Rev. Jay Voorhees
MONTPELIER — The phone rang at 2 a.m. — the police. There had been an incident in the parking lot behind the church: people loud and out of control, neighbors calling. So I threw on some clothes and drove through the rain to see what was going on.
When I got there, a group was gathered on the back porch, sleeping bags spread out, trying to stay dry and warm. They weren’t there to cause trouble. But trauma and drink don’t mix well, and an argument had turned into a shove, then a hit.
All was calm by the time I arrived. We talked about what happened and how it could have gone differently. I told them they couldn’t stay if it kept happening, and they promised they’d be quiet. Then someone looked at me and asked, “Where else can we go?”
That question haunts me, because the honest answer is nowhere — not for lack of ground in Montpelier, but for lack of anywhere legal, staffed, and warm. So, they stayed, and I went home. The next morning, they were still there when volunteers arrived to make lunch.
I’ve had some version of that night more times than I can count, here and, before Vermont, in a Nashville neighborhood where I ran a transitional shelter for years. The shape of it is consistent from state to state: skyrocketing rents, gaps in mental health and addiction care, a lack of services built for people who have nowhere else to be.
I understand why this unsettles people. Some see what happens on church property, see a city unwilling to force people off public land, and conclude our compassion has become the problem — that if we made things harder, people would stop coming, stop staying, become someone else’s difficulty. I don’t think that comes from meanness. It comes from watching a crisis with no end in sight and wanting an explanation simple enough to act on.
But I’ve been close to this a long time now, in two states, and what I actually see isn’t a community too generous for its own good. I see a city and state that haven’t built the infrastructure this work requires and have left churches holding what’s left — mostly unasked, and only occasionally, briefly, compensated for it.
Consider Montpelier’s own encampment policy, often called remarkably lenient. It gives the city wide discretion to declare almost anywhere off-limits — last year an amendment nearly restricted every city park, defeated only by a tie-breaking vote. A city councilor has admitted the policy promises shelter space the city doesn’t have. That’s not generosity run amok. That’s a policy with no floor — and the floor that exists, some nights, is a church hall.
It’s also worth saying that the theory behind much of this frustration — that people come to Vermont because we’re too generous — has been checked against the numbers and doesn’t hold up. Most Vermonters experiencing homelessness became homeless here, among people they already knew.
None of this is new to people of faith. Long before “Methodist” meant anything, it was a taunt aimed at a small group of Oxford students who kept a weekly rota to visit the men and women locked in the city jail — teaching them, paying down what debts they could, sitting with the sick. When John Wesley later gave instructions for how his societies should care for the poor, he told them to ask first whether people had enough food, clothing, and fuel for winter. Only then should you ask about their souls. That ordering was not incidental. It still is the ordering.
So when people ask why churches keep doing this, even under criticism, I think the honest answer has two parts that don’t cancel each other out. We do it because we want to — because every person carries a worth that isn’t up for negotiation, and because we take seriously a command to love our neighbor never qualified by whether the neighbor was easy to love. And we do it because we don’t have much choice — because we’re often the last thing standing between a person and a night nobody survives.
That’s not an argument against limits. Grace isn’t an open door with no one minding it. We ask people to leave when they’re violent, and we want a mental health and justice system that can actually hold people accountable, instead of leaving that job to whoever’s nearby. But the answer to a housing crisis and a broken mental health system was never fewer people willing to open a door on a cold night. It was always going to be more of us, together — city, state, and church, each finally doing the part only it can do.
I think about those people behind Trinity all the time — at the Community Table lunch, by the back door, passing on the street. And I worry, because winter isn’t far away, and I think of the people in my past I found dead in a parking lot or buried after they died outside with nowhere to go. That isn’t hyperbole. That’s reality.
Whatever Montpelier decides about how to handle this crisis, we must remember that people’s lives are on the line.
And for people of faith, we believe we are called to love the neighbors we have, not the neighbors we might choose.
The Rev. Jay Voorhees is the pastor of the Trinity, Grace, and Northfield United Methodist churches in Montpelier, Plainfield, and Northfield.
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