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This summer, a leadership group at Meadowlake Presbyterian in Huntersville discussed how the church could reach into its own community rather than send its people elsewhere for mission projects.
Three of the eight leaders separately had brought a newspaper article to the meeting that said the Salvation Army's Center of Hope emergency shelter needed help to house homeless women this fall.
"We said, 'Simple enough. That's what we're doing,'" said Scott Salzman, a church elder.
The article, published in July on the Observer's front page, outlined the Salvation Army's emergency plan to ask churches to provide shelter for homeless women for a week each from Sept. 1 through early December. Volunteer Steve Brumm had made calls for three weeks but signed up only 11 churches.
"The article was critical," Brumm said this week. "I got enough churches to fill the weeks that they asked me to fill."
The Center of Hope project asked Charlotte houses of worship to take in more homeless people for longer stays than ever before.
Meadowlake Presbyterian has worked with Room in the Inn, an Urban Ministry Center program where local sites, such as churches and colleges, provide temporary housing for homeless people through the winter. But the church had never housed guests from the Center of Hope.
"There was a heavy undertaking of making sure you have the logistics in place," Salzman said. "We turned the sanctuary into a housing facility."
The church provided air mattresses, linens and food. They invited the women to take part in the life of the church, welcoming them to join in with the choir, which practiced in the sanctuary.
It hosted a movie night and invited a makeup consultant one evening to do the women's makeup.
Salzman said spending a week with the guests blew away his expectations of what they would be like.
"I think in our minds we have this image of who might be in a shelter, and when I walked in that wasn't the case," he said. "We learned from this that our friends and neighbors are hurting."
Deronda Metz, director of social services for the Salvation Army, said the homeless women who are staying in churches love the experience.
"Initially they were resistant, because they didn't know what to expect," Metz said. "(At the Center of Hope), even if they have to sleep on the floor, they know the routine."
Churches, which provide volunteers each night, can spend more time with the women than the Salvation Army staff can. There the ratio can be one staff member per 50 clients, Metz said.
"At the churches they get one-on-one (attention), and they love it," Metz said. "It's been a positive experience for the churches and for the women."
Metz said the program has housed about 50 women who needed shelter, exceeding her expectations of housing about 25 women in churches.Thirty churches in and around Charlotte are participating.
The Salvation Army is looking for "a more permanent solution" for housing more homeless people, but Metz said the church model has worked in the interim for the Center of Hope.
"The churches have done it," she said, "and we were able to do it without raising funds because the churches do it at no cost to us." The Salvation Army is planning to repeat the program in the spring.
Salzman of Meadowlake Presbyterian said housing the women has confirmed and reinforced the church's decision to get more involved in ministry to homeless people.
The church is considering how it can help people living in shelters become self-sufficient and how the church can "make a real difference.
"It's our belief that when you're reaching out to somebody, that's when you see Christ," Salzman said. "When you're helping somebody, that's when (Christ) makes himself most apparent."
