They’ll Always Be With Us…
But do they have to be this close? One church’s struggle with hosting a homeless encampment.
THE SLEEPOVER WAS UNFOLDING the way sleepovers with 10- and 11-year-olds always unfold. Nobody was sleeping.
I was chaperoning our church’s annual fourth- and fifth-grade winter overnight, and though we’d tried to exhaust the little beasties with a rip—roaring game of flashlight tag through the sanctuary—just please don’t knock over the pulpit—they weren’t about to close their eyes. They lay on their warm down sleeping bags strewn with pizza crusts, jockeying iPods. Occasionally one would erupt in a guffaw. Occasionally a different sort of interjection would drift in from the parking lot outside, where a different sort of sleepover was under way.
A year ago this month the Nickelsville homeless encampment, an itinerant community of some 90 individuals, asked to live for three months in the parking lot of the church I belong to, University Congregational United Church of Christ. Technically illegal due to city permitting regulations and therefore not definitively covered by the church insurance, hosting them raised serious liability questions. But the more burning issue for this congregation of liberal Christians was this: How can we most effectively serve the homeless?
To me the answer had always seemed plain: permanent housing. Pouring resources into stopgap measures struck me as shortsighted, even enabling—and it was hard to see Nickelsville as anything but a stopgap measure. The self—governing shantytown had gelled a few months earlier—its name a political jab at the municipal government they saw as hostile to its needs, its ultimate vision a community where they could sink roots. But by the time they came knocking at our parking lot they’d had to move several times. If you will give us a home for three months, they said, we will work on finding ourselves a longer-term site.
Hmm…a field of pink tents donated by the Girl Scouts, pallets, and porta-potties? Not exactly the kind of solution I imagined would get to the root of the problem.
Our congregational vote was held on a cold day in late November, at the beginning of the church calendar’s Christmas season, and the debate was spirited. “Let’s say a child in one of the church-housed day cares were harmed by…let’s not even say a resident of Nickelsville, let’s say a banished resident of Nickelsville,” posited a concerned congregant. (As a strictly self-policing community, Nickelsville maintains its own zero-tolerance policy around infractions like alcohol and weapons.) “It’s well and good to support the homeless. But in the parking lot of a church that provides space to three child-care centers?”
And a fourth- and fifth-grade sleepover?
That day we were astonished to learn that all three child-care centers supported inviting the homeless onto our grounds. Having learned that sufficient security would be in place, they were all for it. Perhaps the directors of the centers were just that attuned to the vulnerable. Without an invitation from the church Nickelsville would probably disband, its residents most likely vanishing into the streets.
Published: November 2009
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