VANCOUVER, BC—Turnout was larger than expected at a one-day seminar on how churches can help provide shelter and housing for growing numbers of homeless people across the Lower Mainland. It was “a watershed moment,” say its organizers.

Working people threatened

Two hundred pre-registered—the most that co-chair Jonathan Bird says they were prepared to accommodate—but 250 actually showed up. More importantly, they all left united in purpose, despite having come from across the denominational spectrum.

“While things will continue to divide folks who were there, they found something to affirm in Christ’s name with full hearts,” says Bird, the associate for social involvement with City in Focus (CIF), a ministry to the people of Vancouver. “And what they found to affirm is coming alongside their struggling neighbours.”

“We’re in the midst of a crisis,” says Tim Dickau, pastor of Grandview Calvary Baptist Church in East Vancouver and a keynote speaker at the conference. “Housing prices and rents have gone up so rapidly, [but] income assistance has not been raised for 12 years.”

“In the Lower Mainland,” Bird points out, “less than one per cent of all livable suites…are available at welfare rates. So even if you get on welfare, the chances are one in 99 that you’ll find a place that you can afford.”

As a result, surveys suggest the ranks of the homeless are growing at an alarming pace. A study conducted for the suburban cities of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, for example, found 177 people who had no place to live—almost five times higher than in a survey done just in March 2005.

“It’s not only people who are ‘down and out’ who are in danger of homelessness or are homeless. It’s working people...it’s families who are losing their homes,” says Dickau.

Greg Paul, executive director of Sanctuary Ministries in Toronto, credits a growing awareness that homelessness is not—and never has been—just an inner-city problem for the high conference turnout.

“People in the suburban communities are beginning to realize that they are the sending communities for even urban homelessness,” he says.

By a show of hands, about two-thirds of the conference participants indicated they had never before taken up the issue.

With funding from World Vision and CIF donors, a steering committee formed at the conference will spend the next year on follow-up activities, including a survey to gauge churches’ interest in, and financial capacity to support, various types of housing projects.

“One of the challenges we face...is the challenge of the Church working together in Vancouver,” says Dickau, who has led his own church for 17 years to provide shelter and housing for the homeless. “We’re just not good at it.”

One way churches can participate, he suggests, would be to donate their parking lots as an incentive to get other partners involved. He proposes building underground parking for the church with affordable housing on top.

“Churches all over the city...could explore this possibility,” he says. “Municipalities are...recognizing that hardly anybody [on social assistance] has cars, so they don’t need to make parking for people in social housing.”

“This is a great example,” says Paul, “of how people and communities of faith, [with] our very different perspective and approach, could create new kinds of opportunities that I think are wonderful and would just be a fabulous witness.”

Bird believes that while the capacity of most churches to address homelessness is “very limited,” they can still play an important role.

“At best, what the Church can do is model a quality response...and then partner beyond the faith community to do those models in the first place, and secondly, to share the lessons of those models,” he says.

“I think the biblical phrase is being a mustard seed.”