A federal district court judge ruled last week that St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Brookings can continue to serve free meals without restriction to people living on the streets. The church sued the city in 2022 over an ordinance that required a permit for meal services in residential zones and limited the number of days meals could be served to two days a week. Bernie Lindley, the Vicar of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, joins us to discuss the ruling.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2022 St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church sued the city of Brookings. The church argued that the city overstepped with its ordinance, restricting its ability to offer meals to people experiencing homelessness. Last week, a federal district court judge agreed. The judge ruled that St.Timothy’s can continue to serve free meals to people living on the streets without restrictions. Bernie Lindley is the Vicar of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church. He joins us once again to discuss the ruling. Father Bernie, welcome back.
Bernie Lindley: Thank you.
Miller: Can you remind us what the city ordinance required of you and also the kinds of services that you’d been providing at the time?
Lindley: Well, at the time that this all happened, the pandemic was in full swing and we had people sleeping in our parking lot in cars at the city’s request. And that’s kind of what caused this ordinance to go into effect, was that there was a petition from the neighbors living around the church where they wanted to see homeless people removed from the church grounds. We ended up complying with that within a couple of months to get the people transitioned in other places.
Then a couple months after that, the conversation started that we needed to limit the number of days that we fed people. They wanted us to get a permit to restrict our feeding to two days a week. And I knew that if we applied for that permit, we would immediately be in violation of that city ordinance because at the time we were feeding four days a week. So instead of applying for a permit that we knew we couldn’t comply with, we filed a lawsuit...
Miller: Can I ask you, did you consider acquiescing? Did you consider saying, all right, then we will reduce the number of days that we give food to hungry people?
Lindley: I can’t do that. No, I never considered that.
Miller: So you fought instead. And I should say this is something we talked about, I think it was about a year and a half ago. Time remains confusing for me. I want to zoom forward to just last week. What went through your mind when you heard that you had won?
Lindley: Well, we were elated. My entire staff, my congregation, all the volunteers were extremely happy. That was last week and even now, I get congratulated throughout the community. I might be at the post office, I might be at the grocery store, wherever I am there are people that will be congratulating me. So there are a lot of happy people about that ruling.
Miller: The language the judge used was pretty forceful. He said that one of the city’s arguments about the necessity of a permit in order to serve meals “defies any stretch of the imagination.” And he called you out. He wrote this:
“The city of Brookings is very fortunate to have Reverend Lindley and the entire congregation of St. Timothy’s as compassionate, caring and committed members of the community. The homeless are not ‘vagrants’ [he put that in quotes] but are citizens in need. This is a time for collaboration, not ill-conceived ordinances that restrict care and resources for vulnerable people in our communities.”
What did it mean to you specifically to read those words? And I’m not thinking about the call out to you, but the forceful defense of what you were doing?
Lindley: It brought tears to my eyes when I read that. I was absolutely overjoyed.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the kinds of services that you now provide, you and your congregation or members of your community, on a daily basis? I mean, what is an average day of potential services like?
Lindley: The office hours for our congregation are Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So, they’re not every day of the week. It’s three days a week and it’s only in the mornings, but we’ll have people come in and get a cup of coffee. And these are all kinds of people, it’s not just unhoused folks because we offer a lot of fellowship. But they’ll come in.
If they don’t have access to a shower, they’ll get on a sign up list each day to use our shower. They get their mail. People who do not have any way to get mail any other way except perhaps general delivery get their mail here. So they’ll check in with our parish secretary to get mail. We have a chaplain here that’s in training and she spent a bunch of time this morning talking to a woman who [had] a friend of hers pass away recently in kind of odd circumstances and she was trying to process that. So our chaplain spent time with her and prayed with her.
What else do we do? I mean, there’s all sorts of different things that will happen. We have a lady that has a small child. She just had a baby about two months ago and we’re trying to figure out how to get housing for her. She’s in a hotel room and that’s going to come to an end very soon. And actually, she transitioned out of the hotel room into something else. But anyway, we’re trying to get sustainable housing for her and we’re working on that. It’s a long process.
We get clothes donated and so we sort through the clothes and numerous people need access to clothing. We have a laundry ministry that happens on Tuesdays that we have a partnership with a local laundromat. So really, a lot of it is community building and supporting people who are going through difficult times.
Miller: A lot of it that you mentioned seems like a kind of emergency response. You’re a person who has x need right now, this dire need of food or shelter or a shower or clothing, and we will give it to you. What do you do that is more systemic or to try to help people out of that ongoing emergency?
Lindley: Over the course of the last two-and-a-half months, I guess, we have been directly involved in getting 15 people housed. The congregation actually bought a single wide trailer in a park for a family of three to be able to move into so that they no longer have to be unsheltered. And we’ve bought travel trailers for people that they put in RV parks permanently. Then sometimes, if somebody is living on the ground and they have a driver’s license, we acquire a car for them and we put it in their name and we get them started on their insurance so that they can have transportation and they can be inside at night with doors that lock instead of being on the ground at night.
So there’s numerous different things that we do to try to create stability in people’s lives. And sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes it takes a bit of time. My magic wand doesn’t work at all times.
Miller: But it does sometimes.
Lindley: Sometimes, sometimes. Getting that family into that single wide in a park, that’s a big thing! There’s a four-year old boy in that family that now has a place to live.
Miller: Correct me if I’m wrong, but the sense I get is that the lawsuit and the tension that led to it could be boiled down to different versions of NIMBYISM – that I see the services that the church is providing as a kind of magnet for people who I don’t want in my neighborhood. I’m not sure that people would say that explicitly, but that’s the sense I get that at least on some level that has driven some of the animosity towards the services that you have provided now for years. How do you counteract that basic idea?
Lindley: You know, it’s funny you should say that because just yesterday, I had a conversation with a guy about this very thing and he doesn’t live anywhere near the church, but he feels that the church is a magnet that brings people in from all over the area. And he thinks that they should be sent to other communities where there are more resources. Specifically, he said they should be sent to Portland.
I said, well, these are people who grew up in this community of Brookings Harbor. They went through the school system here. Some of them are multigenerational. They’re no longer able to afford a house to rent. They certainly can’t buy a place here in this town. They have various different mental health challenges. And then I asked him, “Don’t you think that we should take care of our own?” Don’t you think that we should provide those services instead of thinking that we should take someone who has never lived in another community besides this one and send them somewhere else where the services are already over-saturated?
He kind of paused for a second and thought about it and I don’t know if he’d ever really thought about his feelings and his reaction to our ministries. I don’t think he ever thought about what the other side of that might look like.
Miller: Father Bernie Lindley, thanks very much.
Lindley: Well, thank you for having me.
Miller: Bernie Lindley is the Vicar of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Brookings.
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