By Jim Wise

Jwise@heraldsun.com

The Herald-Sun
Nov 27, 2004

DURHAM -- One cold November evening in 1974, the Durham Rescue Mission opened for business. The first guest didn't stay long.

The mission had no heat. The only way to keep warm was bundling under homemade quilts. There was no hot water.

After a breakfast of powdered milk and Pink Panther cereal, that first guest had had enough.

Thirty years later, the Durham Rescue Mission's clients stay days, weeks, months, even years. Their quarters are snug, warm and bright. Food is plentiful and varied.

From a dilapidated winos' hangout, the operation has grown to occupy a former church building at East Main Street and Alston Avenue, several nearby houses and a motel building once notorious for drugs and prostitution.

"God's been good," said mission founder Ernie Mills. "He really has." His wife, Gail, is the mission's business administrator.

The mission offers shelter, safety and restored lives to the homeless, the alcoholic and the addicted. In many, if not most, the offer is one last chance to avoid a lonely, despairing death.

It is an avowedly Christian mission, established and run by a Baptist preacher with close-up and personal knowledge of the damage a chemical can do.

"He hates alcohol, but he loves the person," said Lynn Holloway, a recovering cocaine addict and former Rescue Mission resident now its chaplain and education director. "He's genuine. His love is for real."

In its first four months of operation, the Rescue Mission aided 27 men. In 2003, it served an average of 159 men, women and children per day. Last year, Mills estimates, his mission provided Durham County with services worth almost $3 million.

Mills' figures are conservative, valuing a night's lodging at $10, a meal at $5 and vocational training at $15 an hour. In hard numbers, during 2003 the Rescue Mission provided 58,194 individual nights' lodging, served 178,950 meals and gave away 213,398 items of clothing.

The Rescue Mission began with one young couple with a calling in a strange town.

"We had no friends," Mills said. "Now we have thousands."

The Rescue Mission's supporters -- in terms of money, volunteers and general good will -- range from the Tobaccoland Kiwanis Club to the Durham Council of Garden Clubs to the Duke Park Neighborhood Association to Sherwin-Williams Paint Co., not to mention innumerable individuals in and outside Durham.

"I think they really have a passion for what they do," said Dan Hudgins, former Durham County Social Services director. "They feel they have a calling and they have conveyed that to people in this community."

'God will provide'

Blessings just seem to come the Rescue Mission's way.

Mills recently got a letter telling him the mission had received a $10,000 state grant. He hadn't applied for any grant, had no idea how it came about.

The Rescue Mission doesn't take government money, and Mills said he was going to gratefully decline. But he was touched -- somebody thought highly enough of what he does to put his name in the pot, and somebody else thought highly enough to make the offer.

"I think God will provide," said Gail Mills. "Lots of times it was down to the midnight hour, and God would provide."

Such providence goes back to the heat-challenged beginning.

The Rescue Mission moved into its first home, at 1301 E. Main St., after a crew of winos moved out, Ernie Mills said. The very walls were full of empty bottles.

"You've heard of fiberglass insulation?" he asked. "We had glass insulation."

Truckload after truckload, Mills hauled bottles and cans to the dump. His mission was cold, practically broke. And support was hard to come by.

"Bad spirit," he said. "I was in a bad spirit."

Unloading his trash, he happened to look up. He saw a gas space heater.

His spirit changed on the spot. "I knew God put it there for me." The house already was plumbed for gas. All Mills had to do was hook up the discarded heater. It worked fine.

By the end of 1977, the 4-year-old Rescue Mission was on firm enough foundations to try raising the down payment for larger quarters, the former Fuller Memorial Presbyterian Church one block west. Less than a year later, the mission was all moved in and serving Thanksgiving dinner to 17 residents and 18 other needy citizens.

"Their eyes just lit up when they saw somebody really cared about them," Mills said at the time. "It's nice to see some joy in their lives."

More recently, in 2002, Mills was having plans drawn for a 15,000-square-foot building to expand his ministry for women and families.

Then he heard about the Durham Inn, a motel at Avondale Drive and Interstate 85.

It was condemned and about to be torn down because of the drug addicts and prostitutes who carried on their business there, he said. But the floor plan for Mills' addition was almost exactly like that of the motel.

"Lord," he said, "what are you trying to tell us?"

He investigated. At the Durham Inn, he could get four times the space at half the cost of building new. First, though, he had to get the judge to lift the condemnation order. Then he had to convince the Duke Park residents, who had forced the condemnation, to change their minds.

"The neighbors were mad as fire at the drug addicts and prostitutes," he said. Now he had to go ask, "Would you mind if I brought the drug addicts and prostitutes back?"

They voted unanimously to support the mission's plan.

Then there was the matter of raising a $400,000 down payment in 90 days -- in the summer, typically the worst time of year for raising money.

