Minnesota churches are sharing land with homeless people. They say it's the Christian thing to do

MINNEAPOLIS — A Nazarene ministry in St. Paul‘s working-class East Side. An aging Lutheran congregation in Roseville. A nondenominational megachurch in Maple Grove.

Three vastly different churches are on the leading edge of a Minnesota experiment in treating chronic homelessness by building tiny home villages — known as Sacred Settlements — on their land for society’s hardest-to-house people.

The settlements are modest, each comprising a handful of tiny houses clustered near trees and water. Neat, wood-chipped trails ramble from one home to the next. Hand-carved road signs and communal vegetable patches add a cottage flair. Each house is uniquely built and donated by other churches across the state, with rents based on size.

Part religious movement and part housing policy research, Sacred Settlements’ first few years have suggested that homeless people once written off as unwilling to receive help can find stability in the right environment. At the same time, the churches that welcomed them have seen renewed relevancy and interest, their leaders say, in an era when political divisions are driving younger generations away from religious life.

“It wasn’t a driving factor in our decision to have the settlement, but the result was we have more folks coming in, a lot of folks curious, younger people coming to work with us,” said Michael Stetzler, former board president of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville. “The energy that it’s created internally, and the draw that it is for some people looking at us from the outside, is kind of a revitalization.”

Federal law exempts religious property owners from zoning codes that would typically hinder secular builders, as long as they use their land to further their mission. Settled, the nonprofit behind Sacred Settlements, argues that serving the poor is aligned with all major world religions. By leveraging their privilege under the law, these churches are acting out a form of radical hospitality they say is at the root of Christianity.

“Collectively, religiosity owns a lot of land, and they don’t pay taxes,” said Seanne Thomas, a St. Paul resident who saw the state’s first Sacred Settlement established at Mosaic Christian Community, next door to her, in 2022. Thomas isn’t religious but said she respected the church’s trailblazing move and has had no problems with the tiny home village.

“What better use of all of their real estate than to embrace and shelter those that are experiencing chronic homelessness?” she asked.

Not everyone trusts the concept to work out. In the outer-ring suburb of Maple Grove, members of homeowner associations opposed the development of a Sacred Settlement with 12 homes at Church of the Open Door. They petitioned to make it a sober community restricted to those who already had jobs, and lobbied for a state law change to place churches’ tiny home villages under the regulatory purview of cities.

The bill didn’t pass. Church leaders are now cautiously moving ahead with plans to open their settlement within the next two years. They don’t need to overcome a public hearing and City Council vote to obtain city permits — a common barrier for other homeless service providers — but they are continuing to talk with skeptical neighbors.

Over time, the opposition’s website quietly changed from “No Settlement Maple Grove” to the more neutral “Settlement Maple Grove.” The group did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story.

“Serving the poor is from cover to cover in the Bible,” said Pastor Dave Brickey at Church of the Open Door. “To me, the opportunity to support this landed on a plate in front of us, and we had a choice of whether we were going to be obedient or not.”

One sunny afternoon in St. Paul’s Payne-Phalen neighborhood, Jr McNeely sat at a shaded picnic table with children from Mosaic Christian Community, punching name tags out of leather for them to decorate.

McNeely had been on the streets for 10 years before he came to Mosaic’s Sacred Settlement with his girlfriend and dog. No emergency shelter would have kept them together, so they lived in tents across the city. At Mosaic, they have four walls, a key and the peace of mind to sleep without needing to keep one eye open for those who might hurt them.

“I totally changed my whole perspective,” McNeely said about moving into a Sacred Settlement and getting to know church members. “I thought they were just judging me and stuff, listening to the negative voices. Now that I’ve opened up more and let them get closer, I know they’re here to help me.”

Rian Kloetzke, a fellow resident, said it’s been a strange thing to have people be nice to him without wanting anything back.

“Everyone’s always smiling, chipper. It’s weird,” Kloetzke joked. “It gives me faith again, in humanity.”

Underpinning the Sacred Settlements model is an evolving body of research built on some longstanding principles about addressing chronic homelessness, as well as some novel ideas.

“We believe, after spending hundreds of days on the streets ... learning people’s stories, that underneath all of this is a common story of a profound and catastrophic loss of family,” said Gabrielle Clowdus, who founded Settled.

“That’s what makes the difference between someone who’s able to transition out of homelessness, and someone who gets stuck there and becomes chronically homeless.”

Clowdus’ doctoral research focused on ways to solve homelessness that go beyond the well-established Housing First approach, which says people need a place to live before they can focus on holding down a job and treating a drug addiction.

While federal housing policy operates on Housing First principles, critics say the approach hasn’t been successful because it doesn’t confront the root causes of homelessness — including addiction, psychological trauma and physical disability — nor the isolation that people acclimated to the streets can feel in apartments.

Many researchers have looked more deeply into the role social connections have in disrupting mental illness, addiction and homelessness. Sacred Settlements’ “Full Community Model” calls for the permanent presence of “intentional neighbors” — people who have never experienced chronic homelessness, voluntarily living alongside formerly homeless residents and sharing the work of maintaining the village.

When problems emerge, congregations have found ways to be flexible, Clowdus said. When one resident became convinced there was a demon on a doorstep, church leaders — who had no experience with the more charismatic tradition of expelling evil spirits — told it to go away in the name of Jesus. (It soothed the afflicted resident.)

After moving in to a Sacred Settlement, people have re-established medical care, gotten control over the hording in their storage units and started healing the wounds of family abandonment and social rejection in therapy. Everybody comes in for family dinner once a week.

“It’s not short-term housing, it’s not a stop to someplace better, it’s not you have 90 days to get better,” said Meredith Campbell, whose family oversees the Mosaic Sacred Settlement. “It’s a commitment to the permanent, which means that our lives are changed too. When we say there’s room in in our lives, there’s room in our calendars, at our table, at our house. That sort of reciprocal relationship is necessary for transformation, and we’ve seen it.”

-------------