Courtesy of Because Justice Matters

Missionaries and volunteers with the Christian missionary program Because Justice Matters attend to the nails of sex workers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district

One hand grasped another across a nail salon table and delicately applied strokes of purple polish. But this was more than an ordinary beauty treatment.

Each Monday afternoon at a spartan storefront in the downtrodden Tenderloin — just a few blocks away from the upscale salons on Maiden Lane — the Christian missionary group Because Justice Matters provides free manicures to women and transgendered people, many of them current and former sex workers.

“It’s been said that the most counseling happens in a salon chair,” said Ruthie Kim, the group’s director. “As soon as you touch a person they want to talk to you.”

Kim said the Tenderloin nail salon provides a unique venue to connect with a population that is often isolated, abused or exploited. It is part cosmetology, part crusade. “They’re the throwaway people,” she said. “A lot of our women have nobody. Sometimes we’re the only ones they can share their stories with.”

The salon is operated by volunteers with donated supplies, working under the supervision of a professional cosmetologist. It started in late 2008 with a sidewalk table — outside so women could see it — at the group’s offices at 357 Ellis Street. Soon there was a line, and now about 35 women come inside for manicures and conversations each week. In 2011 this meant 600 hours, or 36,000 minutes, of one-on-one sessions, according to the group’s year-end report.

“That’s one of the most compassionate things I’ve heard about,” said Laura Lasky, executive director of Solace San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that connects local sex workers with medical care and other assistance. “They’re listening to them. They’re loving them. That’s incredible.”

But in a city that practically wrote the book on sexual freedom, not everyone feels that sex workers need religious intervention. Critics argue that many women are simply practicing a profession — indeed, one of the oldest — of their own choice.

That view can be found at the strip clubs in North Beach where Because Justice Matters operates a second outreach program, handing out gift bags of makeup and lipstick to strippers. Once inside dressing rooms, the missionaries ask the women if they want to be prayed for.

Last week, 185 gift bags were given out, adding to 1,575 such interactions the group said it made with women in the North Beach clubs this year. (Citywide, San Francisco’s 15 clubs employ 1,000 strippers, according to people familiar with the business.)

Sandy Bottoms, 23, the stage name of a dancer at the Lusty Lady, an employee-owned strip club in North Beach, called the work of the missionaries “quite offensive.”

“On an emotional level it’s really harmful,” Bottoms said. “You have people come into your place of work propping up these stigmas that I don’t agree with.”

Bottoms noted that stripping is legal, and said the missionaries perpetuated a premise that her job is wrong. She said this view promoted public scorn and placed sex workers at risk of backlash, including violence.

It is a concern echoed by Carol Queen, co-founder of San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture and a longtime advocate for sex workers’ rights. While acknowledging that religion can be a positive influence in some people’s lives, including sex workers, Queen said the missionaries go to the strip clubs “because they believe the women shouldn’t be there and do what they’re doing. It feels like harassment.”

But when Kim was asked if her group’s goal was to convert or spiritually save sex workers, she said that ministering to such a complex, diverse community was not so simplistic.

Kim, 30, an immigrant from the English village of Barrow upon Soar, has been a missionary with the group Youth with a Mission in the Tenderloin for 12 years; her living expenses are supported by donations.

“The issues we are dealing with are so deep and so traumatic,” she said, and included addiction, childhood abuse and domestic violence.

She said a success in this community was far less likely to involve religious epiphanies. Instead, she said a great day was one when a seemingly benign conversation, prompted by the touching of hands while nail polish was being applied, let a woman know that she was loved — a powerful message on these cruel streets.

“The nail table has become that place,” she said.

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.