by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Areas like Ethiopia and rural China usually come to mind when most people think about missionary work, but for missionary Mike Ogden, inner-city Jacksonville sounded like the best place to practice his faith.
Ogden runs the Hope Outreach Ministry for Every-1 (H.O.M.E.) mission in the heart of Springfield. While the mission is now run out of a 68,000-square-foot building at the corner of 12th and Liberty streets, Ogden used to practice the ministry out of his Springfield home.
“We didn’t have a building, so what choice did we have?” Ogden said. “We wanted to minister to people. They needed food. They needed clothing. They needed a hug and a place to cry. We didn’t have a building but God gave us a house and that is all we had at the time so until he showed us more we did it out of our house.”
When Ogden first moved to Jacksonville after finishing a seminary program in California, he knew that he wanted to be a missionary for people in the inner city, but he lived in the Arlington area with his wife Lynn and their two young daughters.
“We were living in Arlington and God just started burdening me with ‘If you want to reach these people you have got to live among these people,’” Ogden said. “The place He called me to was specifically was Springfield. But we didn’t feel like we would be effective building respect among these people by living across the bridge and driving in everyday.
“I think that there is really a limit to how much they come to really trust you when you don’t live where they live. You don’t understand where they live. You don’t understand the poverty and the drugs and the prostitution and the crime they live in. We now live in the same stuff that they do.”
Though Ogden and his wife were ready to move from Arlington to one of the most impoverished areas of Jacksonville, the couple did have some reservations about their two young daughters.
“I wasn’t worried about my wife and me,” he said. “We were sound and fine and could go anywhere in the world and be all right. I had a fear of what the inner city would do to the children.”
But Ogden and his family took a big leap of faith and, in January 2002, moved to the inner city where they would open up their home to Springfield’s most impoverished residents for more than a year and a half.
“Everybody here knows where I live,” he said. “People would come to our home and we would be able to minister to them right there in our doorway or invite them into our home.”
Ogden even saw his home turn into a small food bank and clothing depot as more people began hearing about his work and started dropping off donations at his doorstep.
“I would buy stuff with my own money and we would keep it piled up in our living room and hallway and kitchen,” he said, “then people started coming by the house to drop off donations of clothes and food. It grew so much in the house that I didn’t have room for everything. And then it got a little bit crazy because there were so many people coming by my house. It was like a path of people coming to the house.”
At that point, Ogden said he and some other like-minded people started looking for another place to practice and expand their missionary work and soon found the old school board administrative building in Springfield.
Since moving into the building, which is shared between H.O.M.E. and America’s Heart, a donation distribution center for Third World countries, Ogden’s mission has grown tremendously. H.O.M.E now offers about a dozen services like after-school homework assistance, literacy and computer training programs and career development courses.
Moving into the larger space has also allowed Ogden to help more people with food and clothing donations than before when the operation was run out of his home. He said he distributes bags of groceries to between 300 and 500 people per week now.
While the larger space has offered Ogden the chance to expand his services to the community, it has also raised the overhead on his missionary work. Though Ogden and the two other missionaries that run the mission raise their own funds just like international missionaries, H.O.M.E. is funded entirely though individual donations.
“I don’t worry about where it is going to come from. But, every day, I do wonder where it is going to come from,” he said. “I realize that if we don’t get the large donations every once in a while, we won’t be able to pay the electric bill.”
Luckily for H.O.M.E., large donations come in every now and then to keep the mission afloat. Ogden said they have received some as large as $10,000 and some as small as $50 but, because the missionaries raise their own funds, all of the mission’s donations go right back into the community.
They also don’t have to worry about paying rent every month. Two local businessmen, whom Ogden chose to keep anonymous, stepped in and bought the building for the mission and the America’s Heart organization. Ogden said the organization would have had to move or shut down if that act of generosity had not happened.
Though Ogden doesn’t have any consistent source of income for the mission, he said he never worries about it.
“If I was always worried about it I wouldn’t be able to effectively minister to people,” he said. “This is a totally faith based, trust God and wait-and-see type of ministry.”
And his ministry is helping hundreds of people everyday, he said. Between the hundreds of hungry people that receive groceries through H.O.M.E. or the individuals that stop by every so often to just sit and talk, Ogden said he has been successful at doing what he was called to do in the inner city.
“We are trying to create a home atmosphere away from these people’s homes. A place to come to that offers things that they may or may not have at their homes, one of those things being just having someone to talk to.”
For more information about the H.O.M.E. mission, call Ogden at 434-6714.