8 OctOber 12 - 18, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents homeless during the week. “This church has value because it’s down in the trenches,” he said. Birdd said he used to serve people in vari- ous parking lots downtown. He guesses he and his flock had gotten kicked out of about 15 over the years. Eventually, the traveling church found a home across the street from The Bridge. The spot essentially fell into their laps at the perfect time. Birdd said under Mayor Laura Miller the police started citing people for feeding the homeless. “I thought ‘Man, I guess I’m just going to go to jail because I’m not feeling led to stop. Inside, I know this is what I was cre- ated for,’” Birdd said. Around the same time police were get- ting ready to start citing people for feeding the homeless, the owner of a nearby busi- ness called Millet the Printer came to Birdd. He said he had cameras in the area and that he had been watching them. He told Birdd that he noticed the group would clean up the area whenever they were done. So, he offered the keys to his parking lot to Birdd. It was right across the street from The Bridge. The business owner said “You can use it as long as I like you,” Birdd recalled. This gave the group a private property from which to serve the homeless so they wouldn’t be cited. They gathered on the property every Sunday for about 12 years. Along the way, Birdd met his wife Jenni- fer. When Leon met Jennifer, the two were working at Home Depot. Leon, who was married, was also attending a Bible college at night then and was later ordained. Even- tually, Jennifer left Home Depot to work for herself in landscaping. But one day she re- turned to that Home Depot and Leon gave her a quote on a fence. The two got to talking and Jennifer noticed Leon wasn’t wearing a wedding ring any more. The two started dat- ing after that and later got married on the streets of downtown, surrounded by people the church serves. They’ve been together for 17 years. Jennifer jokes that she married into S.O.U.L. Church. “I’ve always loved people,” she said. “I’m a troubleshooter. I’m a nur- turer, too, so when I see there’s a situation, I’m always trying to come up with answers.” Jennifer said she wears a lot of hats within the church and it can be hard to be faced with all the struggles of the people they serve. “I’ve found that there are a lot of hardships,” she said. “Then, you have people who, it hasn’t been a lifelong struggle — it’s something that just happened.” And free food and faith can only do so much. “The struggle for me is that there’s a lot of things I can’t do anything about. The struggle with the people we love on is that there’s a lot of things they can’t do anything about, and they get to a place where they give up and they stop trying to do anything about anything. So, their situation stays the same.” She said on the flip side, there are things they can do to help people find their way. “We just have to reopen the eyes of the people who forgot that they could and hope- fully cause an awakening and put some fire under their feet,” she said. “That’s the chal- lenge.” She said sometimes the work can feel like trying to put out a wildfire. The church often faces people dealing with homelessness, poverty, abuse and men- tal illness. “There is beauty to it because we love them,” she said. She recalled one Sunday morning when she was feeling down, but seeing everyone else so happy to be at the service uplifted her. “The challenge is not to see only the challenges, but to see the beauty. That’s the biggest challenge,” she said. It hasn’t been smooth sailing getting to where S.O.U.L. Church is today. Most of the church’s money comes from personal dona- tions. Leon said sometimes funding gets a little low and it worries everybody. But he, Jennifer, the church volunteers and attend- ees just try their best to roll with the punches. Jennifer said her husband seems to see ev- erything through rose-colored glasses, while she calls herself a realist. If he weren’t that way, she believes, he’d likely quit what he’s doing. She sometimes prays to be able to see things the way he does. It can be easy to start feeling like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, but she said there always is one. “I just deal with one situation at a time,” she said. “We’re touched by so many people. I’m talking thousands a month that we come in contact with, and then there’s not a clock- out button at the end of the day,” she said. It can also feel like a war zone sometimes. “We go out there, we have no idea what we’re fighting against today,” she said. “We don’t know if somebody’s going to have a meltdown. We don’t know if someone’s go- ing to overdose. We don’t know if someone’s going to miscarry or if they’re thinking of murdering somebody. Those are things we really do face.” But with all the struggle, there are also many good times and happy stories of peo- ple who come through the church and man- age to turn their lives around. These are the stories that encourage Jennifer and often make her cry tears of joy. She said they won’t know how many people the church has touched until they get to heaven. When she considers quitting, she just thinks about all the people who would end up hurting. She said what keeps her going is that she knows this is what she was meant to do. “I’m called to love the broken, to love hu- manity, to help in crisis” she said. “I’m wired this way.” Leon said he’s getting older and he often thinks about the future and how S.O.U.L. Church will continue beyond him. He guesses he’ll be doing this for another ten years before he’ll need to pass the torch. The church recently created a board to help carry on the work. “So many ministries come and when the leader passes, it’s done,” he said. “It shouldn’t be like that. It should be a work that keeps going. Someone laid the ground- work. Someone needs to come along and take it up farther than that. But they have to have the right heart.” ▼ POLITICS RESUME FILLER IS NEWLY REPUBLICAN MAYOR ERIC JOHNSON GUNNING FOR HIGHER OFFICE? BY SIMONE CARTER F or months, many Dallas residents found themselves wondering whether Mayor Eric Johnson had crossed over into GOP territory. The signs, such as the mayor appearing on Fox News and hobnobbing with high-ranking conser- vatives, were pretty much everywhere. Johnson’s apparent affinity for the Re- publican Party prompted us to ask his office over the summer whether he had broken up with the Dems. They shoo-flied us away, casting observations of a focused political shift as “inaccurate.” Turns out that the mayor either under- went a serious change of heart by Sept. 22, the date of the Wall Street Journal op-ed an- nouncing his transition to the Republican Party, or he didn’t want to reveal his conser- vative bent quite yet. Whatever the case, we feel a teensy bit gaslit, which is a polite way of saying “lied to.” But we’re used to that from pols. Now some political observers are insist- ing that the mayor’s very public party switch signifies he has designs on higher office. The Observer reached out to ask for comment about whether that’s the case but didn’t hear back. Although we may have been ignored, Johnson did recently tell conservative radio host Mark Davis that he has no such goals. During a recent interview, the mayor shot down speculation that he’s aiming to climb the political ladder. “I’m not running for anything else,” he told Davis at the time. “I want to do this job, and I want to do it the way I’ve been doing it for the past four-plus years. So, I hope peo- ple take me at face value there because I mean it. I’m on a mission to make my home- town the best city that I can make it, and I’m going to do that as a Republican.” Uh-huh. Forgive us for being somewhat skeptical of this full-throated assertion. The mayor has also developed a little habit of puffing up his latest ballot count. Johnson has repeatedly bragged about receiving 98.7% of the vote in his May re- election bid, when in fact he earned around 93%, D Magazine reported in June. News of Johnson’s post-election party shift is making many of the state’s liberals see red. Now, the Dallas County Democratic Party is demanding that he resign. “This switch is the launch of a selfish and cynical strategy to get his next job at the ex- pense of his current job, the one Dallas vot- ers elected him to do,” the party Nathan Hunsinger Pastor Birdd recently created a board for keeping S.O.U.L. running when he retires. Unfair Park from p6 >> p10
