Wayside Chair

The Wayside Chapel was established in the Kings Cross area of Sydney in 1964. Ted Noffs was the founder of the Wayside Chapel, which was at the time a Methodist ministry (Uniting Church from 1977). At that time, it was only a single room with a dozen chairs in a block of flats at 29 Hughes Street, Potts Point. Within twelve months of his arrival, Noffs had transformed it into a chapel, coffee shop drop-in and community resource centre. In the late 1990s, Pastor Ray Richmond and others established a "tolerance room" where people who inject drugs were able to do so in a supervised environment, as an act of civil disobedience. This eventually led to the creation of the legal Medically…

The Wayside Chapel's mission is described as "creating a community with no 'us' and 'them'". Rather, the Wayside Chapel characterises its approach in the following way:<blockquote>"I don’t want you to be a problem that I have to fix. I want you to be a person that I can meet. And I think if we meet you’ll change and so will I. You’ll move towards health and so will I. That’s how it works."</blockquote>