From Christianity Today comes this inspiring story of a deacon giving hope to the hopeless: men who have turned to prostitution to stay alive.

The deacon, John Green (seen on the left with his wife and children), founded Emmaus Ministries in Chicago. Its purpose: to help those who are traveling life’s dusty road to discover the risen Christ:

“When I first saw men in prostitution, I thought, Dude, why don’t you get a job?” admits John Green. He grew up Roman Catholic in a wealthy suburb of Akron, Ohio, on a 100-acre private lake. When he was 16, his parents gave him a 16-foot sailboat.

Later, two years with a homeless youth ministry in New York City revealed the cruelty of street life to John. He began asking how to act justly, show mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8). These questions led him back to Wheaton College and Graduate School, while he began reaching out to the most ostracized among Chicago’s homeless people—prostituting men.

In 1990, John launched Emmaus Ministries (www.streets.org), an evangelical Catholic-Protestant outreach that incarnates Christ’s love to hustlers. (In the Gospel of Luke, the road to Emmaus was one of the first places where the resurrected Jesus appeared to His disciples.)

Today, John, 42, directs the ministry in a three-story former crack house in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Behind the aging brick building, John and his wife, Carolyn, live in a condo with their three young boys. Where drugs once fed empty lives, the Emmaus team shows God’s love to the city’s forgotten people.

Surprisingly, prostituting men are usually not gay. “So many of our guys have huge starving hearts for a father,” John says. By the time a man begins prostituting, he is bearing immense pain. “Most guys have been sexually abused, the majority are high school or middle school drop outs, and most don’t know who their fathers are.”

“They’re looking for a place to call home, love, and acceptance in the world. But the streets twist those things,” John says. “Every voice speaking into their lives is negative and dark.”

Five nights a week teams from Emmaus scour gritty urban streets. Pairs of men and women offer hot coffee, cookies, and an invitation to the Emmaus drop-in center.

Lindsay Myers loiters in “Boys’ Town” on most nights until 3 A.M., hoping to develop friendships with hustlers, predominantly African-American, in Chicago. She and three other recent college graduates are volunteering full-time at Emmaus for one year in exchange for room, board, and $20 a week.

“I love this work because I feel like this is where Jesus would be,” the 23-year-old Florida native says. “There’s nothing we can do that’s ever gonna change these guys. It’s God’s work.”

Both volunteers and staff appreciate how the ministry’s joint Protestant and Catholic outreach unites them. “Emmaus is a great chance for humility,” says Ronnie LaGrow, who graduated from a private Catholic college. “Your eyes are opened to all these Christians serving. There’s such friendship and an underlying joy we share.”

John Green’s desire to heal divisions in the church developed from defending his faith as a minority Catholic among Wheaton College’s Protestant student population. He discovered that misconceptions abounded among both Catholics and Protestants.

When John married Carolyn, the daughter of an American Baptist pastor, the couple committed to building unity in the body of Christ by serving the poor. An ordained Catholic deacon, John believes, “If we work together with integrity, and we do it well, there’s real healing in the body.”

I can’t think of any ministry more diaconal in nature — more devoted to serving, helping, healing, and uplifting through acts of charity. Moreover — in the great spirit of that great deacon, Francis of Assisi — Deacon John Green is preaching The Word by living it.

Check out Emmaus Ministries at this link. And whisper a prayer of gratitude for people like John and Carolyn Green.

Photo: The Green Family, from Emmaus Ministries