http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/Ludington_Shelter.mp3
Homeless shelters are gearing up for the busy season, when many who sleep outside will seek shelter from the bitter Northern Michigan winter nights.
And this year, two new shelters are opening up in Northwest Lower Michigan, one in Manistee and one in Ludington.
Neither has its own building. Area churches will take a week at a time, agreeing to feed and house community members with nowhere else to go. They're modeling the programs after a similar one in Traverse City, known as Safe Harbor.
Last Sunday night, the shelter in Ludington opened for the very first time. Volunteers set up 10 cots in a basement-level Sunday School classroom, made a meatball dinner for 25, and prayed.
"Dear Heavenly father, I thank you. I thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve these people Lord God. And Lord let us be your hands and feet tonight Lord. May our words be your words, Lord. In this I pray."
Susan Parkinson stands in a circle with more than a dozen others. They ask God to fill Emmanuel Lutheran Church. The church is the homeless shelter for this week. Next week the shelter will move on to another church. The new program called Hospitality in the name of Christ, or Hospitality Inc.
Despite all the preparations, no one had any idea if there will be any guests the first night - or, if so, how many. But they have no doubt of the need for shelter. Susan Parkinson says some months ago her church, Path of Life Ministries, helped a homeless couple get off the streets. And on this, the Sunday of the shelter's opening, she learned the couple is once again homeless and living in a tent behind a Ludington home improvement store.
"And we just had over three inches of rain," she says. "And I can't imagine living in a tent and having that much rain. I don't think God wants us to live in tents. We lived in tents over 2000 years ago. We don't need to be living in tents today."
Susan Parkinson has a job and a roof over her head, but she's had some financial troubles of her own. She lost her apartment and she's moved in with family.
"So I didn't have to go out to the streets, and I'm thankful for that," she says. "But a lot of these people don't have family here and that breaks my heart. To know that one person - even one that doesn't have a place to live - just rips at me. In today's society that shouldn't be. It shouldn't be."
And on the first night of Ludington's roving church shelter, there was one guest - a woman who says she's fleeing an abusive relationship.
At first she felt awkward to be the shelter's only guest, surrounded by so many volunteers, but mostly, she was just grateful for a place to sleep. At nine o'clock in the morning, she didn't know where she'd be laying her head for the night. And the stress of the day had left her exhausted.
According to numbers compiled by the Michigan State Housing Development Authority there were a hundred homeless people in Mason County in 2008. In the first quarter of 2009, the latest data available, the estimate had climbed to 148.
Volunteer Shelter Coordinator Tammy Martin says one of the most difficult tasks of opening has been to convince Ludington that there really is a homeless population here.
"The pastors can say that, the agencies can tell you that. But you don't see it," she says. "You don't see it on the streets. It's not like the bigger cities. You don't have the panhandlers."
Tammy Martin says getting people in the door will take more than just getting the word out to the homeless population that the churches are welcoming them. The churches also have to develop a reputation of making guests feel comfortable, and they have a plan for how to do that.
"Be a friend, a welcome face, just living the Gospel, you know, instead of beating them over the head with the Bible," she says.
While no one literally wanted to beat anyone over the head, division over whether to have Bible studies at the shelter with guests was strong enough in the early stages to make some wonder whether the churches could really pull this shelter off at all.
Emmanuel Lutheran's Pastor, James Friesner, says some pastors in the area felt the shelter needed to offer a strong religious experience. Others, like him, thought opening the doors and making people comfortable was enough.
"And I thought, 'Oh here we go. You want to slow it down, get a group of clergy and, maybe next winter,'" he says. "But this is how I hoped. That we would not go into another winter before something was in place."
Friesner says this opening hasn't come a day too soon, either. He got a confirmation of that the day the shelter would open, in Sunday worship.
"I had a person come to worship this morning who's homeless. And they brought all their bags in. And they set them all down in the hallway. And I looked at one of the persons on staff, and I said, 'Well, there it is smack-dab in our face and I pray that we see it.' And she said, "Oh pastor, we see it. We see it.'"