When Christ Episcopal Church in Alameda, California, was first approached about hosting a three-month shelter for homeless persons, its leaders didn’t realize how much the shelter would gather, transform, and engage their community.
For the Rev. Stephen McHale, leaning into the parish’s mission of gathering people into community, helping them be who God created them to be, and sending them out into the world to share God’s love as they have found it has also meant continuing to work with county and neighboring agencies to offer these services.
For the last nine years, Christ Church has hosted the Homeless Warming Shelter. Every winter, the parish hall becomes a warm place to sleep, shower, and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. With a capacity to serve up to 25 guests, the church provides fresh socks, underwear, and other amenities as needed. Well-behaved pets are welcome to accompany their owners, and local service providers are available to help guests find more sustainable housing and employment opportunities, if they so desire.
What started out as a seasonal shelter in rotation with other area churches has morphed into a longer-term partnership with the City of Alameda and Episcopal Community Services, which provides essential services to homeless persons across four counties in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The city covers two-thirds ($159,214) of the overall cost ($238,809) of overnight management, while Christ Church raises funds to cover the remaining one-third ($79,595). All funds are then distributed to Episcopal Community Services, which staffs and provides operational oversight of the warming shelter when it is open nightly from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. from December 1 to April 1.
All crisis intervention services at Christ Church follow a housing-first, trauma-informed, harm-reduction framework that aims for long-term housing retention and improved well-being for guests. The nonprofit agency sets up the rules—including no weapons, no racist language, and no disrespectful language—and Christ Church provides all meals.
McHale said this is a giant undertaking, but it’s one that residents throughout Alameda County have started to support.
“One of our volunteers keeps an online spreadsheet,” he said, that includes “different groups in our church, other churches in Alameda and Oakland, neighborhood groups, Girl Scout troops, Camp Fire groups, you name it. Anyone who wants to help out signs up to provide dinner, breakfast, and snacks. And it takes everyone because we need to feed people every night for four months.”
McHale said the homeless ministry is the best evangelism money can pay for, given that more than half of volunteers come from outside the church.
As a result, Christ Church is seeing a lot of new faces. Volunteers and guests desire community in the face of loneliness and isolation; and parents of small children want safe and nurturing communities.
As McHale sees it, his job is often to coordinate massive numbers of good-hearted volunteers, but it’s also to tell the story of parishioners who said yes to the invitation of caring for their neighbors, and to ensure the ministry stays financially viable.
In addition to oversight funds that support Episcopal Community Services, Christ Church raises another $90,000 annually to cover normal wear and tear on the building, the cost of utilities, and staff time. This money, which draws from the parish’s operations budget, recently funded the addition of a third shower and commercial laundry units in the parish hall.
The project, which is slated to open on December 1, involved moving a mop sink, installing a stackable commercial laundry unit next to the third shower, and then installing two more stackable commercial laundry units across the hall. These efforts are entirely run by volunteers, McHale said.
Even though the warming shelter only operates during the winter months, the shower program is active every Sunday afternoon, year-round. Up to 30 people start lining up during the coffee hour for 15-minute shower slots that open three hours later.
In that place, volunteers and guests, Episcopalian and Catholic, evangelical and unchurched and atheist, gather for coffee, conversation, and a little bit of food too.
Christ Church welcomes donations.
Cara Meredith, a freelance writer and postulant for holy orders in the Diocese of California, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
