Blankets, clothing and other items left out in the open by homeless people who sleep outside at Grace Community Church are stacked beside the dumpster a few days before it’s scheduled to be emptied, giving them a chance to retrieve their things.
My church, Grace Community on West Lee Street, is struggling with how to answer the question: How do we love our homeless neighbors? Grace is known for serving the poor and homeless. We have a weekly community dinner for the homeless, a financial assistance ministry, a permanent supportive housing ministry (moving people from homelessness to housing), and a yearly Christmas Banquet for our homeless friends. We have members involved in urban mission projects, street outreach ministries, the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, the homeless coalition, the day center initiative, as well as close friendships with homeless and formerly homeless people. But one of the biggest struggles that our church faces is how to love and serve the homeless neighbors who sleep on our church property every night. (It’s not just the sleeping that’s a problem. It’s the mental health and addiction issues, sanitation problems, liability concerns, sex offenders sleeping at a place frequented by children, etc. But that’s another post.)
Shepherding Pastor Will Dungee spoke about it at the end of a recent sermon:
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[Listen to all of the sermon, "Who Is My Neighbor?," here.]
When he said all that about the Holy Spirit speaking to us in the church about what we should do, I wanted to stand up and read Isaiah 58, which talks about true worship and says, in part, “Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless.” (My blog gets its name from Isaiah 58.) But I didn’t stand up. I sat there and prayed instead. Because I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to read it. And I have a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about our response to our homeless neighbors, but I don’t even pretend to have the answers.
After the service, the first person I saw was Pastor Will, and he immediately asked what I thought of what he’d said about our friends. I told him that I was really struggling with us having this big heated and cooled building that we only fully utilize a couple of times a week, while our friends sleep outside. And then I started crying and I ran to the bathroom. (I know, that sounds so lame. It’s embarrassing for me to write it. I almost never cry. But this has been getting to me for a while, and when Will asked me about it, I just kind of lost it for a minute. But you know what? I want my heart to break for every single thing that breaks God’s heart, so hey, maybe it’s just a God thing that I cried about it.)
I haven’t had a chance to talk to Will since then. I know that he and our other pastors and elders are struggling with what to do. I talked to a friend of mine about it. Here’s how our conversation went:
Audrie: “If we opened up every single church in Greensboro, nobody would be homeless. Nobody would be hungry.”
CM: “What’s the worst thing that could happen if we let homeless people sleep in our church?”
Audrie: “Somebody might smoke crack in the bathroom. Or have sex.”
CM: “And then what? I mean… so…?”
Audrie: “Yeah.”
Audrie: “You can stand up and speak in a meeting in front of the mayor but you won’t stand up in your church? I think the prompting of the Holy Spirit was there. What would have happened if you’d responded? You would have stood up and read the passage and sat back down and everybody would have looked at you like you were psycho. Just like they did with Jesus. What’s the difference?”
CM.: “[Sigh.] I know.”
Audrie: “There’s injustice here! And we’re calling ourselves Christians? Hello! Open the doors to the church!”
I used to be bold. She is kicking my butt on boldness these days. I need to pray…
I’m really thankful that my church is struggling with this situation. Some churches don’t struggle with the poor or homeless at all — they don’t have any connection to them or they don’t acknowledge them. So I think it’s a blessing that we’re where we are as a church, and it’s an honor to be given the opportunity to love and serve our homeless neighbors. As Pastor Will says, “The bottom line is, we have to love…” And what a gift that is. Amen.
Please pray for us at Grace as we seek the LORD on what it looks like for us to love our homeless neighbors the way that Jesus wants us to.
UPDATE, 11/10/2008: It looks like our church is going to be an emergency shelter location this winter. I’ll be writing more about this, but I wanted to come back and update this post. I’m so excited about what God is doing at our church, and how He’s growing and using us to serve homeless and hungry people!
UPDATE, 07/18/2009: Our church housed a winter emergency shelter for women from December through April, and plans are already underway for next winter. Church staff and volunteers helped most of the women who stayed at the winter shelter move on to other transitional or permanent housing situations after they left the winter shelter. This was an excellent, growing, challenging experience for our church body, and I continue to pray about the future…
…Sometimes Christians, in their eagerness to be compassionate and Christ-like, fail to recognize that God put limitations on this aspect of our discipleship. It is not always good stewardship to expend the time and energy to teach the truth or to render assistance to those apparently in need of such. In fact, sometimes to do so is poor stewardship and betrays our Lord’s trust in us. While we do not want this fact to be used as an excuse to ignore our responsibilities to act, neither do we want to waste the things the Lord has entrusted to us, including our lives and ourselves…
