Room at the inn

The New Jersey Star Ledger reports on how one Episcopal priest started a homeless shelter in Monclair, NJ - one of the wealthier suburbs of the US.

"You have experienced doors being shut, is that right?" he asked the congregation last month at House of Prayer in Newark, where he is interim pastor. "Doors we thought we should have been able to go into and journey in this direction or that. Only to find another door was opened, and we stepped into that door and realized God opened it for us, and those doors have lead us to where we are today."

The doors through which the 72-year-old Renn walked on his way to Montclair and MESH include ones at Boeing, where he worked as an engineer after getting bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. Another door lead to his work as a missionary in Zimbabwe for six years. Another to Nutley, where he served as pastor of Grace Episcopal Church for 23 years.

But of all the doors Renn has walked though, perhaps the most important was the one he passed through almost a year ago; the one that took him into the bitter cold. The one that made him think: Someone is going to freeze to death.

Last January, as the temperature dropped, Renn's anxiety rose.

Each day, as he felt the wind sharpen, he found himself fearing the same thing -- that some homeless person would freeze to death huddled outside a building in Montclair, where he lived.

'I'll be right up front: My anxiety was for the township of Montclair. What a shame, what a blot for Montclair" if that happened, he said.

And then he had another thought.

"We can't let that happen."

Montclair is a splendid town, with good schools and tree-lined streets of center-hall Colonials. But behind some of those windows, and behind some of its buildings, the story is no different than in many American towns and cities.

Every day a free meal is offered in Montclair, and every day 40 to 60 people sit down to lunch, most of them residents who have difficulty making ends meet. Among them are 10 to 15 homeless men and women who avoid the Newark shelters out of fear of violence or theft. Instead, they spend their nights curled up on roofs, huddled next to buildings or wedged in some small space that blocks the wind.

Fifteen homeless adults in a town of 37,000 residents may not seem like a lot, but what if one froze to death, as seemed increasingly likely to Renn last January. What would that say about a community with so much affluence?

Read it all here