VANCOUVER, BC—A major part of Gordon Wiebe’s pastoral duties at Christian Life Assembly, a 3,500-member Pentecostal church in suburban Langley, was to partner with several community-based ministries in B.C. and overseas.

That ended two years ago, when Wiebe realized if he was serious about sharing the love of God, he had to live out the gospel—not just speak it. So he quit his job, sold his house and moved with his wife into a rooming house in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, the most poverty-stricken neighbourhood in Canada.

“I worked for the institutional Church for 25 years,” he says. “All of our committees, good as they were, would not have gotten me to the Downtown Eastside.”

Wiebe went with no agenda. But that soon changed when he crossed paths with Christian property developer Hart Molthagen, who in 2000 had purchased a dilapidated rooming house and turned it into clean, safe and supportive housing for the homeless.

(Vancouver’s homeless population has doubled in just the past three years, says Sam Sullivan, the city’s newly-elected mayor.)

In 2004, Molthagen and fellow “benevolent investor” David Ash, also from Langley, bought the New Dodson Hotel on Hastings, which the Wiebes now call home.

“The day we bought it, things changed,” Ash told Business in Vancouver. “We cut off the prostitutes doing tricks in the rooms. We stopped the open sale of drugs. We took the gambling machines out of the pub, even though it was a great source of revenue. And we started free breakfasts for our tenants to create a sense of community.”

“We are providing 24-hour security and support and an environment where incarnational people can join an indigenous team,” Wiebe adds. “We work together to find pathways to wellness pathways from the bottom up.”

That includes very slowly nurturing what he calls a “redemptive community...of people that are meeting and talking about spiritual things and sharing redemptive acts that they’re doing with one another.”

It seems to be working, according to a survey of 140 former tenants for the federal government’s national homelessness initiative.

“We found nobody was homeless after a minimum of six weeks’ in the rooming house,” Wiebe says. “Drug addictions, mental health issues and sex-trade linkages were reduced by about 50 per cent.”

Among the “incarnational people” who come to the Downtown Eastside to help with the renovations are members of Christian Life Assembly.

Some return more than once and a few even moved to the area, says Patrick Bjurling, a pastor in the church’s mission department. “You realize that, yeah, you have to be careful and streetwise, but during the day, it seems to be a safe place.”

“Everyone wants to help feed people, but food is a non-issue in the Downtown Eastside,” says Ash. “The biggest need is getting some healthy people in there, people who care, who can demonstrate compassion and love.”

Yet Bjurling doubts most church members fully grasp what Wiebe is trying to accomplish.

“They know of Gordon’s ministry and they support him, but I don’t think they understand the magnitude,” he says. “And with [Christian Life Assembly] being a large church, where there are so many things going on, there are a lot of things that don’t get communicated effectively.”

For his part, Wiebe believes the Downtown Eastside can teach affluent Christians about their need to rediscover “the original dependence on the Spirit for our whole life.

“We actually need in our society a complete change of context…a very basic look at ourselves before God and what we all have created,” he says.

“I’ve learned that being small is where it’s at, and that the greatest I could achieve in an institutional world was like being the most righteous in Sodom.”