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Addicted to God - Former meth user calls on religion to help Daytona

Beach's homeless
Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL) - November 25, 2007
Author/Byline: SETH ROBBINS - STAFF WRITER
Edition: Final
Section: Section C
Page: 01C

Faded tattoos coat Ray Kelley's thick forearms. When he received the sleeves of ink, which included a large
cross on his left elbow, he didn't know he would become a preacher one day.

On a gray evening, near the J-Foods store on North Street and North Ridgewood Avenue, Kelley shakes the
hands of men and women streaming into the fence-lined, grassy lot. Every Thursday night at 6, he preaches
here. Across the street, dope runners huddle under an awning to escape the drizzling rain.

"No church. No Food. No Late Birds," reads a sign that Kelley and his wife, Susan, tacked to the chain-link
fence encircling the field. Jesus of Nazareth offered loaves and fishes to sustain a poor, hungry crowd through
his sermons. Tonight Kelley's disciples, in orange T-shirts, stir pots of chili and arrange pyramids of
hamburger buns for after the service. It worked for Jesus, and it works on Ridgewood.

"We're in the devil's territory," he says of this notorious center of drugs and prostitution, "and you have to
get dirty when you're in the devil's territory. We get cussed out. We get called names. We get beer thrown at
us. We get hugs by people that stink. To get dirty is to be on the front lines doing God's work."

For Ray Kelley and his wife, the front line sits squarely at the intersection of North Street and North
Ridgewood Avenue, where they founded the Daytona Outreach Center six months ago in an abandoned
copy shop overrun by drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves.

All of whom are now welcome to come in for a blessing. Or use the phone.

"We just love on them," says his wife, Susan.

'SELF-DESTRUCTION TOUR'

Both former methamphetamine addicts, the Kelleys hope to revive those on drugs and alcohol with a heavy
dose of compassion and Christianity.

"I'm two bad choices away from being just like them," Ray Kelley, 46, says. "So when they see me, they see
that they're a couple of good choices from being just like me."

In 1987, the Kelleys were shooting pool in a Clearwater bar, acquainted less than a week, when they made a
bet to wed if he lost. "I scratched the 8-ball," Ray Kelley says. They were married the next day.

He worked as a construction foreman. Susan was a house painter. Both were heavy drinkers, and Ray
had dabbled, all his life, in drugs.
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In 1999, Ray Kelley offered a meth pipe to his wife. "I never dreamed," she says, "that putting that pipe in
my mouth would change my life forever."

For the next five years, the Kelleys were on what they call their "self-destruction tour."

They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the drug, eventually losing their home. They separated.
Susan went to her mother's, where she slept on the couch next to the couple's 8-year-old daughter. Ray
Kelley lived out of a storage unit.

By 2005, Ray Kelley was homeless, stealing from friends and burglarizing houses to feed his $700-a-
day addiction.

APPEAL TO GOD

Then on July 11, 2005, after spending several nights on the streets near Ridgewood Avenue, Ray Kelley
asked God to kill him. But he was left standing.

"I said to God, 'if you're real and you can take this addiction away from me, I will be yours until the day I die.' "

Weeks later, his wife returned. Though their bodies ached for the drug, they made a pact to quit, and kept it.

After getting clean, he drove the streets of Daytona Beach asking people if he could pray for them.

Having never graduated from high school or had any formal training in theology, he was leading a Bible study at
a homeless shelter when he had a vision of a "recovery church." The Daytona Outreach Center was born. It
has been funded ever since by their church Tomoka Christian in Ormond Beach.

Ray Kelley's mission owes a debt not just to Jesus of Nazareth, who spent most of his brief life amid
the desperate and destitute, but also William Booth, an evangelist who left the pulpit in the late 1800s for
the streets of London. Booth, along with his wife Catherine, implored thieves, gamblers and drunks to give
their lives to Christ. By 1867, Booth's mission had grown to 1,000 volunteers and countless more
converts. Known as "The General," Booth dubbed his recruits the Salvation Army.

Checkered pasts, however, made Booth's converts less than welcome at the established churches.

Troy Ray, director of Halifax Urban Ministries in Ormond Beach, says Kelley's congregation faces a
similar problem.

"A number of churches in the area are good about inviting homeless people in, providing meals and
showers," Ray said. "At the end, though, it still feels like they are a guest and not someone that belongs
there. What Ray and Sue are doing goes a step further. They say 'this is your church. This is your place.' "

RESIDENTS LUKEWARM ON CHURCH

Neighbors of the Outreach Center, however, group it with another place on North Street that attracts
transients. "They are doing a good service," said Chris Daun. "But a majority of the clients are from other states.
If you feed them, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing wound."

Ray Kelley remains implacable, and other pastors defend his type of service as basic to Christianity itself.

"The mandate of the New Testament church," said the Rev. L. Ronald Durham, pastor of the Greater
Friendship Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, "is to bring Christ to where the people are; not to sit in the
stained glass walls of the sanctuary waiting for them to come in."

Walls and a roof would be a luxury for Ray Kelley's congregation. For now, the field will have to do.

Hoarse from yelling, he reads to men and women in folding chairs. "As it was in the days of Noah so will it be
at the coming of the Son of Man." A cigarette tips precariously from a listening man's lips, each tongue
flick counting the seconds of the sermon. Ash-colored clouds sweep the sky and leaves rustle; a downpour
can't be too far.

"It ain't going to rain," Ray Kelley shouts. The crowd stirs. "It ain't going to rain tonight."
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"Amen," cry several women. This is a proposition they can get behind; many will spend the night in the
woods among the damp palmettos.

He bounds among the folding chairs, sweat matting his copper hair to his forehead. "The only thing that is
going to rain on us is the Holy Spirit."

"You tell it preacher," replies a woman whose brother looks for her nightly, often paying street people
for information.

THE PREACHER'S WIFE

Susan Kelley, 42, recently consoled her after she heard her best friend, Vivian, died in the bushes off
Beach Street. "I don't want to die," she had cried. "The other night I tried to kill myself. The train was this close.
I don't want to be out there. I got kids. I got degrees."

Susan Kelley tried entering Vivian into a treatment program the next day. She never made it. Still, Kelley prays
for her friend.

"It hurts me so much to hear their stories," she says. "It reopens my wounds a little bit. But, I don't ever
want them to close completely. I don't want to forget how bad it hurts to be addicted."

Each morning, Susan Kelley sits at her computer in the front window of the Outreach Center. Her hair is plain
and brown, and her face is free of makeup. She has to remind herself that she is now the preacher's wife to
the outside world.

"They don't see the crazy meth head who used to run the streets of Daytona," she says.

Her favorite part of her day is when someone wanders into the Outreach Center wondering what it is they do
- that and Willie Dee. Dee's real name is Charles Hickson, and he has been a drug dealer on the streets for
more than a decade. Now, he sweeps the walk of the convenience store next door, and has begun to do odd
jobs around the Outreach Center.

"I know he's going to be a mighty man of God one day," she says, "when he gets done with the junk."

Night falls and all that illuminates the field is the white glow of the J-Food Store sign. Men and women
gobble their chili, quickly lining up for seconds - a hot meal is hard to come by.

Dee, however, eschews the free food and thanks Ray Kelley for his preaching. He remembers when J-Foods
didn't exist, when live oak trees, lined with Spanish moss, were scattered along the boulevard, and a picture
show was just around the corner. He appreciates what the Kelleys are doing, but he's not ready for God yet,
he says.

"But, I know when the man upstairs gives me that message, I will be sitting on those steps that morning," he
says, pointing to the cement stoop.

The Kelleys will gladly open the door.