Willie Jordan of Fred Jordan Missions, known for Skid Row outreach, dies at 93
Willie L. Jordan, the longtime missionary, broadcaster and former president of Fred Jordan Missions, a faith-based ministry on Skid Row, a Los Angeles district known for homelessness, died at her home in Glendora, California. She was 93.
Her son, Joe Jordan, now the mission’s president, said in a statement last Monday that she “went to sleep in her home and woke up to Jesus saying, ‘Well done, thy good and faithful servant.’” He added that her 93 years included marriage to his father, seven children and a worldwide ministry.
For more than 75 years, Jordan helped lost, hurting and impoverished people worldwide and became one of the most recognized voices in inner-city ministry in the U.S., according to the statement sent to The Christian Post.
She felt called by God to share His love at age 13, and by 15, was teaching personal “soul winning” in Southern California churches. After high school, she traveled the nation, urging young people toward service.
In Korea, shortly after the war, she found a baby who had fallen into an open fire while his mother searched nearby hillsides for roots to boil for food, and rushed him to a hospital, where he died. She returned to the U.S., raised funds and went back seven months later to build an orphanage that has since grown into one of South Korea’s largest, caring for more than 500 children with disabilities.
Her husband, Fred Jordan, founded the American Soul Clinic on Skid Row in 1944, and Willie joined in 1949 at the Soul Clinic School, beginning a lifelong commitment. Together they built orphanages, schools, mission stations and churches in Japan, Liberia, Hong Kong, Argentina, Taiwan, Mexico and Ghana.
In 1951, the ministry launched the weekly television program “Church in the Home,” hosted by Fred with Willie at his side. She also hosted “Take Three,” a daily biblical program on KWVE 107.9 FM, a Southern California Christian station known as K-Wave.
Fred Jordan died in April 1988 at Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora, at 78, after a massive heart attack, according to the Los Angeles Times, having lived in Covina. At the time, the Skid Row mission fed 1,000 people a day, and more than 6,000 on major holidays.
After Fred’s death, Willie became the only female president of the mission, renaming it Fred Jordan Missions in his honor. In 1989, she expanded her work to reach women and children, partnering with Foot Locker on its first Back-to-School event.
“We took our children to Skid Row from the time they were four weeks old, and it certainly didn’t hurt them,” Jordan said, adding that she and Fred had always hoped their children would love God and have compassion for people in need.
In 2018, Willie handed leadership to her son, Joe, who called it “a blessing and honor” to continue work begun in 1944, with the vision and legacy continuing more than 82 years later.
Willie was the aunt of Pastor Greg Laurie, founder of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California and Hawaii. Laurie said in an Instagram video that his aunt had gone to be with the Lord and had carried on the mission her husband started. He called her “a modern-day Mother Teresa” who “made all the difference in the world.”
In a 2013 interview with Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, California, Jordan said the mission preached the Gospel first, then fed people to meet physical needs. Citing Matthew 25, she said helping “the least of these” was the same as serving Christ.
She told Hibbs that “the face of America has changed,” estimating at least 40% of homeless people were single mothers with children, and said hope for the homeless lay in Jesus alone. Hibbs called her “an amazing Deborah of God.”
Willie is survived by her seven children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
