Seeing Differently – Reflections on the Night Shelter

I have been involved with Birmingham Churches Winter Night Shelter for the last 5 years or so. It is an amazing project that enables several hundred volunteers from churches and communities around the city to open their buildings and offer welcome and shelter to people who would otherwise be sleeping rough. It is an ever evolving project that grows and changes year on year with more churches and individuals keen to get involved. On one level it is quite a small and simple activity, it certainly only scratches the surface of homelessness in Birmingham, but at least it’s something!

It means that each night of the week during some of the coldest months of the year, 12 men who would otherwise be sleeping rough will instead have a roof over their head. They will be welcomed into a warm safe space and invited to participate in the night shelter community for the time they are there.

I am less hands on with the shelter these days but in our first year I somehow found myself coordinating our pilot Winter Night Shelter project. I had run a number of projects in the past and was fairly confident in my skills on that score. Although I had no real practical experience of homelessness, I had theoretical knowledge and information and I knew homelessness was increasing, so along with a number of others, thankfully most of whom had far more practical experience than I did, we decided to try to do something to help.

We worked very closely and relied heavily on Housing Justice, a national Christian charity which supports church and community based shelter projects. They provided us with a model of how to do it and the resources and training we needed to make it happen. In December 2011 five churches agreed to host a pilot shelter project for 4 weeks starting in the coming January. Time was short but we found some funding, bought airbeds and bedding and sourced all the other resources we needed. Housing Justice did some training with us and we developed a relationship with a couple of homeless charities in the city who agreed to do our referrals.   We were excited, we were nervous, we were ready to welcome guests, we had some referrals and we were expectant, and on the first week we opened – no one came!

We learnt a lot in the first week and after some changes and some more relationship building the shelter soon began to fill up. It was great to see volunteers getting involved, different churches from different denominations and traditions, most of whom had never been involved in this sort of activity before, but they got stuck in and welcomed guests. I was pleased to have been part of enabling it to happen but the bit that really took me by surprise was how much, in such a short time, I came to care about our guests, and how much the conversations and interactions I had with them impacted my own journey of faith and discipleship.

While in lots of ways the shelter has evolved and changed over the years the general format remains the same. It begins about 7pm when the guests arrive by minibus from the pickup point. Usually beds are already laid out and so they pick a bed, settle in and then everyone, volunteers and guests, sit down to eat together. There is usually lots of conversation, sometimes in slightly broken English as it’s often not their first language. After the meal guests and volunteers alike play chess and card games, watch films, read the newspaper, and do the washing up. At some venues they play table tennis and pool, some guests get their heads down early and get some sleep, especially if it’s been a particularly wet or cold day, but there is always a good amount of conversation and laughter. It feels like a jumbled up community of people hanging out together and making space for one another to relax and be themselves, at its best you can’t really tell who is a guest and who is a volunteer.

Our guests are people with hopes and dreams and skills and interests just like me, but for whom the label “homeless” is one more barrier they have to cross.

I remember one year when we asked if we could take a few photos, one guest very quietly explained to our shelter coordinator why he’d rather not be in the pictures. He was worried that they would make their way onto the internet, he hoped one day he would meet someone and get married, and so he didn’t want this time of his life to follow him around for the rest of it. He had hopes and dreams filled with happiness and possibility; even though he didn’t even have a roof over his head he still had hope for the future.

Sadly this is not the case for all of our guests and for some their situations seem nothing short of hopeless. There is one guest in particular who I got to know in the first couple of years, his story is not one of radical transformation but of decline. His circumstances and increasing substance abuse means that he is now considered too high risk to be referred into our shelter, and even though I haven’t seen him for more than 3 years, I have not forgotten him. When we met him he was initially quite anxious and very wary of us, but he still came back to the shelter, and amidst the chaotic mixture of anxiety, bravado, half truths and suspicion with which he related to us there was also a lovely young man; resilient, compassionate, and resourceful – although his resourcefulness was not always put to good use! There were moments when he went out of his way to help, offering items of clothing to others he felt needed them more; times when he was genuinely grateful that churches had bothered to do something like this for “people like us”.

I pray for him regularly, the outreach teams tell me that he’s still around and that things haven’t really changed much for him. I pray for him and also for others like him; I pray that they might find freedom, restoration and peace. I pray that change may happen, I believe that it can, I hope that it will, and yet I know it may not. It is one of the prayers I most wrestle with God about, questioning Him and searching for answers, usually finding I offer it back to Him with my questions unanswered, but believing that God loves each one of them and cares for them far more than I ever could.

I was reminded recently of the words spoken by both Jesus and John the Baptist in Mathew’s gospel, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near” (Mtt 3:2 , 4:17). I am no biblical scholar but I am told that the greek word metanoeō which in most English versions of the bible is translated as “repent”, does not really accurately do justice to the meaning of the word. Apparently metanoeō is better translated as a change in thought and action, or to “see differently”. It is a shift in how we see, and feel and understand and behave. So in fact what both Jesus and John the Baptist were saying was probably something more like “See differently, for the Kingdom of God is near”

Being part of the shelter and participating in the temporary community it creates, means that I can no longer see homelessness as an abstract problem that affects our city; now homelessness is the lived experience of people I’ve spent time with and got to know, and they aren’t “homeless people”, they are real people. People who I have eaten meals with, played cards and pool with, discussed the news with, laughed with and had meaningful conversations with; people who have hopes, dreams and gifts, and have friends and family that they care about.

My faith tells me that each of them is made in the image of God, and so perhaps when Christ calls us to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger it is not just for their benefit but for ours. When we seek to genuinely engage with another person, particularly when that person’s life experience is so completely different to our own, something mutually transformative takes place. My experience of the night shelter leads me to believe that when we really take time to “be with” rather than just “doing for” then we are changed by that encounter, and that somehow the Kingdom of God is nearer and we begin to “see differently”.

This blog will be featured on the Christians In Practice website, which is  a one year research project exploring how community activity and Christian learning feed each other.