fuonlyknew

It Comes Down to Community

We are friends with the people at the Redwood Gospel Mission in Santa Rosa, CA (about 30 miles from us).  The front page of their May 2023 newsletter features a man named Steven – formerly homeless and an addict – who became a Christian, got clean, and has put his life back together.  The caption on his picture says “Even if you don’t believe in God, this is a place where you can come and feel accepted, get warm, get food and get loved.”

That quote got me thinking about our many encounters with the homeless.  On the surface, the problem is usually mental illness and/or drug addiction.  But when you dig deeper, the thing that  kicked them out onto the streets isn’t either of those.  Rather, it is a failure of community.  Most of our homeless friends are far away from their families and often they are no longer welcome.  Some don’t have any family left.

Yes, we can give them financial and physical help, but we aren’t addressing the chief problem – we all need to belong with and to somebody.  The people who are most successful in helping the homeless are those who are best at bringing them into their communities.  There are various ways to do this – homeless shelters, tiny home communities, welcoming the homeless to your church, etc.  I’m no expert and I don’t know the statistics on what works best, but I do know this—if any of these are going to have lasting effect in homeless people’s lives, they have to fulfill Steven’s words above.

Most of us aren’t directly associated with homeless shelters, able to build tiny house communities, or even able to make the decisions about how our church interacts with the homeless.  But we all have at least a little say in our churches and we all live somewhere near a homeless shelter (hopefully an effective one!).  Most importantly, though, we can be a homeless person’s first point of contact for healthy community.  And we can all do SOMETHING to help them feel accepted, get warm, and get loved.  So, what are we waiting for?