Brian Sleeth with graduates from the Christian Outreach Center’s job readiness course.
In 2009, Brian Sleeth found himself homeless. After three years of trying to plant a PCA church in the Detroit area, Sleeth needed to close the project. He and his family moved back to their hometown, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with the hope of finding a job there. But nothing materialized after nine months of searching, and with no way to pay the bills, Sleeth, his wife Stacy, and their four young children were forced to live with family members.
“Even though I didn’t live on the street, I knew how it felt to lose everything,” Sleeth said.
“There was the loss of dignity,” he continued. “I was in someone else’s house where someone else was the head of the household. I felt like I had let my family down.”
He said he desperately wanted to get back to work — so desperately that he found himself driving down the road one day begging God to take him to heaven if this was as good as it was going to get.
After nine months of homelessness, Sleeth received a call to pastor a church in the Mississippi Delta. He served there for several months before returning to Baton Rouge to care for his father, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away shortly thereafter.
In the years that followed, Sleeth dabbled in various business ventures, but nothing really stuck. In 2013, Sleeth sensed God leading him back into ministry. He began interviewing for a pastoral position in the Midwest, but between the first and second interview, he learned that Christian Outreach Center, a ministry to the homeless in downtown Baton Rouge, was looking for an executive director.
“This job just came out of nowhere,” Sleeth explained. “It was unlike anything I had done before.”
Sleeth applied and got the job.
Transformation over Handouts
Twelve years later, Sleeth is still serving in the role, having expanded the ministry from a thrift store and outreach center with 14 employees, to three thrift stores, one center, and 60 employees.
The three locations for The Purple Cow Thrifted Living employ 54 employees and generate 90% of the ministry’s funding. The name comes from a business book about “standing apart from the herd” and Baton Rouge’s cultural association with the color purple.
Sleeth incorporates purple into his attire whenever possible, including purple shoes. He said that purple is “a very Baton Rouge color” because of Louisiana State University, and it reminds him that Jesus is his king.
“Plus,” he adds, “the personal branding always starts conversations with strangers.”
Meanwhile, the ministry that takes place at the center focuses on both essential services and sustainable services. Essential services include support like meals, grocery delivery, bus passes, as well as help securing documents like birth certificates, which are crucial when someone is looking for housing or a job.
The goal is for those who receive essential services to ultimately benefit from sustainable services, which include financial literacy and job readiness classes — programs that employees from the center also teach at the local prison.
There are many paths to homelessness in Baton Rouge, Sleeth said. In addition to drug addiction, mental health issues and domestic violence are primary causes for homelessness.
“A lot of people can be just a perfect storm of circumstances away from it,” he said.
In order to truly help people grow and change for the long-term, Sleeth began implementing courses using curriculum from The Chalmers Center at Covenant College, an organization that equips churches and ministries to help alleviate poverty from a biblical perspective.
“Our understanding of the nature of poverty and some ways of solving issues of poverty, I think are very unique,” he said. “We really want to seek the transformation of the whole person. We don’t just want someone to learn a couple of skills.”
Sleeth explained that transformation in the context of Christian community is what the ministry aims for, not the transaction of hand outs.
Brittney Williams is one who can attest to this kind of transformation.
When she first got connected to Christian Outreach Center, she said she was addicted to pain medication, struggling to find employment, and living with her father. Through programs and connections with people at the center, she was able to get back on her feet.
“They gave me hope, and it came through Christ. I found God again, and purpose,” she said.
Eventually, Brittney became an employee of the center. Today she is a case manager with about 30 clients. She regularly teaches classes on job preparedness.
Friends of Jesus
Today, Sleeth is a member of the Southern Louisiana Presbytery and even served a term as presbytery moderator. He also preaches on Sunday for two small Mississippi churches in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. But his real passion is his work with the homeless.
Looking back on the past 12 years, he sees now how God used his family’s season of homelessness to prepare him for his current calling.
“I never would have chosen anything remotely like this,” he said. “It was God who chose this for me and brought me through what he brought me through. He just put me through a process of making me the person for this job.”
And he is grateful. Because through it, he gets to hang out every day with the kinds of people Jesus hung out with — the downcast, and often, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
“There are so many [homeless] who love the Lord and are hungry for his Word,” he said.