Mission Sunday And The Gift Of Service

Guest Speaker: Joe Thompson, Interfaith Housing Initiative

Affordable housing isn’t a buzzword when you’re short 14,000 units, and it’s not solved by good intentions alone. We take Mission Sunday seriously by linking Scripture’s call to service with a practical question: what happens when churches decide to build housing instead of only talking about it?

We walk through the ways our congregation already serves Greensboro, from ongoing partnerships that fight hunger and homelessness to the behind-the-scenes work of supporting nonprofits and local boards. Then we zoom in on a deeper thread in our mission history: decades of engagement with housing, including Habitat builds, shelter support through Greensboro Urban Ministry, and the hard, unglamorous decisions that shape what “affordable” can look like in real neighborhoods.

Our guest Joe Thompson from Westminster Presbyterian introduces the Interfaith Housing Initiative and explains how it’s teaming up with Partnership Homes to expand supportive housing. You’ll hear what supportive housing means in practice, how residents are vetted and supported, and why stability plus on-site care can be the bridge from shelter to a life rebuilt. Two stories bring the impact into sharp focus, moving from addiction and loss to college, meaningful work, restored family, and long-term independence.

If you care about homelessness solutions, supportive housing, and faith-based community development in Greensboro, this conversation offers a clear, concrete next step: a six-unit building with a $1.3 million goal that’s already well on its way. Subscribe for more mission stories, share this with someone who cares about housing justice, and leave a review telling us what part of the conversation stayed with you most.

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Transcript

Prayer For Illumination

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Please bow your heads for the prayer of illumination. Guide us, O Lord, by your word and Holy Spirit, that in your light we may we may see the light, in your truth find freedom, and in your will discover peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Eternal God, in the reading of your of Scripture, may your word be heard, in the meditation of our hearts, may your word be known. In the faithfulness of our lives, may your will be done. Come light, light of God, where well all creation. Enlighten our hearts, let your light dwell with us. Amen. The first lesson is from the first book of Peter, chapter 4, verse 10. As each one of us has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's very grace. Every believer has a gift they can use to further the kingdom of God by serving others. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.

Mission Sunday Welcome And Overview

A Church History Of Housing Work

Introducing The Interfaith Housing Initiative

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Our second lesson today comes from Ephesians 6, verses 7 through 8. With good will, doing service as to the Lord, and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is slave or free. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God. Well, let me add my voice to welcome everyone to uh Mission Sunday today. It's always something that uh I look forward to and appreciate the members of the mission committee taking part today. Um I do want to draw your attention to the page, you can't miss it, in the bulletin toward the end, that gives you a little recap, a little summary of the many ways that uh just activities under the umbrella of the mission committee, um ways that we are serving in the community. I do want to mention that you'll uh is it up there, Mike, already on the bulletin board? Um, our new addition to the bulletin board, is it up there yet? When you go by to the dessert auction, you'll want to see a brand new special, special gift that we received from one of the groups that we helped on the mission committee. So I'll let you discover that yourself. It's a beautiful piece. You'll see that here I won't go through all of this, but the various programs that we sponsor for the community, the ongoing collections that we take part in for the community as well. Serving includes things like serving meals with Urban Ministry, Recovery Cafe, and then many of us serve on boards in uh not of nonprofits in this community and also regionally. And uh those are different ways that we can help to serve uh God in the community. Our mission trips, as Marty mentioned, are really key focus areas and also our support for international missions. Our benevolent gifts are a way that we, I think, reach out in lots of other ways. You'll see there the organizations listed that we have supported recently through the budget that is created really by the whole congregation, through line items in our church budget, special donations that come in throughout the year, and then also from our mission fundraising activities. You'll see them there. As you look over those that list of wonderful organizations, you'll notice that many of them have to do with fighting hunger. You'll notice that many of them have to do with homelessness and helping people to find housing. Even though some of these groups don't have housing in their name, they often are able to provide assistance with finding housing, providing supportive housing to members of our community. So those are a couple of the themes that I've noticed ever since we became members long ago. You'll also see there a couple special projects that were undertaken this past year, including the Summer Emergency Shelter, where we partnered with Urban Ministry and the city to provide overnight accommodations for 90 days, and special thanks to everyone who took part in making that happen. The other thing that got started last year was what we call the sacred or civic sacred slash civic placemaking project, where a group of members from the Mission Committee and the Property Committee joined together to take part in some trainings with other churches to explore ways that churches can be more active and involved in providing affordable housing to the community because it is such a critical need. In fact, as I think about this, we've been in the affordable housing business for a really long time. Decades, certainly precedes my family joining, what was it, 25 years ago. We've taken part in Habitat for Humanity builds. We joined together with Presbyterian churches for many years and built, helped construct, swing those hammers, and also helped to fund those things. There used to be something called the Interfaith Hospitality Network. Some of you were very involved in that, where churches gathered together and helped provide overnight accommodations for families experiencing homelessness. That is cooperative is no longer in place. We support urban ministry in providing shelters. And also, I would say the homes that we have owned along Lawndale, those in the ways that we have used them, including tearing the most recent one down because it really couldn't be fixed up anymore, the ways that this church has chosen to use those homes, through provide renting them at affordable rates, providing a famil uh a refugee family a place to resettle, those are elements of being involved in helping to support the community's needs around affordable housing. So, this is a long introduction, Joe. I'm sorry, but that brings us to today because we have a few minutes to hear about a new wonderful initiative going on in the community, the Inner Faith Housing Initiative. And Inner Faith, and Joe will tell us a little bit about this, where churches and synagogues, other faith institutions have the opportunity to come together and try to do something to help this vast need for housing. It is said that we need another 14,000 units right now or more in this community to serve people of all different income levels, and it is a massive challenge. So, Joe, we welcome you here to Guilford Park, fellow Presbyterian from Westminster, as Stephen said. And Joe is also a member of Partnership Homes, a nonprofit builder that has several decades of experience, successful experience with urban ministry and other partners to develop supportive housing for our community. And also, I do want to say that Joe has been a builder for many of many years. And some of you know of his work personally. But the one thing I wanted to share, and then I will sit down, is that Joe received the Habitat for Humanity Hero Award a few years ago, which I can tell you're a modest person, and you wouldn't have told us that. So I wanted to share that because that to me was a wonderful indicator of his charitable uh intent and his understanding of the issues in this community. So, Joe Thompson, we welcome you to Guilford Park and we'd love to hear about the initiative.

