Blog Posts
The Importance of Saying “Yes”
Photo by Naomi August on Unsplash
Louis was a UCLA graduate student, working towards his PhD in engineering, when he realized that college student homelessness was a massive under-the-radar problem. It bothered him. A lot. Louis felt compelled to do something about this problem and set his mind on opening a shelter to house homeless college students. He figured there might be a church, synagogue or mosque near campus that might be interested, so he set out to meet with congregation leaders.
Each time Louis presented his idea, he was met with sympathetic ears … but the answer was always a disappointing "no."
Louis pushed on. After meeting Louis, the Executive Director of the Westside (Los Angeles) Coalition for Housing, Hunger and Health, approached me shortly after I began serving as Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica, California. She said to me, “Pastor, there is a young man with a dream and I would like you to meet him”
By the time I met with Louis he had already spoken with some 50 other west Los Angeles and Santa Monica congregations. I was the 51st.
And I was the one who said “yes.”
Now I knew nothing about homelessness among college students but quickly discovered that some 10% of college students in California were homeless (and 20% hungry). While those numbers are higher in California than other parts of the USA, because of the high cost of housing in our state, I also found that this is a national problem, affecting students across the USA.
Louis’ dream was to open the “Bruin” shelter (“Bruin” is the nickname for UCLA athletes and students), staffed by volunteer students. It was to be the first shelter for homeless college students in the USA and only the second shelter for homeless people run by college students in the USA (the other shelter run by college students was at University Lutheran Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a shelter for the general homeless population). Student volunteers would serve as resident assistants and provide dinner and breakfast for our residents. They would also raise the funds for the ongoing expenses. Residents would be pre-screened by the student leaders and stay in the shelter for the entire semester, or until they could find more permanent housing.
Mt. Olive Church had been around since 1942. It is a small (225 members) but very active congregation. A large (100+ students) preschool. Home of the Westside Coalition for Housing, Hunger and Health. Host to fifteen 12 step groups and monthly jazz concerts as well as many other musical and community groups.
And, in 2015, a congregation with unused space in our facilities.
We allowed the shelter to turn two unused classrooms into a large dorm room for ten residents and let them use the Parish Hall balcony area for storage. Since the residents came in each evening around 7pm and left each morning at 7am, they were able to use other shared facilities like the kitchen and other spaces for study.
So, it was easy for our Congregation Council and for me to say “yes.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, this new venture was not without challenges and setbacks. We needed to get a zoning change to allow us to be a “hotel” in our neighborhood. We needed renovations to our facilities, adding a shower to one of our bathrooms and a sprinkler system to the new dorm room where 10 students would sleep. We opened and then had to shut down for a time because of these zoning and renovations needs.
But we also had amazing support from our congregation and community. Before approving the zoning change, the City of Santa Monica solicited comments from the community and received 62 responses, 60 of them positive! We had financial support from the Santa Monica City Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the ELCA’s Southwest California Synod, among many others. A local architect did all the architectural drawings for the needed building changes and even found a local contractor to donate the renovations. A Los Angeles Times newspaper columnist became our champion. People would literally stop me on the street and ask how they could help!
The night we opened it rained. We had gotten homeless students out of their cars and off the streets into a safe, dry place to sleep, eat and study.
In addition to financial support, the shelter received amazing media coverage with articles on The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times newspapers among many others plus stories on PBS and NPR and a 2019 feature story on CBS Sunday Morning (which was followed by a Sunday Doonesbury comic about college student homelessness – I wonder where Garry Trudeau got that idea?)
Since we opened the Bruin Shelter, our college student homeless shelter ministry, now called “Students 4 Students Shelters,” has expanded to include the Trojan Shelter (staffed by volunteer students from the University of Southern California) in Los Angeles and the Aggie House in Davis, California (staffed by student volunteers at the University of California at Davis). Students are ready to open the Slug Shelter in Santa Cruz, California (staffed by student volunteers from the University of California at Santa Cruz) as soon as they can find a site. We are in conversation with student leaders at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, among other campuses. All sponsored by Mt. Olive Lutheran Church.
