At the end of June, half of Glennon Heights Mennonite Church in Lakewood, Colo., volunteered in some way to help five homeless families stay off the streets for a week.

They do this four times a year at Lakewood Christian Church through Family Promise — a program aiming to transition people out of homelessness.

Volunteers from both churches provide transportation, dinner, bedding, overnight hosting, towels, showers and planned evening activities for the week. Each week the families move and are hosted by another church.

Pastor Betsy Headrick McCrae said participating allows Glennon Heights to have firsthand interactions with neighbors who are homeless in a way that is not patronizing.

“It’s not like you’re solving all their problems or anything,” she said. “But you do get to interact with them and be kind.”

Awareness of the homelessness in their Denver suburb came about through participation in Mennonite Urban Ministries, which began in 1969 when a handful of Denver churches came together in an inner-city outreach effort.

Though now defunct, the impact of Mennonite Urban Ministries was far-reaching and can still be seen in outreach from Glennon Heights and the other participating churches.

Joint effort

With the joint efforts and funds of four congregations — First Mennonite, Glennon Heights Mennonite, Arvada Mennonite and Garden Park Mennonite Brethren — Mennonite Urban Ministries worked to serve the Westside community, where First Mennonite was located.

At one point it was one of two well-known low-income areas of urban Denver, according to Merv Dyck. He directed the ministry for 18 years beginning in 1984.

As far as he knows, there had never been anything quite like it in the Mennonite church, with a centralized approach to outreach based on a shared vision to serve where the poverty was.

The four original congregations, which over the years included at least three others, gathered money to initiate programs to respond to needs of those living in Westside.

“Our philosophy was, we would start stuff and we would cut it loose,” Dyck said. “And if [the initiatives] ended up going a different direction than we had envisioned, we accepted that. We wanted to keep our program small and keep the overhead as low as possible.”

They did so by partnering with other social service organizations, doing what needed to be done or what wasn’t getting done.

“We would try to fill in the cracks,” he said.

For a while, none of the area food banks were providing infant formula, so they funded grocery certificates to distribute.

They also began a fund for utility and rent assistance, held health clinics, connected people to housing, built shopping centers and much more.

“I really felt like this is where the church ought to be, and maybe these people didn’t come to church on Sundays but we were helping them,” Dyck said. They knew who he was, and his motivations.

He remembered that when people saw a need they couldn’t fill, they’d say: “Let’s go to the Mennonite, he’ll help us.”

“Personally that has been one of the most exciting phases of my own life,” Dyck said.

Striking difference

Slowly the neighborhood began to change, and the difference today is striking, Dyck said. Art galleries have opened. Much of the low-income housing is getting torn down.

In the late 1990s, the ministry’s board began to discuss whether it was still necessary. Dyck proposed seven or eight options for moving forward.

According to Craig Sommers, who served on the board at the time, one of the plans stuck out.

“We decided that there were needs in each of the local congregations and it would make more sense to be separated,” he said.

Dyck moved to half time and began helping congregations decide how to work in their communities. The biggest need, according to his research, had moved toward Glennon Heights.

“I spent quite a bit of time to get them to adopt their own kind of program to reach out to that community,” he said. “It was kind of a shock to them that these problems were moving closer to them.”

But someone in the congregation discovered a program called Interfaith Hospitality Network, recently renamed Family Promise. They’ve been working with them for 12 years now.

Headrick McCrae said the church spent a few months this year examining why they were involved. Interest was starting to wane a bit, partly because the work is fairly demanding for that one week of hosting families.

“It seemed pretty obvious that people wanted to keep going with it,” Headrick McCrae said. And more than that, it was obvious that the program has become part of the church’s identity.

“It’s who we are in the sense of having a concrete and local commitment to being involved in the community,” she said.