Why Interfaith Partners Decided To Build

How Partnership Homes Creates Supportive Housing

Two Lives Changed By Stable Housing

The $1.3 Million Goal And Invitation

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Okay. I wanted to send a welcome from Westminster Presbyterian. We we uh love getting out and talking to other churches and and welcome um the opportunity to come to talk to people. I really appreciate your worship service here. It seems very personal and and uh touching. The third thing I'd like to say is I am not a speaker, so uh I'm I'm just gonna I'm just gonna talk the best I can and we'll see what happens. Um so I'm here to talk about about two organizations to me. One is one is the Interfaith Housing Initiative, and the other is Partnership Homes. So the Interfaith Um Housing Initiative grew out of an affordable housing group that we were holding at Westminster, and we had a um a feeling that uh Ernie Thompson, I don't know if you if you guys know Ernie, Ernie was the the pastor at Westminster before he retired. He had a feeling that the churches in the city should be doing more to uh foster affordable housing than we're doing, other than volunteering for habitat. In fact, we should be raising money and building affordable housing ourselves. So, out of that, he contacted other churches and faith organizations, and and the group, Interfaith Housing Initiative, was formed in early 2025. They've been meeting, and uh you can see in the sidebar of your bulletin read you know read something about the IH IHI, and um we wanted to know how how we could get involved to actually do something rather than just talk about it. As you know, there's been a lot of talk about affordable housing for a long time, but not a whole lot of action. So being a member of Partnership Homes, and I'll talk a little bit about a partnership homes for a second. Partnership homes was a spin-off of Habitat for Humanity that was formed in 1998 by Bob Kelly, who is the Executive Director of Habitat, and the Reverend Mike Aiken, who, as you probably know, was the director of Greensboro Urban Ministry. And they both felt that there should be a place that people who are experiencing homelessness could go after they were in the shelter. They couldn't afford to move into an apartment right away, but some place needed to be provided to give them an opportunity to get their life straight and to then move back into society. So out of that talking came Partnership Village and Partnership Homes. So partnership homes was formed as a nonprofit. Money was raised through grants and different uh avenues, and partnership village was was built in 1999, and since that time we've we have four three other additional places, so we now have a total of 121 apartment units that serve people coming directly from the shelter. So the way it works is that people are vetted by urban ministry, and then they are uh approved and then move into urban to a partnership village or or the three other units, uh, excuse me, places that we have. And urban ministry offers supportive, that's why it's called supportive housing, supportive uh social workers on site to help people as they move in. So I want to tell you a couple of stories about some people who have lived in in Partnership Village. One is a person named Angel Baptist, who an I'll grant, you know, remember all these people came out of the shelter. So she she was addicted to drugs, uh was kind of at the at the very bottom. She she went into urban ministry, eventually was able to get an apartment at Partnership Village, and the supportive housing there turned her life around. She eventually attended UNCG, graduated from UNCG, attended ANT, got a master's in social work, and now works for one of the nonprofit uh counseling services here in town, helping people exactly like she was. And she is a dynamic speaker. If you ever want to have a speaker to talk about that, she would love to come and talk to the church. Another person who I'll call Mary was also drugs, lost her, lost her husband, had three children, was living with her mother in a single uh apartment, single bedroom apartment, eventually ended up in in the shelter at at uh Greensboro Urban Ministry, and then eventually went to Partnership Village. The same thing happened with her, she turned her life around, she calls it her landing place, and she feels that God led her to be there, and she eventually finished college and became a nurse, now has reconciled with her husband, they own their own home, and you know she's uh you know back on her feet again. So these these programs work. So back to now back to the Interfaith Housing Initiative. So the Inter Interfaith Housing Initiative was looking for someone to partner with, and since I was involved with partnership homes and I knew of a situation we had, um, it was suggested by myself and some other members that the IHI Interfaith Housing Initiative partner with Partnership Village to build the last remaining unit at a at a an apartment complex that we own called Partnership Place is down on Terrell Street. We acquired that through the city. It had been managed by a nonprofit out of South Carolina that had gone under and it just kind of went down and down. And um before we could acquire it, one of the one of the buildings burned down. And so the funding that we received only covered the buildings that were left standing. So therefore we have a space left in this apartment complex for for one more building which will house six units. So what we're in the process of doing now is trying to raise$1.3 million to do it, and you think, well, gosh,$1.3 million is an awful lot of money. We'll never do that. Well, in fact, we've raised around$870,000 already. So we are in the process now of talking to other churches, seeing if we can get churches interested in helping us with this project, and uh and we know we will we will do it. Um and I think I think we all know the need there is for affordable housing, and especially this type of housing. So I would just ask that um the church would be open to talking about it, and if you're willing to support us, we would really appreciate it. Thank you.

unknown 16:08

Thank you.