During a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Alan Graham, founder of Christian outreach ministry Mobile Loaves & Fishes, shared the Gospel with podcasting legend Joe Rogan during their conversation. Graham’s organization was founded in Austin, Texas in the late 1990’s seeking to mitigate homelessness with a God-based, community-oriented solution.
During the discussion with Rogan, he said, “I live my life to the best that I possibly can, which is simple: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So that’s what we’re gonna do. I believe I’m sitting in this chair right now because of how God has architected us over a few years, coming together, and now we’re here.”
Rogan addressed a commonly held criticism of modern-day Christians, that they don’t live as their faith calls them to. However, he noted that Graham clearly does not fit into this category. “I think you’re a very unusual person, because there’s a lot of people out there that profess to be Christians, they profess to be in whatever their denomination is, whatever their religion is, but they don’t necessarily live it,” the host said.
Continuing, Rogan said, “You abandoned your beautiful house and moved into one of these tiny homes in this homeless community. And then when we went and toured the community and got to see how you interact with everybody, it’s beautiful. It’s really very extraordinary. And I don’t think there’s very many people that would do that, what you’ve done.”
Graham further explained how he was led to God. “I had a powerful experience [at a retreat] that led me to ask, ‘God, what do you want me to do?’” he recounted. “I wasn’t asking for anything big.” He also had a deepening in his relationship with Jesus during the retreat, “The intellectual relationship I had with Jesus dropped into the depths of my heart,” he said.
The founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes emphasized the importance of taking a humane approach to homelessness. “We need a human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection between people who are broken and battered and come from a trauma background, a battlefield background, that you and I can’t even begin to understand,” he said.
For years, Graham has been serving the Austin community. “With more than 6 million meals served, MLF has grown to become the largest prepared feeding program to the homeless in Central Texas and has spawned similar food truck programs in other cities across the country,” according to the ministry’s website. reads.
“The interesting thing is how [the people we’ve helped] have shaped my life, and that’s where the miracle sets in,” Graham stated. “When you drive around [cities] and see the homeless crisis … it appears hopeless. It’s just a mess. … Our community shows that there is hope, unbelievable hope, if we do things right and get our act together as a civil society.”
According to the core beliefs of the organization, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in His own blessed life. By virtue of being created by God in His image, we are all called to live in community and relationship with Him through each other.The family is the original cell of social life. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. All members of the human family are equal in dignity. The Lord God took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it. Gen.2:15″
Featured image credit: Steven Crowder, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joe_Rogan.png