Taking it to the street
Medical ministry brings healing and hope to the homeless of Pittsburgh.
by Sue Washburn
James Withers, center, provides medical care to a homeless man in Pittsburgh.
James Withers felt a calling to do something different with his medical skills. As an inner-city doctor, he longed to find a way to give direct medical attention to those who are often excluded from traditional care. So he created Operation Safety Net, a medical ministry that reaches people living on the street in Pittsburgh in ways that honor and respect them as people of God.
Withers prepared for the endeavor in a place that felt most natural, the library of Second United Presbyterian Church of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He checked out the book 52 Ways to Help Homeless People and learned that ministry to men and women on the street doesn’t just help those being ministered to; it also transforms those doing the ministry.
After he finished the book, Withers’s own transformation began. Instead of putting on a white jacket over a shirt and tie, he adopted a different style. For several days he stopped shaving. He rubbed dirt into his hair and allowed some of his clothes to go unwashed so that he would fit in with the people on the streets.
“It’s not like going to a doctor’s party, that’s for sure,” he says, chuckling.
He also asked Mike Sallows, a former homeless man, to teach him etiquette for the street and to introduce him to the communities of people living under Pittsburgh’s many bridges.
With Sallows, students, and other volunteers, Withers now provides not only medical care to the men and women living on the streets but hope and dignity as well.
Withers has always embraced medicine as his God-given vocation. As a medical student in the 1980s, he knew he wanted to do his residency at a hospital that had a faith-based mission in addition to good medical practices. He found that combination at the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System, an organization founded by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy.
“Healthcare is about wholeness and healing. It’s a ministry,” Withers says. “It’s a way of connecting to other people in the way that Jesus did. It’s like the old concept of a house call: you go to others and respect their reality rather than expecting them to fit in your box.”
Operation Safety Net at Pittsburgh Mercy is recognized as one of the nation’s first full-time, street-based medical programs. Each year, Withers and the other staff train medical students in caring for people who live on the street. Withers hopes to continue expanding this homeless ministry through the Street Medicine Institute, an organization that provides education and other information to healthcare providers around the world. He says it’s a ministry that puts love first and transcends geographic, ethnic, and even religious boundaries in ways that Christ did.
“I remember conducting a conference in Nigeria, and a small group of Muslims was really moved by the photos of the work that we do. Our presentation inspired them to start a program caring for the people on their own streets,” he says.
Withers’s work in Pittsburgh and around the world has allowed him to see the people around him as a giant tapestry of shared joys and heartaches.
“It’s a community of love that is too vast and too deep to put into words. It’s an amazing view,” he says. “My hope is that I am a representative of Christ’s love to the world.”
Sue Washburn is a freelance writer and pastor of Reunion Presbyterian Church in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
