ON THE RUN: Joy Junction executive director Jeremy Reynalds takes a phone call on his way to the shelter's chapel, which is being renovated by volunteers.

Meet Jeremy Reynalds, Executive director of Joy Junction

WAS HE EVER HOMELESS? Reynalds found himself homeless for about eight months when he was first trying to establish ministry in Florida, and then later for about three months when he burned out ministering in Santa Fe.

WHY DOES HE DEVOTE HIS LIFE TO THE HOMELESS? " I feel that I'm doing God's work. He commands us to help the poor and the needy."

HELPING THE POOR AND NEEDY

Jeremy Reynalds sees his dreams to minister to the homeless coming true through Joy Junction

Stories by Rick Nathanson of the Journal

If shameless self-promotion is a sin, then Jeremy Reynalds is willing to be labeled a sinner.

To promote Joy Junction, the homeless shelter he founded in 1986, Reynalds dashes off endless press releases, requesting donations of everything from canned food to used vehicles.

Earlier this year, Albuquerque's Joy Junction made the national news after Reynalds encouraged the shelter chaplain to camp out on the roof of the chapel for 60 days in a fundraising effort that netted nearly $11,000 toward renovation of the building.

Nor is Reynalds above using press releases to champion personal causes. He has voiced his opposition to gambling, for instance, suggesting it contributes to the homeless problem in America.

As executive director of Joy Junction, Reynalds oversees the largest homeless shelter in the state, which last year sheltered 5,600 people, served 65,000 meals and raised more than $978,000 to provide services and maintain the aging buildings on its 52-acre South Valley campus.

And Reynalds, 42, doesn't apologize for any of it.

"If hoping to get free news coverage to tell the plight of the homeless is shameless self promotion, then I stand guilty as charged," Reynalds says. "In order for us to continue getting funds from the community, our name has to be kept before the public."

FORMATIVE YEARS

An evangelical lay minister, Reynalds started out his life leaning less toward the gospel of Jesus Christ than toward the philosophy of Karl Marx, who preached that "religion is the opium of the people."

Reynalds was born in Bath, England, and raised in the southern coastal town of Bournemouth. His father, a retired Royal Air Force career soldier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Reynalds and his older brother were still young. His mother was a homemaker.

"Life was difficult," he recalls. "I never really knew my father or did things with him because he was getting sicker as I was getting older. We lived in financial insecurity for several years, until the RAF pensions and other services kicked in."

Reynalds attended a boarding school from age 12 to 17. And while he says he is "grateful for the education," he was less than thrilled with the "routine and regiment of the boarding school environment." In addition, he says, ' I wasn't athletic, I was chubby as a kid, and the other children were cruel.'"

By the time he left school, Reynalds had trimmed down, but he was still something of a loner and didn't make friends easily. A young woman he met in Bournemouth, however, did catch his eye. "She asked me if I wanted to visit her church. I said yes, because I was attracted to her -- not to her church. If anything, I was anti-religion. I thought religion was for young kids and old people, but not for me. I was too smart."

At the working class Pentecostal church, Reynalds found himself making friends surprisingly easily. He even began reading the Bible "with an open mind," entertaining the possibility that God exists, and praying for a divine sign.

He got one.

One day while reading the Gospel of Luke, the words on the page "stood out to me like they were six feet tall," he says. "I became a born again Christian a week later."

In 1976 Reynalds went off to a Bible college in Britain, where he met an American who told him about an Assembly of God school in Florida. Reynalds applied and was accepted. "My parents were not thrilled at the prospect of me 'emigrating to the colonies,"' he says. Nevertheless, in June 1978 he arrived in Florida with $20 in his pocket -- not nearly enough to actually enroll in classes.

A British pastor who headed an Evangelical church in Orlando put him up, and arranged for Reynalds to accompany a group of traveling Pentecostal evangelists conducting revival services in the South.

"These were definitely holy rollers," he says. "I'd never encountered anything like it before. Thegroup was headed by a wild Cajun evangelist from Monroe, La., who wore green polyester suits and lived in his Cadillac."

Upon his return to Florida, and with school no longer in the immediate picture, Reynalds had time to concentrate on another interest- Sylvia -- a woman he'd met at the church in Orlando. They married in April 1979.

Sylvia, who had a young son from a previous marriage, was soon pregnant, and son Joshua was born in February 1980. The couple had three more children during the next years.