"In 57 days," he said, "that $400,000 was in the bank drawing interest." Two years later, the Good Samaritan Inn is repainted, landscaped and a few building inspectors away from receiving its residents. With its opening, Durham Rescue Mission is poised for its largest growth spurt.

"It's going to help us to more than triple the number of women and children we can help," Ernie Mills said.

The number of single men will increase, too -- by 50 percent -- because space will be freed up at Main and Alston and the Millses won't have to tear down four houses to build the new building he had planned.

Hope for the hopeless

Seventy-five to 80 percent of the men who come to the Durham Rescue Mission are addicted to alcohol or narcotics, Ernie Mills said.

Women arrive as addicts, too, and/or as victims of spousal abuse. Some have lived in abandoned houses without doors and windows, where they worried about keeping their children safe from rats.

"A lot of kids come to us," he said. "The only thing they've ever seen is that concrete jungle."

Some arrive with nothing and leave, months or years later, with self-respect, educations, jobs and homes of their own. Some arrive and go back to the streets.

"Some are just in and out," said Holloway, the former resident now on Rescue Mission's staff. "Some you just look at and say, 'No hope.' "

Getting clean and staying clean are tough -- tougher than they used to be. When Mills started in mission work, in 1968, most of the people he dealt with were older alcoholic men, he said. That has changed -- the addiction and the age.

"Illegal drugs -- it started in the '70s and got worse and worse and worse. Once a guy gets on cocaine, that's what they live for," he said. Being or becoming a Christian isn't a requirement for living at Durham Rescue Mission. But Christianity is omnipresent, and basic to the Mills approach.

The Rescue Mission Web site (http://www.durhamrescuemission.org) publishes each month's total of meals served and lodgings provided, and, in boldface type, of souls saved.

"You can never require anyone to become a Christian, because it's a thing of the heart," Ernie Mills said. "But be open minded.

"When a person comes into the mission, he literally feels like nobody loves him. As a preacher, I tell him God loves him. He doesn't believe it, but then he sees volunteers giving. He really realizes there are people who love him and God loves him no matter what. It's like saying, 'You can have a clean slate.' It really offers them encouragement."

Hearts, minds, souls

Saving souls is part of the mission. Equipping hearts and minds for the workaday world outside is another.

The Rescue Mission is an authorized Microsoft training center. Women in its program get trained in medical terminology. And a grant from Verizon and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation is providing a course in Web design. "We hope to expand that with the men," Ernie Mills said. "Now, we emphasize jobs for women with kids because there is no way they can live on minimum wage. A man can scrape by on minimum."

Scraping by is something he knows about. His first mission job paid $40 a week -- $217 in 2004 dollars -- and no benefits. He'd known it tougher.

As a teenager, he was called to his father's bedside and told, "If we eat this winter, you've got to get in the crop." Mills' father was a sharecropper in Pitt County. He also sold bootleg liquor and drank to ease his arthritis, then liquor got the better of him. "That's when God began to give me a love for the alcoholic," he said. He speaks lovingly -- even admiringly -- of his father, who died of cirrhosis at 39.

Mills finished high school in 1964 and, having become a Christian, went off to Bob Jones University in South Carolina with ministry in mind. "The Lord called me to preach," he said. "I thought maybe a pastorate in a small country church or mountain church." Late in his college career, though, "Images and visions of my dad kept coming to me."

Mills heard a minister from Winston-Salem who had just opened a mission and needed help. So his career began. One Sunday, a local church youth group came to sing at the mission. Gail was one of the singers.

Not long after, he asked her out. Soon, he proposed. And shortly after that, they were husband and wife, living together at the mission. Mills quickly felt a call to move.

His father had been treated at Duke Hospital, he said. "That might have been the beginning of my call to Durham."

'Stellar reputation'

If Ernie and Gail Mills have changed through their Durham Rescue Mission, they have also helped change Durham.

Before they arrived, Durham had no homeless shelter, no public services for alcoholics and addicts. The attitude toward such people, he said, was, "They were just bums, they should know better. It was uphill."

"I've always admired Ernie," said Hudgins, who directed Durham County Social Services for 27 years before retiring last spring. "He's done a lot for this community."

"Everybody thinks so highly of him," said Mort Hansen, president of the Southwest Durham Rotary Club, which gave $7,000 for the Good Samaritan Inn last year. It was the club's largest donation ever.

"It's an agency with a stellar reputation in town," said Lou Rollins, president of Durham Kiwanis, which has pledged $10,000 for the Inn's playground. "There were strong connections of confidence in the work that's being done there."

It is not farfetched to say that Ernie Mills is the best-respected man in Durham. "I think it is amazing to think of the effect they've had on Durham and on the people who have been through the Rescue Mission," Hudgins said. "... He clearly is contributing to making Durham a better place to live."