All because the leaders of Mt. Olive said “yes.
Lots of congregations have unused space, often nearly empty for six days each week. And the housing crisis affects every community. No one left Mt. Olive because we opened the shelter. On the contrary, Mt. Olive membership grew because of our shelter ministry. People joined our congregation because they wanted to be part of a church that served the community in this way. Our Congregation Council was unanimous in support for this effort. We did not feel we needed to go the congregation for an approval vote. The shelter paid/pays its own way. There was/is no financial burden for Mt. Olive because of the shelter ministry.
Maybe it is time for your congregation to say “yes?”
More information on Students 4 Students Shelters can be found at www.s4sla.org .
Rev. Eric Shafer
The Rev. Eric C. Shafer was Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica from April, 2014 until his retirement in July, 2022. He is currently the “Pastor in Residence” for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
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As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
An Ode To The Ones Who Were There
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
This post originally appeared on Rev. Angela Denker’s Substack newsletter, I’m Listening.
There is a version of ingratitude that affects even those who claim to be anti-consumerist, especially within the church.
It extends outward from religion into creative types like artists and musicians and writers. And parents of young kids. And family members.
And … shoot. It’s all of us.
I’m talking about that notion to focus on “the ones who got away.” The ones who didn’t come. The non-RSVP-ers, which can be a large group if you’ve ever hosted an event, a wedding, or a 6-year-old birthday party.
I don’t think it’s just me, but we’ve all gotten kind of flakey in this year 3 of life with COVID-19. I noticed recently that our local salons refused to book appointments without a credit card on file, such was the huge amount of no-call no-shows impacting the books of stylists and estheticians.
I was talking to another mom/pastor friend earlier today about this great temptation to think that the thing that heals us is going to be some kind of blank nothingness-infused Netflix binge. Earlier today, I talked to a musician friend who told me that he’d realized a year or so ago that he’d entered a phenomenon called “post-burnout-burnout” where he was wandering through the world in a sort of semi-numb state, and even playing music couldn’t ignite his former sense of passion in him.
He stepped away for a bit from his full-time job, but for what it’s worth, on the morning I spoke to him he was playing music again, full of life and passion and all the things that made him feel alive.
He was no longer in post-burnout-burnout. And as I talked to him, in the quiet calm of the seminary chapel after I preached there last week, I felt the edges of my recent myopic exhaustion and overwhelm begin to melt away.
Gratitude will do that, of course. But it’s more complicated than just “giving thanks” or making lists. I think the life-changing gratitude we’re all hungry for entails a new way of seeing, a new way of remembering, and a new way of forgetting.
This is my ode and my thanksgiving to the ones who were there.
It may or may not be inspired by 10+ years in ministry, where every Sunday is like throwing a birthday party and you’re not sure if anyone will come, as well as more recently inspired by that experience I had last week preaching chapel at the seminary where I earned my M. Div.
Since I graduated in 2013, having decamped in my third year for the West Coast and finishing my final fourth year remotely/at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, I’d had mixed feelings about going back to Luther Seminary. It had long been the largest Lutheran seminary, but numbers had dwindled since I started in 2009, due to a number of factors, political tension in the denomination, a general lack of interest in post-graduate studies in a field that pays low wages with diminishing congregants, financial woes at the school, and whatever else. Life changes; the world changes; it’s not all bad.
A photo from Luther Seminary’s now-closed Chapel of the Cross
Still, sometimes I have a hard time with change. I’d want to walk back into seminary and have everything be like it once was, when I was 24 years old, engaged to be married, and generally without much of a care in the world. I’d want to see the old friends I’d listen to music on the boombox with in the basement at “God’s Gym,” or walk down to the nearby school where we played pick-up basketball. I’d want to walk to the bookstore, which no longer exists, or pray in the secondary chapel, which is also now closed.
