Faith On 4 Wheels: What I Learned Riding Through Trenton With A Pastor Who Refuses To Look Away

When I stepped off the Amtrak platform in Trenton, New Jersey, toward the end of last semester, the cold air hit me like a warning. 

It was the kind of cold that sits in buildings that haven’t had heat in years. Mark Broach, pastor of the Trenton Deliverance Center church at 1100 South Clinton Avenue, was waiting in a moving truck packed so tightly with supplies it looked like a mobile lifeline. Inside were clothes, shoes, food, toiletries, blankets, and even mattresses. It was the kind of inventory you’d expect from a warehouse, not a church.

Before we even pulled away, he was laughing about everything that had already gone wrong that morning. A musician was hospitalized after being hit by a car.  A volunteer’s car wouldn’t start.  A brother was rushed to the hospital with prostate cancer. And then he shrugged it off.

“We’re still going to have a great day,” he said.

That was my first lesson: for Pastor Broach, service wasn’t about perfect conditions. It was about showing up anyway.

As we drove, he talked about what had happened days earlier at a homeless encampment bulldozed by the city. “They bulldozed all their tents, all their supplies, and took it away,” he said. “Which is cruel. But they don’t want that type of plight here in the city.”

I asked where people go after losing everything. He mentioned shelters and then explained why many people avoid them. Theft. Violence. Overcrowding. The choice, sometimes, isn’t shelter versus street. It’s danger versus a different kind of danger.

Then he said something that would stay with me all day. People don’t just need services. They need to feel seen. He told me that people are starving for empathy in a world driven by greed, and sometimes survival is as simple as someone saying hello and meaning it.

We turned onto Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. He made a dry joke about streets named after King usually being the roughest in a city. Nobody laughed. The buildings looked exhausted. Sidewalks cracked open like old scars. Then we reached a small encampment where two tents were wedged between an alley and a lot.

“These are my people,” he said.

When he opened the truck, everything changed. People appeared from doorways, corners, and side streets. Volunteers unloaded food, pastries, vegetables, and mattresses. Gospel music started playing, echoing down the block. Within an hour, every mattress was gone.

I met a woman named “Nie” who told me that Pastor Mark once bought her groceries and prayed over her mother’s funeral for free. I met a man called “Shark” sweeping debris because if the area looked messy, the police could shut the camp down. Survival here isn’t just about finding food. It’s about not looking poor enough to be removed.

Most people I met that day didn’t use their full names. Some used nicknames. Some gave only first names. In spaces like this, names can be currency or risk. A full name can be traced to warrants, unpaid fines, child custody cases, or family members they don’t want to worry. Some are hiding from abusive partners. Some are trying to avoid being flagged by systems that could push them further out of housing, jobs, or benefits. Others have simply learned that privacy is one of the last things they still control. On the street, anonymity isn’t about mystery but survival.

Later, as we moved through the city, Pastor Broach talked about purpose and how he retired after decades in nursing and administration, but couldn’t sit still, knowing that people around him felt “less than human.” 

“This keeps me going,” he said. “Just be a warm spot to somebody.”  That became my second lesson. Charity isn’t what he’s doing. Relationship is.

We stopped at the Rescue Mission located at 98 Carroll Street. This facility provides a range of services, including emergency shelter, food assistance, addiction recovery programs, and medical respite care for individuals experiencing homelessness. It’s a central resource in the city for those seeking support and a pathway to stability. People have to leave by 7 a.m. and can’t return until evening. Which means survival, for many, means wandering all day. The building looked like a waiting room for a system that never calls your name.

Driving through Trenton, I saw entire blocks boarded shut. Factories hollowed out. Schools closed. Pastor Broach pointed at city-owned homes he wants to rehab into shelters. He pointed at a school where he once taught seventh grade, where he saw three pregnant girls in one class. “That’s how deep the pain runs here,” he said.

By then, I was starting to understand something bigger. What I was seeing wasn’t just Trenton. It was a local expression of a national failure.

Across the U.S., homelessness in cities has been rising alongside housing costs, medical debt, wage stagnation, and the collapse of affordable mental health infrastructure. Urban homelessness today isn’t just about addiction or job loss. It’s about structural eviction from housing markets, from healthcare systems, and from safety nets designed to catch fewer people every year.

New Jersey reflects that pattern sharply. The state has seen steady increases in homelessness, with Black residents dramatically overrepresented compared to their share of the population. In Mercer County, where Trenton sits, homelessness has risen faster than the state average, and most of the county’s unhoused population lives inside the city itself. Which means Trenton isn’t just struggling, it is absorbing regional displacement.

Policy responses exist. So do trust funds, local housing plans, and emergency assistance programs. But those are slow systems built around paperwork, eligibility thresholds, and political cycles. Hunger and exposure operate on faster timelines.

Which brings me to the third lesson. When systems fail slowly, churches and community groups respond immediately, and filling that gap matters.

When churches become primary providers of food, shelter coordination, medical navigation, and emotional support, it tells you something profound about governance. It tells you who is actually doing frontline survival work and who gets to claim credit when conditions improve.

Later, at the church, I saw canes and crutches hanging on the wall. These are testimonies, Pastor Broach said, from people who believed they’d been healed. He told me about shattering his leg years ago, doctors telling him he’d never walk normally again, and how he fought through three years of therapy until he could.

It wasn’t lost on me that the same story mirrors what he’s trying to do for the city. Rebuild function, restore movement, and refuse permanent damage as destiny.

Before I left, he also talked about division. He said there are around a hundred churches in a tiny geographic area of Trenton, but they don’t work together. He joined all their groups anyway. Because if churches unified, he believes, they could change the city. 

That was my fourth lesson: fragmentation is policy’s silent partner.

On the train ride home, I kept thinking about something Pastor Mark said earlier. He said that if people have never seen homelessness up close, they don’t understand it, and if they don’t understand it, they won’t fight for real solutions. 

What I saw in Trenton wasn’t just poverty. It was endurance, improvised systems, faith-filling structural holes, and humanity being practiced at street level while policy debates happen miles away.

In Trenton, faith isn’t a building. It’s a moving truck full of mattresses. It’s soup handed through a window. It’s someone remembering your name. It’s someone showing up, again and again, whether the system shows up or not.

And by the time I left, I understood the biggest thing I learned that day. Sometimes survival in America doesn’t come from institutions. Sometimes it comes from whoever refuses to look away.

Christion Crooms is a senior journalism major at Howard University. 

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