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OPINION: Homeless shelter should still be discussed in Jackson, but not by City leaders

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On Thursday, Jan. 2, Tennessee Homeless Solutions director Amy McDonald got a few minutes to tell the Jackson City Council how important a men’s homeless shelter would be to the process of what they do, which is help people work their way out of homelessness and into supporting themselves financially and staying on their meds if they have some type of mental illness.

Five days later after the City Council meeting, even though the homeless shelter wasn’t discussed in the meeting, I asked Mayor Scott Conger what the status was with the shelter.

To catch you up if you missed that whole story - last spring, the City was on the brink of beginning to build a men’s homeless shelter that would’ve been big enough to house nearly 100 people as a warming center but legitimately allow 28 men to stay long term (up to three months) while getting any training or treatment to help themselves get back on their feet.

As the plan - which had been 3.5 years in the making since Conger and former Innovation Chief Lauren Kirk wanted to respond appropriately and with some impact after an unhoused man literally froze to death the week before Christmas of 2020 in Downtown Jackson - was coming to fruition, some business owners downtown began pressuring some of the Council members to not allow this shelter to be built so close to their businesses. (I use the word “pressuring” because of the way members like Larry Lowrance and Candace Busby referred to the calls they got about the situation despite the fact both of their districts are well north of Downtown.)

The pressure became enough that Conger was willing to look elsewhere and began discussions to buy Airways Motel and put the shelter there and have Jackson Transit Authority buses come to the motel twice a day to transport the people there to RIFA or wherever else they needed to go downtown to get meals or other resources.

The City was close to buying it, but they took a month in October for due diligence. I haven’t confirmed on record what was found, but whatever it was, the City said it would take two more months to get some things fixed in the building and more due diligence. The end of those two months - Dec. 31 - came and went the week before I asked Conger about the status.

He said the City is no longer in the discussion and the one to ask about next steps would be those trying to secure the shelter, which now falls back onto THS and McDonald.

But let me ask anyone reading this - was it the responsibility of the City to even discuss building a homeless shelter? All they were doing was building it, and then they’d have handed the keys to THS and they would’ve run it.

The answer is no. A lot of people who claim to be Christians and will attend a church service this weekend have a good idea of who is called to extend a hand to the homeless, and that’s us who claim to follow Jesus.

Jesus called us to help those less fortunate. But unfortunately, the church over time has handed that responsibility off to the government to the point that the government has raised taxes (partially) to fund those social initiatives. And when the government helps people through those initiatives (particularly too much like during the pandemic), a lot of the right-leaning Christians saying that’s just the people elected into the government at the time trying to gain voters, so they give them what they want.

Has anyone thought about this? Maybe if our churches - particularly the ones with seven- or eight-figure annual budgets - did more of their share of helping those less fortunate, maybe some of those people would be loyal to the church that helped them instead of feeling compelled to vote for the elected official that tries to get noticed for allegedly helping them.

Sure, there would be some that would abuse the service and take as much as they could without helping anyone. That’s going to happen. But Jesus called us to be available to help and put forth the effort. He never put an asterisk or a disclaimer that we should only help those that we thought wouldn’t abuse the help.

When COVID happened, helping the homeless became complicated because Room In The Inn - a ministry of Area Relief Ministries in partnership with area churches - became difficult as it’s hard to help someone graciously and sacrificially and also stay six feet from them.

But the people at ARM and the folks at First United Methodist Church in Downtown Jackson figured it out. And a few other churches have since joined them, but it’s still nowhere near the number of churches that were helping a decade ago.

Last year when frigid weather was headed for the area, did City leaders call any other church besides FUMC? Not that I know of, because they knew FUMC would be willing to step up to help those who needed it.

Those of you who don’t attend there can disagree however much you want to with some of their beliefs. I do that myself. But in the same breath, you’ve got to respect them for making their facilities available to help those who need it and supplying them with a warm bed, a hot meal, and sacrificial love that someone who lives in a tent - by choice or otherwise - doesn’t feel very often.

Unfortunately, the Christian church - at the macro level - is as divided an entity as any in this country that’s full of divisions. I imagine a church scholar at Union or Lane or someone left over from Lambuth could inform us with a long history of how the macro church evolved from the people in Acts that would sell off large plots of land and give 100 percent of the proceeds to the church and meet together in homes for meals all seven days of the week to what it is now. But I have a hard time thinking today’s church is what Jesus had in mind as He was telling Peter about building His church in Matthew 16.

So because of that division, getting together and building a shelter would be a difficult task similar to building the Tower of Babel after God changed their languages.

But if the church took on a First Century Church mindset of “We’re going to do what Jesus told us to do - feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, help the sick and invalid, care for the orphans and widows and make disciples from those efforts,” a lot of the social problems in our city and country would become much smaller problems.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Reach him through e-mail at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X.com @JSEditorBrandon. Follow him on Instagram @EditorBrandon.