She thought she would find a lot of anger at the church among the homeless.

“I didn’t find that, and a number of people let me know that they knew that people let them down, but they knew that God stayed with them,” she said. “I think it’s actually more privileged people who talk about God abandoning them, because they have, out of their privilege, they have expectations of God.”

She had never seen a church model quite like the one she was considering – a model that brought worship services to the subway stations and in the Common, Boston’s most well-known public park. At first, she encountered resistance to the idea from the Church, and she had to push past that.

She celebrated the first Communion service on Boston Common in Easter 1996, “never thinking that I would do it again. But as that week went along after the first service, people who hadn’t been at the service asked me, told me, that they’d see me on Sunday, so I realized there was a church out there.”

That church continues 15 years later. Ecclesia Ministries, which Little-Wyman founded, runs the Common Cathedral, which now holds church services every Sunday on the Boston Common.

Little-Wyman, 62, said she had an overwhelming urge to draw close to Jesus, who she considers the first street minister. “I just kept reading, trying to figure out who this guy was before the church got a hold of him. I wanted to know. That passion felt like it was coming from the God in me, trying to meet up with the God around me.”

By starting the ministry in the street, she said she was being faithful to the questions raised by that homeless woman and by her own priest, who had suggested that she get ordained. She became ordained “to help people in traditional churches make connections with people who are living outside, who are the people in my tradition, and in a lot of others, we’re called to draw close to in order to know God.”

In homeless people, she says, there is nothing between them and God. Their prayers and their connection with their faith are very direct, very compelling.

“I know that I am in the presence of the most pure truth, truth-telling, bare-bones living. It awakens a desire in me that I haven’t felt in any other setting. It has drawn me. …I fell in love, and people fell in love with me, so there was an exchange that felt like a total gift.”

Little-Wyman has passed the oversight of Ecclesia Ministries and the Common Cathedral to a new generation. She now helps others start street ministries in towns across the United States. And occasionally, she still presides over Sunday services, like she will next Sunday on the Common.

A homeless man named Joseph taught her long ago that among the homeless is where she is likely to learn a deeper, truer meaning of the gospels.

She met Joseph years ago in the South Station train station the first time she celebrated the Eucharist. It was on Christmas Eve, and eight or 10 people gathered to sit around her. The story was the birth of Jesus.

"There was a man sitting across from me," she said. "I heard him take a breath in, and then he said, 'I wish I'd been like Joseph.' And he was pointing to the Bible. He said, 'My name is Joseph and I wish I'd been as kind to my wife when she took off with my friend as this Joseph was'."

"I just got from that, and I continue to get from that, just the sense, the truth that homeless people who have nothing ... they don't have a phone call to make, or dishes to wash ... they don't have anything except what they're carrying around in their pockets. Yet this guy, he knows that that Gospel is alive for him. It's so immediate."

Little-Wyman said she decided then and there she didn't have to write a sermon when she was on the Common, though she did write short ones.

"I just wanted to hear from homeless people what the Gospels were about."