FACING DESTINY

After he and Sylvia married, Reynalds worked at odd jobs but began spending more time and energy as a volunteer minister for inmates at a Florida prison. Consequently, the family became homeless.

A church member offered them a place to stay if Reynalds would find a steady job -- but Reynalds' heart was in missionary work. With his wife's blessing, he went to visit missionary friends on the Navajo Reservation near Flagstaff.

It was there that he learned about job openings for prison guards in New Mexico, something that would provide enough income to allow his family to be together. Reynalds took a bus to Santa Fe, only to find that because he was not yet a U.S. citizen he was not eligible. (He became a U.S. citizen in October 1998.)

Church once again became his salvation. Members of the Christian Life Fellowship he met in Santa Fe helped him get a place to live and find odd jobs, including work as a bellhop at a local hotel. Meanwhile, members of a Christian businessmen's fellowship chipped in to buy airfare to fly Sylvia and the children to New Mexico.

In the fall of 1982, with the missionary fire still burning in him, Reynalds arranged to use an old storefront building on Agua Fria Street in Santa Fe as an evening Christian coffee shop and "someplace where I could minister," he says. "I sat there for many nights and not a soul came in."

He introduced pot luck suppers and guest speakers and eventually the little coffee house, which was named His Place, began attracting people from other Santa Fe churches. Soon, homeless people discovered His Place. "And as the homeless came in, the Christians from the other churches started to leave," Reynalds says.

That's when he stood face to face with his destiny -- ministering to the homeless. More than 30 beds were added in the coffeehouse and in two nearby rented homes to shelter homeless women and families.

"For a while, we were the only homeless shelter in Santa Fe," he says. "I operated it for nearly four years and during that time I had four days off, got my two front teeth knocked out by a drunk, and got rapidly burned out trying to raise money.'

In May 1986 he resigned, "not knowing what I was going to do or where I was going to go," he recalls. "I only knew I didn't want to start another ministry and I didn't want to minister to the homeless."

LED BACK TO THE MINISTRY

With his resignation, Reynalds and his family were homeless again. They stayed with friends for several months, and a funny thing happened: as soon as Reynalds got some rest, he discovered he was burning to start ministering again.

As she had in Florida, Sylvia again supported her husband and did some praying of her own. "God spoke to me and said, basically, helping the homeless is what we were supposed to do," she says.

After briefly ministering to homeless families in a program at the old Kirtland Air Force Base chapel, Reynalds found out about the vacant buildings at the former Lourdes School for young men in the South Valley. Before the end of 1986, he had struck a $650-a-month deal to rent a dormitory on the property to be used as a homeless shelter, along with a mobile home for his family.

"It was a good deal, but I had no idea where the money would come from," Reynalds says. He took a part-time job at a local Christian TV station running the control board, which whetted his curiosity about the media. He enrolled in the University of New Mexico in journalism and communication.

WAITING FOR TAKEOFF: Jeremy Reynalds scans the morning paper at the Albuquerque International Sunport while waiting for his weekly flight to Los Angeles, where he is enrolled in classes for his doctorate.

Today, all of Reynalds' dreams appear to be coming true.

With a master's in communication, he is now an instructor at UNM and a doctoral candidate in intercultural education at Biola University in Los Angeles.

As he explained in a recent press release, he flies to Los Angeles every Thursday to take classes, and flies home Friday morning.

The teaching job at UNM helps offset the cost of his weekly travel, he says, while the cost of tuition at Biola is funded with "good old fashioned student loans."

Meanwhile, the number of people finding their way to Joy Junction grew with each year, and more old school buildings on campus were fixed up and put into use. The New Mexico Boys Ranch gave 10 acres of the old Lourdes School property to the shelter in 1998, and soon after the shelter acquired bank loans to purchase the remaining 42 acres.

The mortgage of $7,200 a month is steep, but purchasing the land, which is zoned for educational, rehabilitation and religious institutions, heads off any attempt to change the zoning. This is especially important, Reynalds says, because other homeless shelters in the Downtown area are facing "increasing hostility."

In addition, the land, which comes with water rights, figures into Reynalds' grand plan to establish a working farm. Residents in the shelter's life skills programs would help in the production of crops. The crops would then feed the residents, with the surplus being sold and money pumped back into the shelter's budget.

"I firmly believe that what I'm doing is in obedience to the call of God upon my life," Reynalds says "I feel that I'm doing God's work He commands us to help the poor and the needy."

1999 Albuquerque Journal