Maybe I used the seminary as sort of a way to manage my grief about growing up, about the changing world and the changing church, and ultimately, the changing me. My thoughts and beliefs had changed a lot since seminary. I no longer imagined pastoring a megachurch or speaking at an Evangelical conference. I was chagrined about the church’s and my own potential, as well as the world’s.
And still Luther Seminary stood there, 25 minutes from my Minneapolis home, at once venerable and full of history and promise and itself too somewhat chastened by the difficulties of the past few years and by many who had been pained and damaged in its midst, for various reasons.
I admittedly was not the best chapel attendee as a seminary student, though I promise you I really did do all the reading. I did! Ask my roommate and the permanent indentation made by my behind in my living room reading chair, faded and ripped with overuse.
Anyway though, I had some memories from chapel. Students strewn across three sides of the chapel pews, with the far-right side reserved for faculty members, who would watch and judge that day’s preacher and examine the word for potential heresies. I’m kind of joking here, but it should be noted that that former faculty section was once called “the Sanhedrin.”
When I stood up to preach last week, though, I noticed that the faculty section was empty. A few professors were simply seated amongst the students present, and a few members from outside the community, one a beloved pastor who had driven in from the suburbs to say hi to me. I was struck again by sort of that empty sense of memory forever changed. What had become of those wise scribes? Some had retired, some left in disagreement, some were still there but just not at chapel that day. Some taught primarily distance students now, admittedly a much more practical way to manage seminary education. Who knows, really. It has been a number of years now. Time passes. Things change.
This writing though, it isn’t about them; the ones who got away or went away. In the past I was often one of them: spending most of my 20s and early 30s moving across the country and back again; trying out different cities and churches and enjoying every minute of adventure and love and newness.
Now, nearly six years into our time in Minneapolis and with no plans to leave the home we’ve spent countless hours fixing up, I’m part of a new group. The ones who stay. The ones who were there. And I have a new appreciation for this historically under-appreciated group.
THANK YOU. Thank you to the ones who just keep showing up. Week after week. The ones who sit comfortingly in their all-but-assigned pews or chairs in the rural sanctuaries that make up the majority of our nation’s churches. The ones who drive school buses and show up each morning and afternoon to get our kids to school safely. The ones who teach, day in and day out. Those who say, OK, I’ll serve on that committee. I’ll decorate. I’ll help with the meal. I’ll clean up.
Thank you to the ones who were there. The ones we’ve too often ignored in a quest for more numbers more eyeballs more money more consistency more security. The ones who were there get understandably tired of this constant quest for more and new and better. I think of my denomination’s drive to get “1 million new young and diverse members,” and I think it kind of smacks of this economic pressure for more more more more more. An engine that never has enough fuel. A beast that is never satisfied.
So much for gratitude.
This discontentment can seep into our individual lives as well. You find yourself obsessing about the ones who weren’t there. The rejections. The no-shows. The no-replies. The ghosting. The choices you didn’t make. The paths you didn’t take. The unanswered prayers.
And all the while, people like the folks sitting with me in chapel last week are standing there in front of you, jumping up and down.
“We’re here!” they’re yelling. “We’re right here!”
It’s my family, my husband, Ben, my kids, my parents, my brother, my longtime friend from high school, Lyz.
It’s that encouraging email, that message you forget too quickly, the mom who says her kid really likes playing with yours …
Who is it for you? Who’s showing up for you?
Sometimes, if you ask me that, and I’m in that pit, I’ll be stuck in bitterness. And if you say, “Well, God is there for you!”
I won’t be able to see God. Nothing. Legions of the ones who weren’t there stand in lines like ghosts, haunting my night and day.
So this new year. I’m going to start instead by counting. Purposefully. Slowly. The ones who were there. Again and again. And as I do so, in their faces - in your faces - I see God.
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | https://angeladenker.substack.com/
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.