Chattanooga Community Kitchen

Today our urban ministry class visited the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, by far the most inspirational place we've been yet (to me). We met with Jens Christensen, assistant director at the kitchen, and with Brother Ron Fender, an Episcopal monk in the Brotherhood of St. Gregory whose primary role at the shelter is to wash homeless people's feet.

Entrance to the Chattanooga Community Kitchen

When our van-load of six or seven students arrived at the kitchen, our professor, the Rev. Susanna Metz, who had driven a few other students in her own car, had already arrived. Her bumper-sticker-covered sedan was parallel parked next to the entrance to the kitchen, and she was standing on the street greeting folks from the shelter with hugs and smiles. It was clear she was a familiar presence in these parts.

We all gathered in front of the kitchen and went inside to the lobby. A middle-aged African-American man sat behind the desk, looking suspiciously at this crowd of clean, well-dressed folks who had wandered in. "We're here for a meeting with Jens," Susanna explained. "Oh, Jens, ok," he answered. "He's around somewhere," he commented, and we continued to wait.

Just to the left of the lobby was the main kitchen area. Although the Chattanooga Community Kitchen has become much more than just a feeding program, here was the center, the heart of what this place had been about from its founding: feeding people. Looming over the rows of tables and chairs was a beautiful mural, depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched in front of a city-scape including a variety of people in brilliant, bright colors. It reminded me of the mural in the parish hall at St. James Cambridge, my first Episcopal parish in the Boston area: there, a mural of Jesus feeding the five thousand took center stage, with Jesus breaking the bread in the center, just as in this picture, and hundreds of people of all different races and colors surrounding him in the background.

Eventually, Jens came out to meet us. He was a young, outdoorsy-looking man who looked like he'd spend most of his time hiking or reading poetry, not running a community kitchen for homeless people. He began to tell us the history of the Kitchen: founded in 1982 by seven different churches (two of them Episcopal), that banded together to address the needs that they were seeing in the community. Now the board of the Kitchen includes not just churches but synagogues and even a Satya Sai Baba group (a Hindu sect), "We don't talk about religion, we talk about helping people," Jens said of how the groups work together. "We can come to an agreement about helping people even if we don't agree on why we're helping them."

The Kitchen began as a group of volunteering going out to give sack lunches to people on the streets, and in 1985 they got a building and began to house their feeding program in one central location. Now, the Kitchen includes not just a meals program but a day shelter, a free health care clinic, substance abuse programs, a thrift store, social worker services, and a transitional family housing unit that can house up to 10 families at a time. 181,000 meals were served last year (2010), and the health clinic sees 4,000-5,000 unique individuals each year. There are an estimated 600 to 700 homeless people each night in Chattanooga, Jens told us.

An unfortunately blurry image of the meditation room.

The day shelter area was opened in 2008 and is a space where people with nowhere else to go can spend time during the day. Most shelters require that guests leave by something like 5 or 6 a.m., so people without jobs are left with no where to go until the shelters open again at 6 p.m. or so. The day shelter area provides a place where people can play cards or chess or checkers, use the public computers for job-hunting or online classes, or just sit. There is also a meditation room, a quiet room with dimmed lighting where people can go for quiet and stillness. I was amazed at the luxury of this beautiful space within the midst of a shelter -- and indeed, the day shelter area itself was the cleanest, brightest, most inviting shelter space I'd ever been in -- a far cry from the hardly-better-than-a-basement concrete underside of a building where the Peachtree-Pine shelter in Atlanta was housed, or the somewhat grungy and dark day shelter space of Siena Francis House in Omaha.

As Jens gave us the tour, he told us about how the shelter had intentionally built this space to be of the same standards one would expect for any public space. "When we went to renovate the space, the staff said to ourselves, 'This needs to be a space that we'd feel comfortable using ourselves.'"

"That's what I'M talkin' about!" a short African-American man in jeans and a raggy t-shirt piped up from the back of our group. A guest at the shelter, he'd joined our group in the lobby and asked Jens if he could tag along for our tour. He interjected occasionally with his own perspective on things.

Jens smiled. "Really," he said, "the bathrooms here were pretty disgusting. They weren't of a quality that any of us on staff would be willing to use. So we decided, you know, when we remodeled, that everything would have to be of the highest quality."

The man in the back of the group nodded vigorously and proudly. 

Just one example of that commitment to high quality service for their guests is the foot washing room. The foot washing program at the Community Kitchen was started by Br. Ron Fender, a monk in the Episcopal order of the Brotherhood of St. Gregory. As Jens told the story, "One day we got a hand-written letter from some man up in the Northeast. 'I want to live with the homeless, make minimum-wage, and wash people's feet,' it said. The director of the shelter threw it on the desk dismissively, figuring it was from some crazy nutcase." (Read more about the story in this article from the Chattanooga Free Times Press.)

But Brother Ron showed up anyway, and however much of a crazy nutcase he was, he made himself at home at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, which now touts him as one of their most beloved assets. He washes and cares for the feet of homeless people -- feet that are often tired from miles and miles of walking and from standing all day long. But this is no makeshift, bucket-and-rag foot washing. Although it arose from humble beginnings, the value of the footwashing -- tender, non-threatening human touch it provides to the guests and the ability to diagnose certain illnesses, like gangrene and diabetes -- drew attention, and eventually led to the donation of salon-quality pedicure chairs for the room (pictured at right). Now, in addition to Brother Ron's ministerial presence, nurses and podiatrists volunteer their time to help in this aspect of the Kitchen's ministry.

This entry is already ridiculously long, but the amount of work that the Community Kitchen does in downtown Chattanooga is simply staggering. Even to briefly mention each type of outreach ministry would take much longer than I've spent here. In addition to the services previously mentioned, the Kitchen also has a medical respite facility, where people who are homeless can go after being discharged from the hospital to continue to recover. (Often people are discharged with orders of "bed rest," but how exactly is one to find this "bed rest" if one does not have a home, much less a bed where they can rest on a consistent basis?) Unfortunately, the medical respite area is currently closed (as of Feb. 2010) due to a lack of ability to pay volunteer nurses to monitor the hall. 

The Kitchen also has a recycling program, which has been operating since the 1990s, before the city provided curbside recycling. The recycling program provides job training for people connected with the day shelter and the kitchen. Our professor Susanna collects recyclables at the seminary and drives them down to Chattanooga every month to donate to the Community Kitchen's recycling program. (When we showed up today, she had a bag of plastic bottles in hand.)

At the end of our time at the Community Kitchen, we sat down for a brief conversation with Brother Ron (pictured below). Someone asked him how he could keep doing it, keep giving of himself in this way, keep putting himself in harm's way in this ministry. (He'd just told us stories of having guns pointed at his head and of breaking up violent fist-fights outside the Kitchen.) They asked if he was afraid.

"You know, I gave up fear," Brother Ron said, matter-of-factly. "I think that's part of living into the vows." 

© Chattanooga Free Times Press.

He spoke eloquently of the value of continuing to show up, week after week, even when people betray you or hurt you or don't seem to be making any changes or improvements to their lives. 

"But we can't abandon them," he said. "I think we've gotta keep being there. That's what the Gospel is all about. God doesn't abandon us. So I keep coming back."

A mural in the meditation room at the day shelter.