Mina Paille, the uncompromising founder of Love & Care Youth Center and Church in St. Louis, has passed away. Charisma magazine highlighted her ministry in 2004, when she was 82 years old. The following is the story we originally printed in the magazine titled, “She Won’t Quit Giving.”
Wake up! Don’t sleep! You’re dying and sleeping. I don’t know how to say it another way. I want you to grow up in the Lord,” says Mina Paille, chastising a napping 41-year-old man in her church.
He is one of about 20 gathered this day to receive a bag of food and household goods that are promised to all who sit for the session that begins with preaching. But what he and many of the sad-eyed, dispirited people filling the pews with him don’t realize is that they will also receive a few bits of manna from heaven–doled out by the 82-year-old founder of the Love & Care Youth Center and Church.
With the help of a dozen volunteers, Paille runs the two-level brick building in St. Louis, Missouri, which has become a safe haven for many whom society would rather not see. It is those whom she beckons to come to the center for weekly Bible studies, chat sessions, prayer, church services and groceries.
Every Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and third Saturday of the month, this feisty, white-haired woman ministers the Word of God, oftentimes filling the modest sanctuary with the homeless and others with no place to go.
Food is their incentive, but they often find themselves engrossed by what this firebrand has to say.
When she is merely speaking, it can be difficult to understand Paille’s heavy French accent acquired from her native Marseilles, France. But when she’s preaching, her voice is clear, articulate and altogether powerful.
Standing only five-foot-four, she grabs people by their hands and arms, offering a gentle hug or caress while she prays with them during the altar call. And each prayer is prayed as if it may be their last.
She makes no excuses for her ministry. “I want to give you Jesus,” says Paille, folding her hands in front of her chest.
“Don’t say ‘nobody loves me,'” she continues. “That’s a lie of the devil.” Before long, the crowd multiplies as others stream in. Each person stops at a desk to sign in and claim a meal ticket before sitting down.
By most accounts, Paille got a late start in ministry. Having grown up in France with a Catholic mother and Muslim father, she said she knew little about the power of Jesus Christ. Even when she and her late husband, Ray, migrated to the states in 1964, she knew very little about His power.
But she soon found out. A woman from Paille’s homeland, looking for a job and toting a Bible written in French, just happened to inquire at Paille’s family pizza parlor.
Paille was inspired by the new employee’s love for the Word. After reading it for herself, Paille was convinced that the God of the Bible wasn’t exactly the one that she was learning about at a nearby community church. At age 52, she gave her life to the Lord and was baptized in the Holy Spirit.
Soon after, she began holding mini-services at the pizza parlor, packing the place out on Tuesday nights when she offered free pizza for those who stayed around to listen. In 1981 she established the Love & Care Youth Center.
“We were in a storefront back then,” daughter Martina Gray recalls of one of the centers that was next to a raucous bar. “[Mom] would come home bloody, having been hit with bricks. Someone had even pulled a gun on her once.”
Yet none of it hindered Paille. “I have to give Him to everybody,” she says, shaking her head resolutely.
Eventually, Paille prayed the bar out of the neighborhood; she later occupied that space, too.
But after becoming cramped in the smaller spaces, she stumbled across the current building. It had an office, two kitchen areas, room for Bible studies, space to set up tables for food handouts, and an adjacent building that was perfect for a pulpit and pews.
Today, Paille feeds more than 200 people a month. And she rarely misses a beat. Although she is a little hard of hearing and has had cataract surgery on her eyes, she opens and closes the center regularly by herself.
Paille says she feels out of sorts only when she is not at the center. “God’s peace is in my heart. The joy of my Lord is my strength,” she says, singing words that are obviously intimate to her.
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