The Church v. Homelessness

My friends Jeff Phillips, Steve Still and I are praying and working together to find long-term, Biblically-based solutions to help move our homeless friends from the street to stability. N&R reporter Tina Firesheets spoke to all three of us while she worked on an article about our formerly-homeless friends Pete and Ricky. Some of those conversations led Tina to write a second article about the search for solutions to the problem of homelessness.

One of the things we all three touched on was the role of the Church (universal, the Body of Christ) in caring for the poor and the homeless. God’s heart for the poor is shown clearly throughout the Bible, as are our responsibilities to the poor and the homeless.

Homeless advocate Michele Forrest believes that if every church in Greensboro took just one homeless person under its wing, as Jeff Phillips has, that could go a long way toward getting people off the streets.

“We’ve got a church on every block, and we’ve got people sleeping behind them in the bushes because they can’t go anywhere else,” [Steve] Still says.

There are 1380 churches within a 20-mile radius of Greensboro. That includes churches in Greensboro, High Point, and Jamestown. Our summer homeless count totaled 734 people in Guilford County. The January count totaled 1108. (Winter counts are usually higher.) And all of those churches have members. And some of those churches have a lot of members. So if every church helps a homeless person in the process from street to stability, then… you do the math.