“I had no experience with addiction, prison, mental illness, and poverty,’” Jamie West Zumwalt disclosed. “‘But those were the situations that the people…were in,’” the ones she and her husband “wanted to serve.’” So it was that, two decades ago, this couple opened—in Oklahoma City’s red-light district—Joe’s Addiction, “a coffee shop that would serve the kind of people that Jesus would have hung out with.”
In telling their story in OKC City Lifestyle, writer Brooke Barnett related, “They sought to create a…safe harbour…where members would take care of, and love each other.” The two “‘wanted to see if it was actually possible to live what Jesus taught….’” Yes! And it’s this unfolding that Ms. Zumwalt tells in her 2018 book, Beloved Chaos.
It is chockablock with tales of those living on the margins, stories reviewers describe as “real, un-sanitized, and deeply emotional.” They’re “raw and honest,” one reader reported; another noted, “the explicit content warning isn’t on the cover to look edgy—there are words [in it] that you don’t expect from a pastor.” Yes, Ms. Zumwalt spent 20 in ministry before opening Joe’s, where she serves, according to amazon.com, as “the lead pastor of this church.”
Beloved Chaos: Moving from Religion to Love in a Red-light District
By Jamie West Zumwalt
Author Academy Elite, 2018