The Pearl: Strip

An outreach to women in the strip club industry.

Part of our mission is to create opportunities for women to serve other women in the ways that we witness Jesus serving women all throughout the gospels. We want to do what he did, in the ways that he did them, with the same heart-posture and motivations that he had.

The approach that Jesus had with women was highly subversive in his cultural moment. He loved the people who were considered to be the social outcasts in the first century. In our postmodern, progressive West we often fail to grasp the unprecedented significance of how radical his approach was.

We notice in Scripture that Jesus created opportunities to hang out with ordinary women as well as women who were categorically shamed, who were prostitutes and who exhibited a spectrum of social pathologies.

Yet, his approach was simple: to be with them, to eat with them, to talk with them, and to love them in practical ways.

When he spoke to them, he spoke identity over them, reminding them who they are and whom they were loved by. He offered them an invitation into his Kingdom, which was and is, in effect, a completely different way to be human.

His approach worked because his presence, his truth, and his gentleness is what drew them to repentance which rendered a life change that communicated their own understanding of their worth and dignity in the eyes of God.

That is our model for how we desire to love all women; the women in our own circles, the women from different backgrounds than our own, as well as the women who are somewhere on the fringe, who may even be considered outcasts. Jesus went where there was pain and his presence was the healing balm for every wound, every imprisonment, and every broken heart.

For this project, we go into strip clubs in order to be with the women, to offer them gift bags with intentionally chosen items, and to pray for them. All of those things we do in order to communicate the love of Jesus, knowing that the Holy Spirit is within us and that Jesus is our advocate and our teacher who modeled this sort of radical love.