Heart Ministry
One couple’s lifelong effort to love and serve others
Alan Harris spoke in the soft accent of Raleigh, North Carolina, where the Piedmont meets the coastal plain. Nancy Harris reveals her Massachusetts roots with every syllable. He had been a Southern Baptist; she was Catholic. When they met in 1988, he had never been married; she, almost a generation younger, was a divorced single mother with a ten-year-old daughter named Rose. They fell in love, married, and together they gave countless people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, and addiction their respect, compassion, and friendship.
Alan’s Story
Alan Harris was born in the thick of the Great Depression, one of five children in a household with a stay-at-home mother and a father who owned a used-car lot. Jobless men who would ride freight trains from town to town seeking work found their way to the Harris home. Alan’s mother was always willing to give them a hot meal and a word of encouragement. “He learned a lot from his mother,” Nancy says.
At about age eleven, Alan began delivering newspapers to earn his own money. After high school, he went north to Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he studied at Emmaus Bible School. Historically, his family was part of the Church of the Brethren, a small “peace” denomination whose doctrine includes plain living and refusal to bear arms. By college, he was a Southern Baptist, so enthusiastic about proselytizing that he handed out leaflets on the street.
He was drafted into the army and stationed at Fort Knox. After his service, he attended and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in business administration.
He worked with the Social Security Administration as a claims representative, even, as part of his job, going on the radio and producing fliers encouraging people to register for benefits. From early in his career, he encouraged agency bosses to send employees to night shelters, where they could help mentally ill and physically disabled people apply for government assistance.
By the mid-1980s, he had worked his way up to be the executive aide to the regional commissioner in Atlanta. As he told the story to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, “I was sitting in my office on the 19th floor of the 101 Marietta Street tower, looking out at Stone Mountain. I thought, ‘There’s got to be more to life than tennis and working.’ I decided to go out and help people.”
He began by volunteering at a soup kitchen. “That was the first time I had seen homeless people en masse,” he said. “Working with them became my passion.”
He crusaded for a safe year-round shelter for women and children. When he found out through experience that few charities and organizations understood what others were doing, he compiled a guidebook of dozens of services for the poor by category such as mental health counseling and emergency shelter. And he continued to volunteer at the soup kitchen at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and at shelters.
But he was also concerned about poverty and disease in Africa, specifically Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in West Africa. Through the global food program Bread for the World and Seed magazine, a biannual publication promoting sustainability, he had become concerned about the famine there, which was exacerbated by years of drought. He visited the country and made plans that, when he retired in 1988, he would sell his possessions and go back there to live indefinitely.
Then he met Nancy.
Nancy’s Story
Nancy Zawrotny was born six weeks prematurely in the harbor town of Fall River, Massachusetts, the home of the infamous Lizzie Borden and her ax. As a center of the textile industry, Fall River was known from the late 1800s as a hotbed of the labor movement—a cause Nancy would eventually embrace.
As a child, Nancy says, she “walked on eggshells.” Her mother was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was institutionalized periodically for the rest of her life. Nancy played the role of mother for her two younger sisters. Despite her mental illness, Nancy calls her mother her “heroine.” Through it all, her mother retained a sense of humor, Nancy says, and she taught her daughters “that the greatest sin was to step on someone else’s dignity.”
Her mother, divorced and remarried, was not allowed to take the eucharist in the Catholic Church, but Nancy and her sisters maintained the tradition of meatless Fridays, confession on Saturday, and mass on Sunday. In between, Nancy prayed the rosary and wrote letters to God in a black-and-white composition book she kept hidden.
Nancy Harris was a civil rights activist before discovering the joy of service in Burkina Faso.
She describes herself back then as a “shy, withdrawn child who cried at the drop of a hat,” but she found friends in Romani children living in a nearby trailer park, who were treated as outsiders by some of her classmates.
At seventeen she saw a television recruitment advertisement for Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps that was part of president Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. A few months later, she skipped her high school prom and graduation to board a plane to Oklahoma, where she was among the youngest volunteers in a group of mostly college students.
She trained with a tribe of Native Americans in Watonga, Oklahoma, and was assigned to tutor children in a low-income Tulsa neighborhood. “It was during that time that I found my voice and was radicalized,” she says. “I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, fought for equal rights for women, and organized unions.” She raised funds for a children’s breakfast program operated by the Black Panther Party.
“Seeing these conditions, suffering, and harsh living made me question, ‘Why am I here? How can I make a difference?’”
nancy harris
Nancy was the first woman hired after World War II at Republic Steel Company in Brooklyn. On the side, she gave speeches, organized rallies, and wrote leaflets for her causes, including the union movement.
But through her activism, she became angry with God. She couldn’t understand how a loving deity could tolerate the injustices she found so blatant. She came to Atlanta to join the civil rights movement, got married, and had Rose.
