Service Week '09: Alum homeless advocates honored with Mary Morris Award

Janel Shoun | 

 

Heeding the call
 
When Lindsey Glenn Krinks (’07) took a walk in the Arcade in downtown Nashville one day during her senior year at Lipscomb University, she certainly wasn’t expecting to stumble upon a life-changing experience.
 
When she noticed the startling facts and flyers posted in the windows of the Nashville Homeless Power Project, she was drawn to find out more, and before she knew it, she was booking a speaker from the homeless advocacy group to speak at Lipscomb.
 
That led to Lindsey and a friend of hers, Andrew Krinks (’08), organizing a march to the downtown courthouse and a rally to promote awareness of homelessness issues and the need for a change in government policies.
 
Andrew says that year when Lindsey and he got involved with homeless advocacy, it felt like something bigger than both of them was pushing them to where they needed to be. The opportunities fell right in their laps, and even in the face of resistance, they moved forward because it just felt right.
 
“(Homelessness) was something that was on both of our radar screens in a limited way, but when (Lindsey) saw that sign (in the window of the Homeless Power Project), it seemed like an answer to prayer,” Andrew said. “It felt like something God was making happen through us and we were called to be obedient to that.”
 
“The more I started working with (the homeless)… I realized that not many people were genuinely reaching out to the community and offering anything more than hand-outs,” said Lindsey. “I started doing more and more, and it didn’t make sense to do anything else.”
 
Their willingness to step up and say, “Here I am, send me,” completely changed their own lives and is working to change the lives of countless homeless Nashvillians:
  • Andrew and Lindsey are now newlyweds;
  • Lindsey, a former kinesiology major destined for physical therapy, is now working as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer at Nashville’s Park Center Homeless Outreach Program, where she works with homeless mentally ill individuals to find housing, learn new job skills and apply for disability benefits;
  • Andrew serves as editor of The Contributor, Nashville’s street paper that offers diverse perspectives on homelessness; and
  • Thousands of homeless Nashvillians have been helped in some way by the programs the Krinks have worked with or coordinated, such as the Project Homeless Connect, the annual Homeless Count, and the recent Holy Week on the Streets of Nashville, where the couple took a group to downtown Nashville to spend 24 hours living as Nashville’s homeless do every day.
 
The Mary Morris Award
 
On Tuesday, April 14, Lipscomb University recognized the Krinks for their selfless commitment to serving others by awarding them the Mary Morris Award for Exemplary Service to Society. The Krinks were honored at a special chapel service in Collins Alumni Auditorium. This award is Lipscomb's highest honor for service to the community.
 
The award was established four years ago to honor another outstanding servant to humanity, Mary Morris, who succumbed to cancer at age 36 in September 2005. Morris was an associate professor of education and founder of the Center for Character Development at Lipscomb University, which promoted the Character Counts! program in schools, businesses and organizations throughout the city.
 
The Krinks were nominated by Matt Hearn, on behalf of the English department, where both Andrew and Lindsey spent a lot of time during their college career. Hearn’s nomination of the two alumni provides an exceptionally impressive list of continual service both during and after their college days:
  • Lindsey initiated the first 30-hour Famine and Facing Hunger Week in which the ladies of Pi Kappa Sigma led the rest of the campus in a week of focus on the world's poor, through giving and fasting. Even after graduation, she still contributes to and participates in the annual event.
  • Andrew organized and led contemplative chapel for two years and served as editor of Lipscomb's creative arts journal, Exordium.
  • Lindsey continues to work for campus awareness of homelessness issues at Lipscomb by recruiting key student and service leaders to reach out to the community in various service opportunities, particularly Nashville's first Project Homeless Connect, which Lindsey helped coordinate to bring services to more than 1,000 local homeless individuals.
  • Both Andrew and Lindsey taught poetry and creative writing classes for homeless men and women at the Campus for Human Development (CHD) and together wrote about their experiences in an August 2008 article published in The Other Journal, a national online journal that explores the intersections of theology and culture.
  • As an alumni, Andrew has led a copyediting workshop at the Tennessee Prison for Women in conjunction with Lipscomb's classes held at the prison.
 
“We can think of no other individuals who better demonstrate the example set by Mary Morris as servants in the community of Christians and in the community at large by representing the best of the kind of students Lipscomb nourishes for service,” Hearn wrote in his nomination.
 
Prophets in the wilderness
 
Talk to the Krinks for just a few minutes, and you get the feeling that they just can’t help themselves when it comes to loving others around them and spreading the word about how much love is needed in our fallen world.
 
“Our system is broken because it is not one that adheres to the system described in scripture. So (the homeless) can’t just be fixed by being plugged into a system that is broken,” Lindsey said. “The more we get out and meet people different from us… the more we can understand the barriers they face and the suffering they have gone through. It’s a lot easier to stay on our side of town, but as Christians we can’t ignore the teaching of Christ and the prophets that call us to love our neighbors. And Jesus says our neighbors are everyone -- but particularly people who are in need.”
 
 “We have felt a calling to not just be an advocate, not even to just minister to them, but to see Christ in them,” Andrew said.  “The best lessons are learned from people who have no place to sleep. Being followers of Christ entails more than looking after our own well-being. It includes compassionately seeking justice for those who are oppressed and basic acts of mercy for those who have been forgotten and pushed to the margins of society.”
 
Most recently, the couple has co-founded Amos House Community, a homeless, ecumenical catholic worker house exploring urban monasticism. Amos House is the founder of Holy Week on the Streets in Nashville and the home to the Mercy Fund which provides food, clothing, housing assistance, and health care to homeless women who are pregnant or have children.
 
In addition, Andrew, the English major, and Lindsey, with an English minor, are already spreading the word about Christ-like social activism through presentations at Christian academic conferences.
  • This week Andrew is presenting a paper at the Conference on Christianity & Literature at George Fox University on “Poetry as Eucharist: Prophetic Witness to the Powers That Be.” This essay explores the intersections between poetry and theology and their combined social and political implications.
  • Lindsey is presenting a paper at Lipscomb’s Christian Scholar’s Conference this summer entitled “Re-imagining Community Service: Toward a Paradigm of Justice and Co-liberation.”
 
Previous winners of the Mary Morris Award are:
  • Nancy Moon Gonzalez, who developed character education for schools in Guatemala and Honduras;
  • Randy Steger, founder of Healing Hands International, a global humanitarian group; and
  • Jon Lee, who operates The Living Water Project, providing clean and accessible water for people in impoverished areas of the world.