Old First Church has a very difficult situation on its hands. It is the homeless men who live on Old First’s steps.
Pastor Daniel Meeter of Old First Church has a post on his blog about these men. He wants to share with the community who they are and why the church has decided, reluctantly, to let them stay there.
In many ways, Pastor Meeter is at the end of his rope about this. “We chased them away every morning. They came back every night. We threw out their stuff. They found new stuff. Only now they started getting even more hostile, to us and to other passersby. We finally found that we couldn’t beat them, and the only thing was to try to control it. Yes, they beat us.”
While they cause him a great deal of trouble and anger, Meeter concludes that these men “remain human beings, images of God, and they need to be treated with respect.”
At the same time, Meeter recognizes that the church belongs to the community and that the church has the responsiblity to be a good neighbor. These men scare kids, make lewd comments at women and passersby.
The situation is forcing Pastor Meeter and the community to look deeply within and figure out what is the right thing to do.
“It is a grief, and we’re at our wits end,” writes Meeter. “We have been unable to find any solution. In a strange way, the three of them are in control. Robert, Will, and Franklin
“They have names. They have souls. They belong to our community. They tell us something about ourselves.
Here’s an excerpt from his Pastor Meeter’s post on Old First Blog:
They have names. They have souls. They belong to our community. They tell us something about ourselves.
Their names are Robert Royster, Will Franklin, and Frank. They cause me a great deal of trouble, and lots of anger from our neighbors, and I do wish they would go away, but, whatever else, they remain human beings, images of God, and they need to be treated with respect.
People keep asking why don’t we get rid of them. We can’t. We’ve tried. Believe me, we have tried. They have abused our hospitality, they piss on our building, they leave food around, they leave garbage all over, they play their radio at great volumes (God forgive me, I have had to resort to theft against them to deal with that one). They are a pain in the neck. But we will not treat them as less than human beings.
We have tried to get rid of them. We’ve discovered the hard way that we can’t do it, we can’t beat them. Whenever I chase them away, they just wait an hour, two hours, and they come back. I go home at night, and they come back. No matter what we do or say, they come back.
I will confess a strong desire inside myself to just let them be. It’s Jesus’ church, not mine, not ours, and the New Testament is very clear about our hospitality to the poor. “The poor you will always have with you.” The parable of Lazarus. Etc. You get the point. And there is no asterix pointing to a codicil that says, “the nice poor.”
But at the same time I recognize we belong to a community, and the church has the responsiblity to be a good neighbor, and if the guys scare the kids, and make lewd comments at women and passersby, and if they leave food scraps around for vermin to get at, etc. etc., then, well, I know that the church has to be a good neighbor. So we decided this last July that they absolutely had to go. We tried to get rid of them. As I said, we couldn’t…
I live a couple blocks away and luckily have never been personally affected by the men who hang out at the church. It’s tough though because they really are a part of our community, for better or worse. This became very clear to me when I was on the Q train one morning recently, and someone tapped me on shoulder. I turned around, and it was the homeless man from 7th ave who has all the plastic bags, and stays on the east side of the street. He told me that he liked my haircut (which I had done the weekend before) and that it looked really nice short. He was very sincere and it was such a sweet thing to say and I thanked him for saying so. He’s a part of my little Park Slope world for better or for worse.
This is really a difficult situation. I live on Carroll Street and pass these guys every day. I have to say that they have never said anything nasty to me and have never even asked for money. Most of the time they’re reading or sleeping or drinking. The big problem, as the pastor also mentions, is urination. My lord, the smell is overpowering if you walk past the church garden on Carroll Street. I really feel sorry for the people who live in the building next door. Is it right that members of our community have to live on a street that has basically become a urinal? But I also feel sad for the guys and hope that they get some help. Definitely a big dilemma.
This is really a difficult situation. I live on Carroll Street and pass these guys every day. I have to say that they have never said anything nasty to me and have never even asked for money. Most of the time they’re reading or sleeping or drinking. The big problem, as the pastor also mentions, is urination. My lord, the smell is overpowering if you walk past the church garden on Carroll Street. I really feel sorry for the people who live in the building next door. Is it right that members of our community have to live on a street that has basically become a urinal? But I also feel sad for the guys and hope that they get some help. Definitely a big dilemma.
I can really understand the pastor’s feelings concerning these men and others, when you pass them it is difficult to watch. just giving money is simply not the solution. A friend of mine who has a business on 7th near by has had to call police several times. I think the pastor should definitely contact the 7th ave community board, as this isa longtime community issue. The two gutys that are in charge of the board are Bob who owns Park slope Copy, and shawn who runs photofaction.. Perhaphs a more committed effort from the merchants would help. These men do need mental assistance.
As the pastor observes on the linked-to blog
“Why are they there at Old First? Easy. The money is good on Seventh Avenue. The money dries up, the guys go. Where I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant there are no panhandlers. Up at Ethical Culture the front porch is deeper and drier, but people don’t give out money on PPW.. . .It’s people giving them money that keeps it going”
I have a walking tour business that goes by everyday and i see those guys, so far never any trouble from them,and im passing w/ tourists…
I deeply sympathize with Pastor Meeter’s struggle. He is clearly a man of good heart and conscience. But part of what makes this problem so intractable is the now commonplace use of the word “homeless” to describe men like Robert, Will and Franklin, and the notion that their main problem is that they are “poor.”
When I began working as a social worker during the Carter administration, there wasn’t yet a “homelessness” epidemic in New York City. I remember clearly, however, when it changed dramatically and suddenly during the first Reagan administration. It began when funding for long-term residential psychiatric care was drastically cut, first by the federal government and then, out of necessity, by the states. Within a matter of a few years, no one was allowed to stay in psychiatric hospitals or treatment centers unless they were a clear and present threat of suicide or homicide. Most psychotic or otherwise seriously mentally ill people are neither actively homicidal or suicidal. But neither are they stable enough to provide for their own care as independent adults. Thrown out of the in-patient facilities, people like Robert, Will and Franklin were made poor and homeless, but not by cyclical economic forces or the vicissitudes of capitalism, but by short-sighted, hard-hearted political philosophies of extreme conservatism. People who are actually poor because they may have lost their jobs or suffered some other personal catastrophe don’t end up urinating on themselves and ranting obsenities on street corners. Only the seriously untreated mentally ill do that.
While I know that this doesn’t alleviate Pastor Meeter’s frustration with the situation on his church steps, a place to begin must always be to accurately understand the problem. The men are not the “poor” described in the New Testament. Robert, Will and Franklin don’t need money. They need psychiatric treatment in a facility that can also provide structure and teach basic self-maintenance to them. I have seen men like these become functional in such a facility. And I saw the places where such healing took place dismantled… a long time ago.