Engaging Culture: From the Met Opera to the Mission Bus
Only 1 mile separates where Rachel Hocking works from where she volunteers — and yet, the two populations she serves couldn’t be any more different.
For the past 20 years, Rachel has worked as the secretary for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. During the week, her office sits inside the most prominent opera house in the United States, flanked by the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet. On a daily basis, the finest musicians and most affluent New Yorkers occupy its halls.
But on the weekends, operating out of the Port Authority Bus Station, Rachel participates in a mobile ministry, The Relief Bus. Every week, she and her team reach out to the poor and forsaken of the city, providing access to resources such as food, shelter and medical care.
“It’s really the two extremes. We have people who are highly educated at the Met, love the arts, spent their lives going to ballets and symphonies. And then I come down to the bus, and a lot of the people … are very hesitant about talking about themselves and their past. A lot of them are very quiet and don’t really want to talk to you until they get to know you better. But some of them will slowly open up, and you’ll realize where they came from — the different states, what brought them to New York.”
From Small Town to Big City
More than 30 years ago, in the fall of 1986, Rachel moved to New York City with hopes of using her music degree in the nation’s cultural capital. She was moving from a small college town in Tennessee (population: 2,000) straight to the heart of Manhattan (population: 7 million).
“I was just excited to be on my own. I am one of five children, and my parents were not interested in any of us returning home to live with them,” she says with a slight chuckle. “I was excited and determined to make a life here and find my independence. Once living here, I found that I was equally captivated and inspired by the diversity and energy the city offered.”
The decade preceding Rachel’s arrival was one of the most intense periods of urban decay in New York City’s history. If you visited during this time, you might find a pamphlet in your hand warning:
- Stay off the streets after 6 p.m.
- Do not walk.
- If you must leave your hotel after 6 p.m., try not to go out alone.
By the mid 1980’s when Rachel made her move to New York, nearly 1 million people had left the city in the previous 10 years.
A Heart for Ministry
Despite New York’s reputation entering the ’80’s, Rachel’s heart for the city and its people only grew as she lived out her twenties, thirties and forties. Led by her faith, she attended weekly church services through the years but really turned a corner when, 11 years ago, she joined a Bible Study Fellowship class.
“I showed up, kind of looking for my two friends, Dale and Virginia, but everyone was so welcoming — the greeters and the admin staff. My leader, I thought she was just such a woman of God, so welcoming — a calm spirit about her. The very first thing I thought of the group was ‘diversity.’
I really liked the fact that everyone was from different denominations, different churches — some of them lived in the borough, some of them lived out in New Jersey … and just that they were all different. Their Bibles looked different, their translations, and I just liked that — that we were sort of getting together even though I didn’t know any of them because they went to different churches, but we had something in common.”
Until her time in BSF, Rachel had not been involved in much ministry outside of church. But by her second year in the study — at the encouragement of a friend — she began volunteering at the Bowery, a long-standing local mission for the homeless. Nervous at first, Rachel found that her new knowledge of the Word gave her confidence in her volunteer efforts. She soon found herself immersed in the ministry and since then has consistently volunteered and served the needy for more than 10 years.
Nowadays, she leads a team of volunteers in a mobile, homeless ministry called “The Relief Bus.”
Learning to Listen
Every Saturday, Rachel unloads plastic chairs from the back of a white school bus. One by one, she unfolds them and places them in an orderly line along a sidewalk. The chairs are soon filled with people who have gathered to receive soup, bread, toiletries and clean socks — while also meeting with Rachel and her team for conversation and encouragement.
Rachel greets one man with a hug, calls him by name and asks him thoughtful questions about his week. She checks in with teammates about another man who hasn’t been to the bus in weeks, sharing her concern for his well-being. The volunteers offer prayer to some and soup to others.
Most weeks seem routine: the bus arrives, the volunteers set up, and the people are served. But through a consistency of effort, week after week, month after month, relationships slowly form. And it is within these long-term relationships — with the poor and forgotten of the city — that change begins in both those serving and those being served.
“I often find when you’re working with people, it takes them a long time to open up. They’ve had people who have promised them things and have disappeared. And by showing up consistently, it takes a while, but finally someone will tell you their name. They’ll finally start telling you their story.
They aren’t going to do that the first few times because they’re assuming that you’re going to show up and bring a big bunch of cupcakes, and they’re never going to see you again.
I just have to keep going. And for some of them, it’s going to take years before they can pull their lives together. And you want to be there during that journey.”
“And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”
Isaiah 58:10
Learn more about The Relief Bus at newyorkcityrelief.org.
Learn more about Bible Study Fellowship at bsfinternational.org.
