These are the people who will often come to a church or a charitable agency to get food, clothing, medical care, legal services, whatever, but there is perthaps no group so hard for the church to reach in order to involve them in the active life of the congregation.  While many churches serve them, few include them in the participating membership of the community of faith.  They are seen as winos, or trash, or street people, or something else, but not as brothers and sisters.

     One of the reasons for this view is that they are often not the kind of persons that we relate to.  Their drinking and drugging, their hygiene, their life-styles, their protest of respectability and middle class norms, their disdain for established church life, their unwillingness to participate in church or any other group except on their terms, their resourceful use of the age-old hustle and con, their occasional violence, their vulgarity, their plain four-letter talk, their unrestrained use of obscene gestures and raucous humor, their often loud and unabashed approach to conflict, their quick condemnation of the church as hypocritical and self-serving: these are but a few of the problems as perceived by respectable mainstream church-going people.  The problem is that great truth can be found in these depictions, even though they do not characterize them all.  Sometimes, too, which can be worse, they get saved, or baptized in the Spirit, and they join some "insufferable" fundamentalist congregation from when they then emerge as the true believers of the one and only righteous church with an absolute morality and an assured but exclusive route to heaven.  No wonder such people are not only NOT sought out but avoided by churches.