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By Richard Hamilton, March 31, 2010 2:14 pm

Rather than keeping you guessing about my lawbreaking exploits, I’ll confess my crime. I feed homeless people. [everyone gasp here] “I can’t believe you Richard…I am so disappointed! Wait. What??” [everyone scratch your head now] You read correctly; my crime is taking food to homeless people.

San Antonio has is home to about 25,000 people each year. At anytime, you can go downtown and encounter a few thousand people living on the streets. Over the past year and a half, I have been privileged to meet and serve some of these people. This past fall, the church I work with launched a college ministry with the expressed purpose of connecting college students with those in need locally (namely the poor, hungry and homeless).

San Antonio has been blessed with a new project providing homeless individuals and families with the training, skills and assistance needed to help them become self-sufficient. This project is Haven for Hope. And it is amazing! I believe it will make a difference in many lives. Haven for Hope is structured in a way that allows (even encourages) community organizations, like churches, to partner with them to help hurting people in San Antonio.

The reality is, that Haven for Hope is not for everyone. There are some (admittedly often by their own choosing) who will not benefit for Haven for Hope. This is compounded by the fact that Haven for Hope’s downtown campus has experiences some delays and is not even fully opened.

Here is where the illegality begins.

The opening of Haven for Hope has given some city officials the opportunity needed to “clean up the streets”. Efforts have already been made to relocate people from areas highly populated by homeless San Antonians (namely and area called “Under the Bridge”). Not sure where exactly they expect them to go. Haven for Hope will only hold about 1,500 when fully opened, which it is not yet. To make matters worse, it seems the city is now restricting the benevolence of individuals and organizations by requiring a permit to give away food, making it effectively illegal to feed homeless in San Antonio. Check out a local news story about the new restrictions.

I understand the complications and liabilities associated with the large homeless population San Antonio has. And, I’m sure that some of these decisions are made by well intentioned people. These new restrictions do however complicate the lives of many benevolent people. Speaking idealistically for a moment, shouldn’t government make it easier for people to help people.

So how should I proceed? What should I do with my new found “criminal” status? For now, I will continue with business as usual. Our college ministry will proceed with its scheduled Serve SA event coming up soon where we will pack lunches for a few hundred of our homeless neighbors. I will look into getting permits to make it all legit and legal and hope the city doesn’t start fining in the mean time.

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By Richard Hamilton, August 1, 2009 1:12 pm

Jonathan Brink posted this video of Matt Carter (from Austin Stone Community Church) earlier this week. Take a look see.

Matt Carter // Missional Small Groups from Todd Rhoades on Vimeo.

I really admire the missional movement, and in many ways consider myself a partner in that thread. Too much about how we typically do church is me centered. Unlike the attitude modeled by Jesus, we are constantly concerned about what we get out of it. (On a semi-related thought, check out this post by Brian Jones. My friend Jason Bedell also chimed in on the subject.)

We are on the verge of launching a college ministry at Castle Hills. Our driving force in this launch is engage students in the restorative work of God in this world, not to provide the cool Christian hangout for college students in San Antonio. I will post more on our college ministries philosophy in the future. For now, let me know what you think about “missional small groups”.

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By Richard Hamilton, February 15, 2009 10:26 pm

On October 24, 2008 I posted “The Timely Death of Words: the failure of language to capture the life of a movement” about the drawbacks of attaching a title to a movement. Movements and words are dynamic and nuanced and they often have difficulty converging. Alan Hirsch, self-proclaimed “missional activist” wrote a piece for Leadership Journal called “Defining Missional”. Not surprisingly, Alan does as good of a job as is possible of defining “missional”. While I’m not big of labeling everything to death, the article is a good read. It is also accompanied by missional family tree.