Because she found it impossible to raise a child while alienated from God, she began taking Rose to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. On Palm Sunday, 1984, sitting on the back pew as the priest prepared communion, “grace washed all over me,” she says. “I had finally come back home.”
At St. Anthony’s she was asked to train volunteers for a night shelter and was invited to a meeting about a foot-washing ministry at the Open Door, an urban commune operated by Presbyterian ministers Ed Loring and Murphy Davis. For the next three years, she washed feet in a ministry rotating among three downtown churches.
“This is where I met Jesus face-to-face,” she said. After a divorce, she was working two jobs to support herself and Rose, attending daily Mass, and continuing the foot-washing ministry.
“Then,” she says, “I met Alan.”
Their Story
Alan and Nancy married on June 19, 1988, but canceled their honeymoon because Nancy’s father died on their wedding day.
Four months later they, along with Rose and their dog, Dallas, stepped off a plane in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. They would be there for a year at their own expense. “We had no support system, no plan, did not know the language,” Nancy says. “It was a leap of faith, a giant one.”
The American embassy had sent them a packet with cultural warnings: women should wear long dresses or skirts; couples shouldn’t hold hands in public; men should communicate with women only through their husbands.
Rose was miserable; so was Nancy. Temperatures frequently surpassed one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Flies and mosquitos were everywhere. “I was exhausted, hot, sickened to my stomach,” Nancy says. “I did not know the language or the money or how to get around. I had no women to talk to.” But what Nancy says broke her heart was the dire poverty of the people there, with insufficient food, no medicine, and few clothes. Life expectancy was among the lowest in the world.
“Little did I understand that this was to have a profound influence and transformation on my understanding of God, family, the world, and who I am to be in it,” she says. “Seeing these conditions, suffering, and harsh living made me question, ‘Why am I here? How can I make a difference?’”
Alan Harris passed away in 2021, but his legacy of “wasteful love” lives on.
Nancy and Alan started reading the Bible, praying together, and talking about their faith. They began to see the joy in people with no material goods. They began to feel they belonged.
Nancy returned to the States when her mother died, then went back to Alan in Africa. She donated the money she inherited from her mother to a clinic for babies founded by the women of the village where they lived.
In September 1989, the Harrises returned to Atlanta. Rose cried because she didn’t want to leave. Determined to tell the Burkinabè people’s story “with dignity and justice,” Nancy and Alan spoke at churches, schools, and civic organizations.
Back home, they committed themselves to live simply and serve the poor. They continued to volunteer in various capacities and founded a mentoring ministry to provide a holistic approach to caring for the chronically homeless, especially the mentally ill. Alan used his knowledge of government bureaucracy to help people apply for benefits. Together they ran Alpha House in a building provided by North Avenue Presbyterian Church, where people could get coffee, food, and referrals for assistance. Alan was a founding member of the Coalition for the Homeless Mentally Ill.
On cold nights, they loaded their car with warm blankets and hot drinks to visit people on the streets. They came to know many by name. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, they filled the living and dining rooms of their home with guests who had nowhere to go.
“I thought, ‘There’s got to be more to life than tennis and working.’ I decided to go out and help people.”
Alan harris
After a prayerful struggle, Nancy left the Catholic Church, largely because of its policy of serving the eucharist only to Catholics. Around the year 2000, Nancy and Alan chose to share in and grow some of the community outreach ministries at FPC Atlanta. They spent weekdays at the church and nights in the streets. At First Presbyterian’s Sunday morning prayer breakfast, Nancy would greet guests with a hug and warm welcome.
When Alan became unable to go out at night himself, he brought a neighbor, Vincent Dobbs, into the fold. Now Vincent carries food, hygiene products, and warm clothes to meet people without homes wherever they are. Alan died at eighty-nine years old on October 7, 2021. Nancy is back at the church at least twice a week, serving the needy. She and Rose, who is married with two nearly grown children, are carrying on the family legacy.
At Alan’s memorial service, his family distributed a testimony he had written. “I have learned from Jesus that it is in giving that we receive, it is in loving that we are loved, it is in forgiving that we are forgiven, and ultimately it is in dying that we live,” he wrote. “My commitment ... was to live as completely as I could, to share my life and my love with my wife (my wonderful Nancy), my family, and all those who Jesus cared about the most, the poor, the abandoned, the lonely. ... I believe love is eternal and I am held in the bonds of love by my family, my friends, and countless homeless people whom I have served and been served by.”
He continued, “I end my thoughts by calling you to live fully, to love wastefully, to be all you can be, and to dedicate yourselves to building a world in which everyone has a better opportunity to do the same. That, to me, is to be a part of God and to do the work of God.”
