Christian Ministry

MINISTRY Every week night between 11pm and 4am, Betty Baker comes down Broadway into Times Square driving her mobile canteen, handing out hot chocolate and granola bars to the girls she calls her “kids.” Her “kids” are teenage prostitutes working the dangerous New York City streets. They call her “Ma.” Betty Baker came from Scotland in 1946 to a home in the coal fields of Kentucky.

That experience softened her and hardened her: “Sweet as honey, tough as nails.” Three years ago, Betty Baker, a major in the Salvation Army, chose to become a mis- sionary in the asphalt jungle of Manhattan. Over the years, “Ma” Baker has become a link, however fragile, between her “kids” and a promised land which has failed to line up to its promises.

“Ma’s” presence often is their only reminder that they are worth something to somebody, that somebody really cares. Ma Baker never preaches to her “kids”. And when a famil- iar face is no longer at the curbside she usually doesn’t know whether the girl went up, down, or out.

But, over the years, many of the girls, one at a time, have left Times Square after announcing, “Ma, I’m going home.” And so tonight, and any night, Major Betty Baker will load her mobile canteen in the Bowery. She’ll head through the jungle of crack-cookers and dope dealers and hoods for hire. She’ll move through the avenues of the most depraved and the most menacing until she gets to the most miserable of them all: her kids.

The seedy girls in long stockings and short skirts, high heels and deep, shad- owed eyes who have made a thousand compromises with their consciences. And there, with a cheery Scotch-Irish grin, Ma Baker will stand on the staircase between heaven and hell—serving. —Harvey, P., Los Angeles Times, 1988 (Adapted). When the scribes of the Pharisee party saw him eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to His disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

When Jesus heard this He said to them, “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.” (Mk.

2:16-17).