SEAFORD, Del. (BP) — Grace Baptist Church Senior Pastor Larry Davis doesn’t believe you can be like Jesus unless you help the poor among us. “Even though He said we’d always have them, He didn’t say not to help them,” Davis said.
For the past four years, Grace Baptist Church in Seaford has housed homeless women during the winter in cooperation with Love INC.’s (In the Name of Christ) Code Purple outreach, sharing hospitality, the gospel and agape love as the women accept invitations to Bible study, worship and fellowship.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Davis will baptize four women housed at Grace Baptist, where between five and 15 women seek shelter on any given night, he said. Statewide, homelessness in Delaware has increased 58% since 2020, according to the annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, numbering 1,358 one January night in 2024 in the state with a population of 1.1 million people.
Davis has linked Grace Baptist with Robert Craig Films and the upcoming theatrical release of “No Address,” a feature film aimed at spurring outreaches to house the homeless who numbered 771,480 nationwide in 2024 PIT counts, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in December 2024.
No Address will give half of its net profits — from the film, a companion documentary “Americans With No Address” already streaming on several platforms, the novel “No Address” including an audiobook, a study guide and a soundtrack — to churches and other nonprofits involved in helping the homeless who register on the film’s website and pass vetting, Robert Craig Films CEO Jennifer Stolo told Baptist Press.
“For us, it’s important that we give back 50% of the net profits back to these organizations that we’ve partnered with across the county,” she said, “because they’re doing the real work and we just want to honor them.
“Our plea is just tell as many people as possible to go to the movie. The more people that go to the movie, the more that we can give back.”
Once the churches receive the funding, she said, “we just know that we’ve identified more than 1,200 nonprofits — churches and organizations — that are doing amazing work. And so whatever we’re able to give back to them, we just know that they will do good work with their homeless ministries.”
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“This isn’t just a movie,” Stolo said. “This is a movement.”
Grammy Award-winning singer and actress Ashanti joins the cast that includes Emmy Award winner Ty Pennington, Beverly D’Angelo, Lucas Jade Zumann, William Baldwin and Xander Berkeley, among others in the film slated to run Feb. 27-March 5 in theaters nationwide.
Inspired by true events, the film follows individuals who experience homelessness for a diversity of reasons, based on a screenplay that has won dozens of awards at regional and local film festivals the past few years, Stolo said.
Robert Craig Films hopes to call people to action in the fight against homelessness.
“If we leave the theatre unchanged,” she said, “we’ve missed the point. And so, that’s not our goal. The hope is that this film inspires people to see the homeless not as a problem to fix, but as people to love.
“And I think so often there are just so many stereotypes. And we really want to break the stereotype of homelessness,” she said. “The reality is many people experiencing homelessness are veterans, many of them are families. We see a rise in seniors now in homeless shelters.”
While the 2024 PIT count for those who were homeless on Jan. 24 yielded 771,480, Robert Craig Films promotes the number of 2.8 million homeless in the U.S., half of them children. Stolo and other representatives gathered the number in research that included visiting cities with the largest homeless populations and meeting with leading agencies addressing the problem.
“The numbers are staggering,” she said. “It’s not the stories we think they are when we walk by someone on a corner. Many of them never thought they’d end up on the streets.”
In Seaford, Davis is supporting the film in hopes that the truth of homelessness will inspire compassion and ministry among churches nationwide.
“If someone is blessed enough to work with this population,” he said, “they will quickly realize that there’s many people that landed in a situation of homelessness and it could have been them. It’s the loss of a job, not being able to find a job, going through a divorce or a bad family situation or a situation of abuse” with no other family nearby to help.
Davis is excited for those he will baptize Sunday at Grace Baptist.
“They laugh a lot,” Davis said of the women. “They’ve grown spiritually. They all now have a study Bible the church has given them. I joked with a friend recently that Seaford will have the most biblically educated homeless population in the country.
“These people will know the Bible and they will be able to share the gospel on the streets or whatever situation they find themselves in.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)
