested their daughter, she said. Then, her nine-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. Seven years later, her son died of a heroin overdose. “So, I ran for 30 years from God,” she said. In her anger, she turned to drugs. She became a drug dealer and a pimp, but she was miserable, and she eventually hatched a plan to kill herself. She was done, not with drugs necessarily, but with life. “I was void of feelings,” she said. She packed up everything to put in stor- age, wrote letters to her two living daugh- ters and went to a motel to kill herself. Her mother had committed suicide and McKer- nan hated her for it, but she was ready to do the same thing. Instead of a motel room, she found herself in a jail cell that night after be- ing arrested for possession of a lot of drugs. She went down for seven felonies and three misdemeanors the night she had planned to end her life. Today, she feels like the whole situation was supernatural in a way. She had a hiding spot built in her car where she would usu- ally keep her drugs. “Every time I got in, I put my drugs there and locked it up,” she said. That night though, she had drugs in her purse and in the passenger seat of her car, which was highly unusual for her. Ready to die, she had crack, heroin and meth in her car, but she was stopped by po- lice because of a broken headlight. McKer- nan was arrested for possession and manufacturing and delivering controlled substances. “God really wanted me in jail. He did not want me behind that [motel] door because I was taking things into my own hands and that wasn’t what he wanted,” she said. She got clean in jail and while there, she was warned not to go to The Bridge upon her release. McKernan was told that be- cause she was white, she would get picked on at the shelter, she explained. She went to The Bridge anyway and said she was treated fine. She now calls the place the “Cadillac of shelters.” It was there that she eventually heard the music. She doesn’t know why, but she kept going back to the church and eventually Jennifer Birdd came to talk to her. “You need to hang out with us,” Jennifer told her. “I just re- member thinking ‘Why would I want to hang out with you?’” But she obliged. She needed to complete 800 hours of community service as part of her sentencing. She ended up doing all 800 hours with the church. Through that time, she had an epiphany. “I’m looking at him like he’s a God of an- ger and is just mean. I believed he’d put a target on my kids’ back and that he was pick- ing off my kids because of my lifestyle,” she said. “But that’s not what it is. I know that now. I didn’t then.” One day, just a couple of months after she had found the church, she was looking around at all the people who had gathered that Sunday and she started to cry. After leaving her husband, she swore she would never go to church again, but she looked around and realized that’s exactly where she was. It didn’t look the same, but she was cer- tainly in church. “All of a sudden I realized that God knew my situation,” she said. “He knew what I was capable of listening to and what I was capable of not listening to.” She said she probably wouldn’t have listened if she had been in a traditional church. And she would have never heard the music had she listened to those who urged her to stay away from The Bridge. “Out here, I turned around and I looked and all of these people were just like me, just as broken as me or more,” she said. It was at that moment that she realized S.O.U.L. Church was exactly what she needed in her life. After completing her community ser- vice hours with the church, she was offered a job with S.O.U.L. “The last thing I thought was that I would be the church lady,” she said. “That was 10 years ago and I’m still here.” She’s now out at the church every Sun- day. She does the cooking and keeps the books for S.O.U.L. It’s not the same food every Sunday. She has cooked prime rib and salmon for church attendees. Another time, she cooked a sea- food boil with lobster. “I love that. I love be- ing able to give them flavors and stuff that they’re not able to get anywhere else,” she said. “I find that exciting.” As it did for McKernan, the church has touched many people over the years since it started in the ’90s. But the vision for S.O.U.L. Church didn’t come together overnight. I t started one day in 1994 when Birdd no- ticed a man walking along the side of the road. The man walked oddly, appearing to take two steps forward and one step back with every stride, Birdd said. Something spoke to him that day. He didn’t know it at the time, but these days he says that something was God. It came in a voice that told him to pick the man up. Birdd didn’t really want to, but he listened to the voice. When Birdd first approached him, the man said, “Leave me alone, I’m not drunk,” Birdd recalled. He said the man talked kind of funny and he almost couldn’t understand what he was saying. “I don’t care if you’re drunk,” Birdd replied. “Do you want a ride?” The man, Robert Shuemake, said he did want a ride and got into Birdd’s truck. He said he was walking to a Walmart, a long way from his home. Shuemake told Birdd he had been an electrician and that he fed the homeless. Birdd responded, “You’re going to have to forgive me. Look, it’s obvious you have something wrong with you. You don’t walk right. You don’t talk right. How do you feed the homeless?” Shuemake said he did so with the help of others. “Who?” Birdd asked. “God brings people,” Shuemake replied. Shuemake then told Birdd to pick him up early one morning to help feed the homeless. Shuemake took his hat off and showed Birdd the scars on his head left by five brain surgeries. The ordeal had taken away some of Shuemake’s mobility and affected his speech, Birdd said. Shuemake insisted that Birdd come and pick him up that Saturday at 5 a.m. to feed the homeless. “I ain’t gonna do that,” Birdd thought. “I dropped him off and that was it.” Later that week, the same voice that told Birdd to pick the man up returned. “That guy is out there waiting for you,” it said. So, he drove to Shuemake’s house. “Please don’t be there, please don’t be there, please don’t be there,” Birdd thought to himself. Sure enough, the man was there, with two five- gallon containers of coffee. They drove to a Dunkin’ Donuts and the shop gave them a little basket of day-old donuts. They headed to downtown Dallas, and before too long, homeless people started showing up one by one to get a free breakfast. This went on for a while, Birdd said. It started as a small operation in 1994, but it eventually grew and evolved into what it is today. The church now has several vehicles, meets every Sunday and distributes food to some 13 counties through something it calls the S.O.U.L. Shared Food Ministry. These days, the church has its regulars, like Daniel Getz, 54. He’s been showing up for years. Now in housing, Getz was home- less for five years. “What happened to me was I had a divorce and my whole world just basically fell apart,” Getz said. He was also diagnosed with bipolar depression. When he was homeless, he would turn out to The Bridge for meals. That’s around the time he heard the music at S.O.U.L. Church. “I heard this music and I was like ‘What is that?’” he said. “It was something different. There was something different to it and it drew me.” He’s been turning out to the church ever since. Then, there’s James Sheufelt, 70, who claims he performs miracles at the church, such as curing people’s medical ailments. “We have people who had cancer of the chest and it just disappeared instantly with Christ Jesus,” he said. “He is the healer, the only healer. It’s his spirit that gets into peo- ple and heals. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t get up and I don’t come down here, some- body may die because I didn’t show up.” We’re not so sure about that, but he and some others at the church believe it. Another man, Matt Sloan, was also stay- ing at The Bridge when he first heard the music. He was using meth at the time. “I heard the music, went across the street, saw the church and prayed out loud to my- self and said ‘Jesus, if I ever get out of this jam I’m in, I will come to this church,’” he recalled. “That’s what I’ve done and I’m four and a half years sober.” Now, he has a bus that he uses to pick people up and take them to S.O.U.L. He also feeds the Nathan Hunsinger S.O.U.L. feeds visitors for free on Sundays. Unfair Park from p4 >> p8
