As the lead pastor of McKendree United Methodist Church in Downtown Nashville, the Rev. Dr. Stephen Handy has been leading community building efforts for years. Recently he was appointed as the associate district superintendent of the urban cohort district in the Tennessee/Western Kentucky conference of the United Methodist Church.
He talked with The Contributor about how downtown has changed and about his role in ensuring the church is involved in and part of the community it serves.
“The beauty of movements is that they always start with marginalized people in marginalized spaces,” Rev. Handy told The Contributor. “So, if we listen to those who are marginalized, not only do we learn from them, but they become a part of the solution. When they’re exposed, and we also give them resources, we can solve this homelessness/unhoused issue together as opposed to fighting people who are fighting for life every day.”
Serving people experiencing homelessness is a core mission of McKendree, and Rev. Handy serves currently as a member of the Homelessness Planning Council, a 25-member community board anchored within Metro government that serves as the governing body of the Nashville-Davidson County Continuum of Care (CoC).
For the past 15 years, you have served as the lead pastor of McKendree UMC. What do you do?
Part of my work is around helping clergy and laity understand their role in community, examining what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ beyond Sunday morning worship or Wednesday night Bible study. How do we understand the dynamics of everyday life in our communities where we’re planted?
So, for me, I try to help create space not only for dialogue but also for strategic engagement of the work that is needed. One of the things that we talk about is, “Are you aware of who you are as a church, and are you aware of the community that you sit in?” If those two things happen well, then connections form and relationships are built that are not transactional but transformational. Consequently, we see vibrant, flourishing communities that are in alignment with people in our church communities.
McKendree has used its building as a winter warming shelter in the past and for several years has run a transitional housing program. What are the services you offer to people experiencing homelessness in that program?
Probably 12 years ago now, we were doing Room In The Inn. I called Charlie Strobel [the late Nashville priest, activist and founder of temporary housing collective Room in the Inn] and said, “Charlie, I understand what Room In The Inn is doing, but is that it?” And Charlie looked at me and said, “No, it was a start for churches to do this work.”
Coming out of that conversation with Charlie, I met with our congregation. We decided to move away from doing Room In The Inn (the winter shelter program) and created a nonprofit to use our facility for transitional housing. We call that nonprofit Restoration Point, which has three main components. One is our feeding ministry. We feed about 100-125 people every week. We’re about to partner with another nonprofit on Fridays, so we’ll be serving twice a week. We not only serve food, but we sit with people. We’re here to find out what’s going on in their lives. Number two is, we have a clothes closet. We hand out about 10,000-12,000 pieces of clothing a year because we know our unhoused neighbors need clothing because seasons change. Then number three is our transitional housing facility, which is in the basement of our congregation. We use that space 365 days a year. We’re building relationships and helping people get housing.
What we were missing early on was the component of affordable housing, so when we met with Ryan LaSuer from Community Care Fellowship about the mobile housing navigation center, we thought this is the right connection because now we focus on moving people out of the transitional facility. At Restoration Point people get some of the tools to do life well. The mobile housing navigation center concept helps them prepare to transition into what is known in this city as affordable housing. What we have discovered is that when people move out of Restoration Point, we cannot move away. We still have to stay connected because they can get lonely [living] by themselves. They’ve been in the community on our campus, so we’re now trying to figure out what that looks like.
Do you think homelessness in Downtown and the response to it from the Downtown community has changed over the past 15 years?
Yes. It’s changed to the extent that unhoused neighbors, from a political standpoint, are viewed as an eyesore to tourism. So many of our congregational members who were a part of our community have moved away and many have died on the streets of Downtown Nashville and the peripheral of Downtown Nashville.
That’s not who we are in Downtown Nashville. With everything that’s growing up around us and with all the money that’s been poured into Downtown Nashville, then surely we should be able to find money to pour into our unhoused community around emotional trauma, around trauma in general, generational trauma, poverty, homelessness.
What, in your opinion, could and should the role of the faith community be when it comes to ending homelessness?
First of all, we have to convene people who are willing to work alongside us because traditionally we have allowed government to lead this conversation. I think the faith community gets to lead it. I don’t think they get to control it. So, we (faith community) get to invite a larger setting of people — governmental agencies have to be at that table, nonprofits have to be at that table, and philanthropy has to be at that table.
There is enough money in this city to do what needs to be done. And so, we have to continue to explore ways to keep those people together and plan and execute and then build. The challenge is, the model that we believe works best is just to move all the unhoused people into a housing facility without the wraparound services and without this understanding that there are some entrepreneurial and vocational training skills that we should be training for, and to let them know that you’re in a community that’s diverse. And often I feel that in Nashville, we just want to move all of the unhoused people together in the same [location]. And I contend that’s not community.
The church is best at [leading community building] because our doors are supposed to be open to all people of all stages of life. People are looking for two things in community, belonging and intimacy. The church should be the one who is facilitating belonging and intimacy in communities wherever we are. I find that happens in coffee shops a lot. I think it happens in gang membership. Whether it’s right or wrong how they do it, they understand belonging and intimacy as something that’s essential to life.
And I think the church has to reclaim its position as being not only the voice of equity, diversity, and inclusion but also being on the frontlines of how does that work and what’s our role in helping to build affordable housing and not wait on government to do that for us.
You serve on the Homelessness Planning Council, the governing body of the Continuum of Care, which includes all stakeholders within Davidson County that work together to coordinate efforts to end homelessness in our city. What are some opportunities you see that the Homelessness Planning Council should tackle?
I’m entering my second year, still learning the strategic planning process, learning the personalities.
Now the Homelessness Planning Council has the right people. We’re embedded in a governmental setting that has restrictions. [If] we can understand what needs to be done in a clear sense, in what I would call divine urgency, we can get more of these things done quickly because every day we don’t have the right amount of affordable housing, we lose another life on the streets. And we’re going to be held accountable at some point for losing these lives that we did not have to lose.
Once again, government has its place, but government cannot control the inflows and the outflows of not only ideas but also financial streams of income. So, we’ve got some really tremendous leaders that serve on that table, and I think as I sit around that table, we’re trying to work in a subset of the governmental space that is not aligned with the people on the streets. When you understand the day to day lived experience of the people on the streets, there is a difference in urgency that happens in this work. And I think we’re moving in that direction. I’m actually pleased with the direction. But is there more work to be done? Absolutely!