One day, while Sarah Dunn was struggling with an elaborate decoration in her family's home, she heard an almost audible voice that asked, "What are you doing to decorate your heavenly home?" That marked the beginning of her passion to convert people to Christianity.  Some years later, she married Colonel George R. Clarke and moved to Chicago.

 Again God spoke to Sarah, and warned her about the time she wasted in social functions. She persuaded her husband (who had become a Christian) to visit the city slums, with their gambling halls, saloons and brothels. He went, but was more interested in making money than dealing with human wrecks. However, while he was on a business trip a thousand miles away, he felt the Lord Jesus stab him with sharp conviction that people matter more than money. He dropped to his knees and consecrated himself to God's service. Immediately he telegraphed his wife of his change of plans.

 On his return to Chicago, he began to attempt to explain about Jesus and preach to the broken men and women of Chicago's slums. His friends considered him one of the world's worst preachers. And yet through his love and concern, lives were changed.

 On September 15, 1877, Colonel and Sarah Clarke opened a mission on South Clark Street. In a space had once housed a tiny store, they set up wooden benches to seat forty people. As the Colonel wept and struggled to speak words that would change hearts, Sarah did her best to keep order among the noisy, obscene and drunken people who came in. They saw it as a work of the Holy Spirit when many lives were changed.

Five years later, the mission moved to a bigger building that had been the Pacific Beer Garden. Dwight L. Moody suggested its new name: "Strike out the 'beer' and add 'mission'”.And so the Pacific Garden Mission got its name. Among those converted in its meetings were Billy Sunday, who became an evangelist; Mel Trotter, who was on his way to commit suicide when he wandered in; and Harry Monroe who became a powerful leader of the very organization that led him to begin following Christ.

 Moody considered the Pacific Garden Mission the greatest slum work in the world. He often preached there. The mission leaders kept their sermons simple. "...Nobody was ever too bad for Jesus to save. You aren't saved because you're good; if you were good, you wouldn't need to be saved. But Jesus died for your sins. He paid it all, glory to God! Make him your savior tonight. Come just as you are."

 And men and women did. Prostitutes, gangsters, alcoholics, gamblers. They would stand and tell in meetings how God delivered them from their sins and gave them a new life. Their testimonies to the power of Christ played a big part in winning others to follow Jesus.

 The work changed its location again after many years, but the Pacific Garden Mission is still going strong. Its stories of people who were "unshackled" air as weekly radio broadcasts and have power to move hearts. Most observers would say God picked right when he chose Colonel and Sarah Dunn to work for him.

 Billy Sunday, a popular professional baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings, came to the mission in 1886. He first heard the gospel from the mission Gospel Wagon on the corner of State and Van Buren. He visited the mission that night and liked what he heard and one night Billy publicly accepted Christ as Lord and Savior. He became an eager Bible student and gave his testimony frequently at the mission. Billy learned his first lessons in talking man to man with a sinner and explaining the steps to salvation. Later, after turning down a lucrative offer to continue his baseball career, Billy Sunday became a world renowned evangelist.

 When Col. Clarke died in 1892, mission convert Harry Monroe took over the helm, with Sarah Clarke remaining as the mission mother. Harry Monroe came to Chicago after being released in Detroit from a counterfeiting charge. He wandered into Pacific Garden Mission and was approached by Col. Clarke at the end of the service. Monroe responded to the Savior and his life was changed. Soon after, Harry was given charge of the song services and helped bring the mission hall alive with glad Gospel songs.

Monroe was a master at soul-winning, both in personally pointing individuals to the Lamb of God, and in calling out to those attending the mission's Gospel meetings. He had also introduced the idea of the Gospel Wagon during Col. Clarkes days. From the horse-drawn wagon, workers preached, gave testimonies and sang the Gospel to people on the street. It was during Harry Monroe's leadership as superintendent that Mel Trotter came to the mission.

 Perhaps many people fail to realize the importance of the city missions to the human derelicts that inhabit the slum areas of our larger cities, but Mel Trotter knew - for it was just a mission, the Pacific Garden in Chicago, that lifted him from a drunken, pointless existence and set him on the road to becoming one of the world's great evangelists.

 Mel Trotter's father was a drunkard who owned a saloon. His son followed in his footsteps, becoming an alcoholic before he was twenty. His mother was a godly woman, but Mel followed his father's example. Trotter married, and he and his wife had a baby, but his appetite for drink continued. He would go weeks at a time without a drink, but then he would go on drunken binges again. Once he "drank up" the family horse and buggy, leaving them without any means of transportation. He returned home from a ten-day drinking spree to find his only child dead in his wife's arms. Bitter and broken, he left home and went to Chicago. During the brutal winter he was reduced to selling his own shoes to finance his drinking. Finally even the saloons kicked him out.

Dead drunk, broke, shoeless, and with almost no clothes on his back, Mel staggered along the street. People passed him by. No one cared, and Mel thought, “Who can blame them. I’m so dirt-begrimed that I disgust even myself.” At twenty-seven years of age, Mel Trotter was in utter despair. “Perhaps tonight I should end it all,” he thought. But Mel’s wife and his mother had never ceased praying--they cared! And God cared! Mel’s path was directed to pass the Pacific Garden Mission... 

He was pulled inside by a kind doorman and sat slumped through the testimony of Harry Monroe, a converted alcoholic, then superintendent of the mission. At the invitation, Trotter went forward and accepted Christ as his Saviour. Mel and his wife moved to Chicago, and he spent nearly every night working at the mission. With Monroe he traveled to area churches seeking support. In 1900 a new rescue mission was established in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Trotter was asked to come and lead the new work. The Lord prospered the work there, and it grew and expanded until facilities were purchased which could handle 750 men. One of Trotter's greatest victories was when the saloon next door to the mission was forced to close for lack of business. Trotter carried a burden for rescue missions in other cities as well. He helped found more than 65 other rescue missions during his life.

 As the years passed and Trotter preached the Gospel from coast to coast, people got to calling him "The happiest man in the world" and "The man who raves about Jesus."

 It was not unusual for Trotter to be asked to fill in for R. A. Torrey or Billy Sunday in one of their great revival campaigns. The power of his personal testimony gave great weight to his preaching. Not only is he one of the best-known converts of the Old Lighthouse, but when the going was rugged in the years of World War I, Mel Trotter himself kept the light burning brightly at Pacific Garden Mission.

 Ill health marked the last few years of his life. He suffered from cancer which required repeated surgeries. He last preached at his mission in Grand Rapids in January 1940 for the 40th anniversary celebration of that great work. His favorite verse was II Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”

 …and God truly made him a new creature.

Mel Trotter’s life is a testimony of a life transformed by the grace of God. 

 Keep praying for the salvation and ministering those on skid row.  God may get a hold of their heart and use them for His glory like He did to Mel Trotter. 

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