Faith Leaders and Our Homeless Neighbors - A Walk that Continues
With the convening of Wheeling’s new clergy-led Homeless Taskforce, we reflect on Wheeling’s long and active tradition of faith-based accompaniment with our homeless neighbors. It gives us hope that the City is now adopting this time-tested approach.
Wheeling’s faith-led homeless legacy runs so deep, it is difficult to pinpoint a start: Ron Mulholland sharing The Good Samaritan at Youth Services System, our United Way under George Smolder and previous directors, the Sisters of St Joseph on this hill and 15th Street or the Jesuits at WJU, the Wheeling Council of Churches starting The Soup Kitchen, the ‘Salt & Pepper Sisters’ or Bishop Schmidt or Sister Constance at the Neighborhood Center with Temple Shalom staffing at Christmas, Wheeling’s own HoH Catholic Worker, St Matthew’s Charlie’s Closet, or First Presbyterian’s or Vance’s or St. Luke’s or so many of our local churches' free meals and food pantries and community drives. Our spiritual community truly abides with the least of these.
The past decade, as the accompanying timeline recounts, has been tumultuous, as the country's homeless challenges have hit Wheeling. But Wheeling’s faith community has been at our homeless neighbors’ side through it all.
Where overwhelmed cities turned to sweeps, our faith leaders procured legal representation for our homeless neighbors, and won in the court of law – twice; winning a formal eviction process, and a city-established exempted camp.
During a global pandemic Wheeling’s faith community banded together and started a mobile hygiene station led by the House of Hagar, sourced from a Baptist disaster relief organization, placed in the Catholic Charities parking lot, staffed and stocked by countless local clergy and churches, and even blessed by a priest.
When there was no place for the Winter Freeze shelter, Catholic Charities WV offered their ballroom, for one night on the eve of the Homeless Ban and even for a full Winter season.
Every time homelessness was on the city council docket, people of faith fervently joined the chorus of concerned community members commenting, making art, taking to the streets, and amplifying the voices of our unhoused neighbors. There is nothing like seeing demonstrators in clerical collars and Bible verses on protest signs.
Even after Wheeling, like other exhausted cities, passed a homeless ban, people of faith convened a ‘Prayerful Gathering on our Relationship with our Homeless Neighbors.’ More than 80 people, including a dozen clergy and a bishop from Wheeling’s many denominations gathered and prayed with Scripture. We honestly questioned if, as people of faith, our human laws are consistent with God’s laws to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter those who need it.”
Indeed, Wheeling’s faith community started West Virginia’s first street paper – this Mustard Seed Mountain – to help give voice and dignity to our homeless neighbors.
Walking Forward in Faith
So finally, after years of Wheeling’s homeless and people of faith praying, acting, and struggling alongside each other, the city is now reaching out to our faith community about homelessness. We hope this is an opportunity to move past blame and unilateral actions, and move towards collaboration and solutions.
It hasn’t always been pretty. It has been excruciatingly hard. That is the reality of homelessness. It is the reality of life.
Are our local clergy being called into politics to rubber stamp spiritual approval for immoral policies? Or, will Wheeling’s faith communities carry on - in religious and public life - the sacred tradition of loving God by loving our neighbors; following the examples of holy strangers living unhoused and in strange lands, the likes of Abraham, Hagar, Moses, Jesus and Mary, the disciples, and countless prophets, saints and holy men and women from scripture of old to our own local religious legacies of today?
Indeed, Wheeling’s faith community has walked far with our homeless neighbors, we trust them to keep walking, together.