(Click on the Star-Bulletin photo for full story; photo by Dennis Oda)
Now, we have a middle aged member of our congregation named Dayven whose life, like Paul's, has been turned around by his experience with the free gift of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. He's shown on the right in this picture--taken a few months after his Walk to Emmaus--in a tent that was on our church's lawn at Christmastime. He and his fellow Christians had no other place to sleep -- houseless but as they like to say, not homeless. In front of our church next to the tent was this sign, made for the Christmas season.

Towering above and behind the church is the Admiral Thomas luxury condominium. This photo was taken just before the tent was placed behind the sign on church grounds.

Dayven volunteers his time as our chief cook as part of a team put together by the founder of the "H-5" Program--a team that is, like himself, houseless but not homeless. They regularly make about 2,300 meals a month, then deliver them in a van donated by one of our church members, to homeless people as far as Waianae and as near as Waikiki and Ala Moana Park. They do this six days a week, starting with an 8 a.m. prayer meeting.

Their program is named H-5, "Hawaii Helping the Hungry Have Hope." In 2004, they collected $8,660.68 dollars in private donations to provide food to the homeless, plus $3,500 from our California-Pacific Conference which also gave it "advanced special" status to solicit funds from other Methodist churches. In addition, an emergency fund of $5,600 voted on at a Special Charge Conference by our own church when their funds and very generous grants-in-aid from the Hawaii Foodbank were drying up.

The money is managed by our church and is used to buy, cook and distribute food; 100% of the labor is volunteer and our church maintains the facilities at the congregation's expense--a standard Methodist practice.)

For Christmas, Bishop Mary Ann Swenson, head of all the United Methodist Churches in southern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, visited our church and delivered both Christmas eve sermons.

Many of our church members and volunteers in our H-5 project have a dream. They believed they could raise enough money to get an apartment, by drawing attention to their situation by sleeping in a publicly visible place, a church lawn, their church's lawn at Christmastime, for the sake of their program. Our senior pastor, Rev. Dr. Eddie Kelemeni (pictured on the right), himself a former Methodist district superintendent, agreed to the project. Some money was raised; more needs to be donated to make this dream a reality.

They have had a webpage courtesy of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, for over a year. They have become a very widely known mission. See our California-Pacific newsletter, Circuit West (pdf), our local Hawaii Foodbank's newsletter, our own newsletter, a November 20th article in the Star Bulletin, and most recently at Christmastime.

Now, some of our fellow church members objected to these brothers in Christ, specifically their use of the church grounds for this purpose. They suggested that there are other ways of attracting money to their cause. Pressure was being put on the rest of us at the time to intercede in this program and resolve the problem. Now, of course others have a perfect right to object; that's a well and frequently used Methodist tradition. We are Methodists and take pride in independent thinking and in not having a merely "following the leader" orientation to political action. For this reason we take votes and expect our leadership team to balance sentiments obtained through voting with the social justice implications of any decision, or as we say in our vision statement, "to become wealthy in Christ by declaring God's love and serving one another." In the end, the agreement stood and the tent stayed up until after Christmas. Enough money was not raised, so after the tent was taken down, the H-5 team, still cooking their hearts out to this day, took up less dramatic residences elsewhere. But the dream goes on.

One night while the tent was still up, someone came by and was thoughtful enough to throw eggs on the tent, even hitting one of the homeless. Strange, because right down the street near (and sometimes under) a viaduct a homeless woman has made her dwelling--a row of six shopping carts and a lawn chair between them.

Kitty corner from the church sits a homeless man with a shopping cart full of his collected possessions. Both have been at or near these sites for years. Neither have been objected to; even the police usually leave them alone (but not always!).

Where would you put the more than 3,000 homeless men, women and children on Oahu? At what expense? Whose expense? Most everyone usually looks the other way. In New York City twelve years ago a psychiatrist named Dr. Sam Tsemberis started a non-profit, Pathways to Housing, that has become an $8 million dollar project with 40 case workers, at any one time housing 450 (previously) homeless, mentally ill people. According to the San Francisco Chronicle Pathways article, the cost of caring for homeless people to the Federal, state, and city governments in New York is about $40,000-$65,000 per person, every year. Think about it; comparable costs are housing and feeding a prisoner in a "correctional facility" or taking care of a frail or elderly person in a full fledged care facility. You don't save tax dollars by letting people roam the streets homeless! Dr. Tsemberis' program has reduced that cost to $22,000 a year, easily cutting it in half or less. American taxpayers should be really upset that so much tax money is used by so many people in so many bureaucracies producing so little value for so few people. The price of perpetuating social injustice is indeed very high.

Did you know that you are paying your governments so much money in taxes to do so little for the homeless? Here in Hawaii, dedicated operations like the IHS (Institute for Human Services) go begging and struggle daily to coordinate a steady stream of volunteers (usually churches like ours and similar institutions) providing three meals a day at their own expense, and a transitional housing team takes in battered women and broken homes and so on, and tries valiantly to find them places to live and jobs.

If you think this little group of homeless people at First United Methodist Church of Honolulu went about solving their problem on their own in the wrong way, let me please, in all humility suggest that you park your car in our basement garage just off Beretania on Victoria St., pay your parking fee, and come in some afternoon and sit down and meet them (they speak English). Talk with them about their history. Perhaps get a little closer. Cook one meal with them, deliver it to one homeless person (they deliver six days a week in a donated van from one of our members), and suggest a better strategy. Help them in some small way to translate your good idea into a workable plan. Perhaps study what others like Sam Tsemberis have done (we have a computer ministry you can use). Help them get some grant money (which will also help them get jobs).

Many of you would help in this way but can't for reasons of being bedridden or overbooked or just too alienated by their appearance or the very thought of getting involved up close and personal. In this case, rather than complain about the homeless, call your local politicians, religious leaders, friendly university professors, yoga teachers, or some highly paid consultants, and let them know that there are votes out there, convictions, beliefs, and money out there, just waiting to address the issue, but can hardly get started before the critics and the modern carpetbaggers get in there. For us Methodists, what is happening at our church is a time honored Methodist tradition going back to the days of the underground railroad and the modern Salvation Army (which had its roots in Methodism). Like the African Americans our churches helped before and during the American Civil War, we don't really know where we're headed with this initiative, but we do have faith, hope, and charity. If you don't want them to strike out, pitch in! Utu's cell number is 223-5176.