News from the Episcopal Church
Louisville cathedral’s ‘Room in the Inn’ winter shelter to serve growing homeless population
By David Paulsen
Posted Jan 6, 2025
[Episcopal News Service] Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, Kentucky, is offering space in its parish hall starting Jan. 6 for use as an overnight shelter for women and children experiencing homelessness, part of a new program called “Room in the Inn” that is modeled after similar ministries around the country.
The congregation, partnering with a local nonprofit, will provide 15 beds seven nights a week for the next month, when the city’s temperatures typically dip below freezing overnight. Three shifts of volunteers from partner congregations will staff the shelter from 5 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. and will serve and share a meal with the guests each evening. A continental breakfast will be offered each morning before the shelter closes for the day.
The Very Rev. Matthew Bradley, dean of the cathedral, described it as “a scalable model” that can be expanded in future years to other Louisville congregations interested in hosting shelters, and it is a good way to engage the local faith community in addressing the city’s housing crisis.
“It just seemed like a way for people to get involved in caring for their neighbors,” Bradley told Episcopal News Service.”
The first Room in the Inn shelter began in 1985 as the ministry of several churches in Nashville, Tennessee. Since then, congregations in three dozen other cities have established and are operating their own Room in the Inn shelters.
The need for such a ministry in Louisville is even greater this winter, after a Kentucky law banning sleeping in vehicles and camping in public took effect in July 2024. The cathedral’s shelter opens this week as Louisville digs out from a winter storm that dropped 7 inches of snow Jan. 5.
The idea for the new shelter ministry grew out of an existing relationship between Christ Church Cathedral and the nonprofit Uniting Partners for Women and Children, which offers daytime services in space it leases in the cathedral’s basement and the third floor of the parish hall. In addition to serving women and children, they cater to people with marginalized gender identities, providing a range of services to more than 100 people on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
In recent years, church and nonprofit leaders had noticed an increase in people experiencing homelessness at a time when public funding for services was on the decline. A 2022 report by Louisville’s Coalition for the Homeless noted that the more than 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city in 2021 was a 41% increase from 2017. Separately, for the 12 months ending September 2024, Coalition for the Homeless reported assisting more than 2,200 people experiencing chronic homelessness.
Christ Church in located in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service
“Meanwhile, our homeless shelter system has been underfunded and overwhelmed for years,” the report said.
A core challenge is the severe shortage of affordable housing. A 2024 assessment found that Louisville is 36,000 housing units short of what it needs, adding to the burden on social service agencies. “There are more people who are entering homelessness for the first time than we are able to re-house,” Bradley said.
Getting people into permanent housing is the priority, he said, but emergency shelters are a much-needed short-term resource. Louisville has several overnight shelters with limited capacity, and the demand increases on “white flag” nights, when the temperature or wind chill is 35 degrees or colder.
Bradley was familiar with the Room in the Inn model and suggested it as an option for Louisville. Uniting Partners was supportive, provided the cathedral could serve as the dedicated site of a shelter for an initial pilot period. The nonprofit now screens shelter guests and refers them to the cathedral, while the cathedral collaborates with other faith communities to staff the shelter, which will be set up each night in a large gathering space known as Dean’s Hall.
The cathedral also led fundraising efforts to launch the Room in the Inn shelter. The nearby Calvary Episcopal Church provided a grant from its community fund to purchase mattresses, one of the primary start-up costs. Additional funding was received from Norton Hospital Foundation. Another agency, Medical Center Laundry, agreed to wash the shelter’s sheets, blankets and pillowcases free of charge.
Bradley also has been encouraged by the number of other local congregations that have signed up to staff one or more overnight shifts with their volunteers through the end of February, when the shelter will close for the season.
“What we hope is that when congregations come and volunteer to staff the room in the shelter, that some of them are going to figure out that they’ve got the gifts of hospitality for this work and might in future years decide that they would like to be a host site,” he said.
He also said it was fitting that the shelter, which is launching during the Christmas season, takes its name, Room in the Inn, from the Christmas story. The innkeepers turned away Mary and Joseph, but today’s Christians can follow Jesus’ teachings in helping other families in their time of need.
“How can we take action today,” he said, “so that others who are made in the image and likeness of God don’t find themselves in the same circumstances?”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.