Jamin Bradley

After struggling to grow our church for several years, we shifted into a dinner church model. Our numbers increased immediately, hitting triple digits in about two years. The word of our dinners spread rapidly among the impoverished and homeless in our community, giving us an inroad to the very people we had been trying to reach for so long.

But as more poor people joined our congregation, we were faced with a myriad of issues that we weren’t sure how to solve. A homeless man wanted to bring his dog inside. Another man asked to sleep in one of our congregant’s cars. Various people asked for money to stay in hotels. We treasured them deeply, so we worked to understand their dynamics so that we might help.

How the Church Can Help the Homeless

The obvious thing that brought the homeless into our building each week was food. This became especially clear once the pandemic hit. Now that we couldn’t offer food, nearly everyone we had reached through the dinner church model stopped coming.

While providing dinners is an easy way to reach the homeless, I can’t exactly say that it’s a necessity. While another church in town has seen the same influx of impoverished and homeless people from the dinner church model, there was something I learned over time from the homeless community we were reaching: they go to different churches and organizations every day for meals. Furthermore, the local homeless shelter (located not far from us) offers three free meals daily, meaning that the homeless did not need our food as much as they preferred our food—and perhaps our company. That being said, in our specific urban community, warm meals are great outreach but not necessarily essential.

Perhaps the more important need we provided as a church regarding food was our monthly food bank, sustained through our partnership with Compassionate Ministries of Jackson County. The Sundays we had food banks were always the most highly attended of the month. The importance of this ministry was further seen in the line wrapped around the food bank right down the street from us every Wednesday. Granted, some of our street-homeless people would only take certain items we had to offer since they had no refrigeration or cooking supplies to work with.

One of the families in our church boldly decided to help a homeless man they hardly knew by taking him into their house for a short while. I was a bit unnerved by this decision at first, as he was known for drawing bloody and disturbing pictures, but it ended up being a powerful experience. He was very touched by the family’s support, cooked for them every day, and returned to church the next week all cleaned up. About three weeks later, he showed me a key and told me he had got his first apartment.

But as cool as these Pretty-Woman-like stories are, I’m unsure how lasting the situation was. Once he moved into his apartment, we didn’t see him again, and I sensed that his life was not together enough to maintain stability and rent. Furthermore, I’ve had other congregants try the same thing, which went terribly wrong. One of my congregants risked renting one of his rooms to a man at our local homeless shelter. Things were fine for about a month, but after that, the man stopped taking medicine for his psychosis and began to act erratically and destroy the house. I went to help my congregant address the situation, but after a bit of unhelpful conversation, the man threatened to beat me up and then threw my phone into the street. The police were called and, to our surprise, knew the man well. But because the man was not suicidal, there was nothing they could do.

This situation brings us to another confusing dynamic of trying to help the homeless. On one side of things, we have laws that help the poor from being evicted too quickly or easily—which is good because the landlords in our city are not known for investing in their tenants or properties. But at the same time, some of the good landlords have run into situations like the one we just addressed, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Some of their houses are ripped apart by their tenants and become complete disasters. My congregant was scared for his life, but the police did nothing more than say to file some paperwork in two days when the court was open and wait for a hearing, which could have taken weeks to months. Such laws can get in the way of landlords wanting to take risks in the first place.

And even when we do create answers to help the homeless, they’re not always taken advantage of. For example, one of my congregants lived in a car before moving to a tent, and I wanted to get her into better living arrangements. I tried to connect her with a governmental housing program because I was certain she would qualify, but she refused to move there. In her defense, that particular housing community is known for some atrocious things, and the police seem to visit it several times a day. No one in our city wants to live there. However, I was surprised that my congregant preferred being homeless over having what would have likely been free housing. I began to realize that some people have built up such a familiarity with homelessness that they would prefer it over other better situations.

Our church found this to be true every time a homeless person asked us for a place to stay or money for a hotel. We didn’t have enough of a budget to help people financially, and we also found hotels to be no more than a band-aid on a gaping flesh wound. Helping someone for a night or two did little to solve their problem. Plus, stories had circulated that some would hold parties in the rooms. Eventually, our instant answer became an offer to drive them a few blocks to the local homeless shelter, which everyone refused. Some said there were bed bugs there. Others said the employees there were mean. Others told us that they weren’t allowed back there and took no responsibility for clearly being kicked out for bad behavior. One woman became newly homeless and refused to go to the shelter, preferring to risk her and her young children’s livelihood in a car. So once again, we found that the answers we could actually give to our local homelessness problem were often denied.

We’ve found over time that one of the better ways we can help serve the impoverished and homeless in our community is to partner with organizations that already know the terrain. I joined the Continuum of Care in our county many years ago, and since then, I’ve volunteered our church to host and lead some of their projects. Every year we host the Point-In-Time Count, where the community takes to the streets in the early morning hours, documenting any street-homeless they can find. The more we find, the more federal income our local organizations are given to address our city’s homelessness. This is a simple and practical way for us to engage the problem. We’ve also hosted a few events where all the organizations that help the homeless in our city come together and put up booths in our church for people to visit. When we help them, we do the work of Jesus without reinventing the wheel.

This is important because we do not know all the ins and outs of how poverty works—but these organizations do. A few years back, some people with big hearts tried to use a local hotel to house the homeless. Their passion was admirable, but they actually worsened homelessness in our city because they started to house homeless from all across the I-94 corridor, increasing our homeless population but not our homeless funds to help them.

That being said, our church did decide to start a new kind of ministry to help the homeless, which the Continuum of Care approved of. This project was sparked by the story of one of our visitors. Her house was condemned at the same time that she was hospitalized for an intense infection. When she miraculously got out of the hospital, she and her large family moved into a hotel where they spent all of their money in about two weeks before ending up at the homeless shelter. It was there that she suddenly died a few weeks later. 

I was tired of not having better answers for people like this, so we started a new project. Our hopes were to buy cheap houses in the city, fix them up, and use them for transitional housing for homeless people. The idea was to create goals for our tenants to meet to help them move into a more holistic life, for which an employee would hold them accountable via visits, coaching, and a contractual agreement. The city liked this proposal and was willing to sell us some of their properties, though they wanted us to fix it up to an unaffordable level. This plan ultimately fell through when the pandemic threw our church into survival mode.

A Liberating Church

I appreciate how Miguel A. De La Torre equates salvation with liberation. Far too often, the church’s focus is on nothing more than sin, not the systems that perpetuate sin or its effects. Jose Porfirio Miranda shows us that “Doing justice for the poor … is nothing short of liberation for the poor from all forms of oppression.”

I believe this is the most holistic direction of justice and gospel, for it calls us to address everything. As seen above, there’s no band-aid solution that can solve homelessness. Even giving someone a home does not solve homelessness because the habits and systems of homelessness live on. Giving poor people money does not suddenly make them rich, because they don’t always know how to use it. There have been several times where poor people in my church have suddenly come into some money, and the first thing they planned to do with it was go on vacation or do something relaxing. They deserve this, of course, but the money did little to help their situation.

We must work with Jesus to liberate people in every form of life. We want salvation not only to come to their spirit, but to their bodies and socio-economic situations. We want to elevate the image of God around us—for no imager belongs at the bottom of society. We are all made of the same dust and designed for the same purpose.