Kevin Nye is an author, speaker, and co-founder of the National Faith Coalition to End Homelessness. His books, Grace Can Lead Us Home and Hope for the Mission, help Christians and faith communities confront the crisis of homelessness with care, faithfulness, and best practices. In this conversation, Kevin joins us to talk about what comes after we understand the problem - how churches turn head and heart into hands and feet.
We talk about the rescue mission model: where it came from (including Jerry McCauley, who started the first one), what went wrong, and what is worth recovering. Kevin is honest about harmful practices - the transactional way basic needs get tied to conversion - but he refuses to stop at critique. The book is full of stories of churches actually getting it right: a few San Diego churches whose storage program helped more than 100 people secure housing, a mission in Oklahoma City that went from worst example to best, churches opening parking lots to people living in their cars, and organizations centering people with lived experience in leadership.
We also get into the harder questions: how to respond to NIMBY opposition, what is happening with criminalization and Housing First policy, and why Kevin ends the book by calling us to turn “I” into “we.”
If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the size of the problem and wondered what your church could actually do, this conversation is for you. Kevin’s answer is not a bigger program. It is finding one other person who wants to do something, and going from there.
