Hilton Head Island, SC – 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 25:31-40; Matthew 25:41-46
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” – Matthew 25:35
When our family moved to Hilton Head Island forty-five years ago, there was an active Clergy Association. One of the first things I heard them discuss was affordable workforce housing. Ever since then various proposals have been made to address this obvious need in our community, but there has not been much done to alleviate it. The situation has frequently been covered in The Island Packet, but little action has been taken to fill the void.
Traffic statistics indicate that every day about fourteen thousand vehicles drive each way across the bridge to the mainland. Some of those people are islanders, some are tourists, but the majority are workers who live off-island. Some of them come twenty to forty miles to get here, and depending on the time they come and how heavy the traffic is, it can take many of them an hour or more to get to work.
No doubt most of you have noted “Help Wanted” signs in numerous businesses on the island. That is true all over the country, but it is particularly true on Hilton Head. In recent years more and more businesses have been opened in Bluffton and Hardeeville and along Routes 278 and 170. It is cheaper for workers to live there than on the island, and because they do live there, they are more likely to work there if they can work for equal pay there.
Unless something is done to overcome this dilemma, the local hospitality economy will begin to decline. If that happens, the price of real estate will also drop. Tourism and the hospitality industry are the primary basis of our economy, and if there are too few employees to staff the places where tourists stay, play, and eat, eventually fewer of them will be coming to this semi-tropical paradise. Thus it will become less paradisical for everyone. Affordable housing should be a priority for everyone living on the island, but it isn’t.
Hospitality is a biblical mandate in both the Old and New Testaments. The two-word injunction, “practice hospitality,” is found in two places in the New Testament, once in Romans (12:13), and once in I Peter (4:5). Hilton Head is very good about practicing hospitality for paying customers, but not so good for the workers who serve the paying customers. Unless something is done to construct housing that our workforce can afford, we are bound to have a diminishing number of them.
Lois and I moved to St. Paul, Minnesota the first week of July in 1998, where I became the interim pastor of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church. It happened that the congregation was the oldest Protestant church in Minnesota, and they would soon be celebrating their 150th anniversary. A committee had been formed to organize the celebration, and I was told they would like me to attend the second meeting of their group. I learned that it had been decided a goal of $280,000 would be set for two purposes: one was to spend half of it for necessary building repairs, and the other half was to go to some charitable purpose, as yet undetermined.
I have always been interested in Christian stewardship and raising money for charitable purposes, so, innocent as a lamb, I said, “A hundred and eighty thousand dollars is an interesting figure, but it has no numerical relationship to a one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Could some major donors be inspired to contribute a total of $1,500,000, $10,000 for each year of the congregation’s existence? And if so, could the congregation be inspired to pledge that amount to match the major donors?” Mind you, this was the first meeting I had attended in that church, and I had been there only a few days. I suspect they instantly thought the Interim Pastor Search Committee had made a huge tactical error, but since they were not the ones charged with the responsibility to raise the money, they had no objection for the idea to be taken to the governing board for their approval, since they were not authorized to make such a decision.
I had previously been told that church had a $28 million-dollar endowment, so before my second meeting of the governing board, I got the idea of asking the board of trustees to take $1,500,000 to go into the charitable fund which was to be a part of the celebration. Therefore the major donors’ pledges would be matched by the congregation, the congregation’s pledges would be matched by the trustees, and the trustees would be matched by the major donors. Everybody would get three times the value of what they actually pledged. Because they were the House of Hope Church, the governing board decided they would establish the Houses of Hope Fund for affordable housing. The annual interest from the fund, about a quarter of a million dollars, would be used for projects to help start the construction of new or renovated housing for people in the Twin Cities who needed places to live but had limited means to pay for them.
The matching gifts concept was the factor that sold the idea. In six months or so we secured pledges and cash donations to establish the fund, and for the past quarter of a century the interest from that $4,500,000 has been the impetus to assist in creating hundreds of affordable homes for lower income people throughout St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Over a month ago there was a front-page story in The Packet about two brothers from a family-owned development company that bought an empty bank building near the Sea Pines Circle. Thet are turning it into affordable workforce housing for employees of the Sea Pines Company. Now, instead of having to drive an hour or more to work, a Sea Pines bus will deliver them to their places of employment each day.
That story inspired me to try to get a Hilton Head Affordable Housing Foundation established to provide affordable homes for all kinds of workers on the island: teachers, police, firemen, local government employees, health care people, landscapers, restaurant waitstaff, store clerks, hotel and timeshare workers. We welcome three million tourists to the island every year; let’s also put out the welcome mat for those who serve them.
According to Matthew, Jesus told several parables in the last two or three days of his life. The last parable he ever taught was the parable of the sheep and goats. Sheep are gentle creatures that move around in search of lush grass, but goats quickly devour all kinds of foliage, including the roots, and they can turn productive turf into a wasteland. In the parable, all the nations and peoples are separated as though they were either sheep or goats. The King says to the sheep, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” After listing more kindnesses, the sheep asked when they had done all these things, and the King told them that when they did it to the most needy of the earth, they had done it to him. The goats did not do that, and they were chastened for their uncaring selfishness.
In every community everywhere, the people who need the most help are often the ones who are the least likely to get it. People with the means to take care of themselves ordinarily, but not always, do so. They love to say, God helps those who help themselves.” Because lower income folks may simply lack the financial resources to do that adequately, they fall between the cracks of the fiscal floor necessary to live comfortably. Yesterday an Island Packet story said only 37% of our town employees live on the island. There are workers who reside in substandard housing on-and-off-island who are paying fifteen hundred dollars or more to rent those homes. We need to provide much more affordable housing to the thousands of people who work here but cannot afford to live here. In thus serving them, we also will be serving God.
On the island are commercial buildings which have stood empty for a long time, some of them for years. I am going to try to convince their owners to contribute those buildings to our housing foundation and get a big tax write-off. Then they will be renovated as workforce apartments. The owners will no longer have to pay property taxes on their deteriorating cash drains. If you are aware of any such places, please let me know. If we get one or two such buildings quickly, the foundation can quickly begin to do what it is intended to do.
There is one big obstacle to this kind of effort. It is the acronymic NIMBY Factor: “Not in my back yard!” NIMBY is always a problem for certain people, because they think such projects will detract from the value of their property. They want to protect their assets, particularly when a fair percentage of those assets may be tied up in an expensive and currently over-priced piece of real estate. Please listen carefully: If we continue to have a drastic shortage of service workers, in twenty years your home may be worth only half of what it is worth today. When too few service workers are available, businesses will start to fail, and residential structures will begin to deteriorate. In forty years your home may be worth a quarter of its present value. In sixty years it may be under water --- not as a mortgage for whoever will own it, but literally. This island will be totally abandoned in sixty to a hundred years, no matter what is done to slow down climate change. This won’t affect any of us personally, but before long it will begin to devastate the local economy. And then our island paradise will become a mere shadow of what it once was.
As long as Hilton Head is environmentally viable, people will still move here to live and work. However, if there won’t be enough lower-paid workers, what draws people here as visitors will begin to dissipate. We have a social issue that too many of us have overlooked for too long, even though every “Help Wanted” sign should alert us to a problem crying out for a solution.
In the Bible, the word “strangers” equates to what today are negatively called immigrants or aliens, meaning people from other nations or cultures. There are over 150 such references to migrants in scripture, and nearly all of them urged the Israelites or the New Testament Christians to pay particular attention to the needs of outsiders who are seeking work. If there is no place for lower-income people, in time there will be no place for higher income people.
Some of the recent workers on Hilton Head have come here from other nations, especially from Latin America. There are also many native-born Americans who migrate to the island looking for work, knowing that employers are desperately needing workers. To repeat, in his parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus said of such outsiders, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” Unless we create considerably more housing for outsiders than they now can afford to rent or buy, our welcome will be meaningless. They will have to live somewhere else, and therefore they will also work somewhere else.
A not-for-profit foundation cannot provide all the housing required for all the workers needed in this island community. But fairly quickly perhaps it can initiate scores of units to be constructed or renovated. In order to accomplish this, however, a sizeable fund of a few million dollars must be contributed by islanders who have charitable inclinations. The word “charity” comes from a Latin word, caritas, which means “love.” Every form of charity is love in action, through volunteer service to others or in monetary contributions on behalf of others. In the Bible, there are hundreds of passages that encourage charitable deeds, especially in the words of Jesus.
Compassion can be shown to hundreds of people, including family members, who will be able to move to our community because of the compassion shown to them by providing homes in which they can afford to live. In helping them, we will also help our entire community. Right now we need hundreds of workers whom we are not successful in attracting because the wages they will be offered are not sufficient for them to afford to come here. Those who are already employed don’t need employment, so they will stay put, wherever they are. Thus our employment crisis will only grow as long as there is insufficient housing for relatively low-paid earners.
Now I want to make a request of all of you collectively. When you opened your bulletin today, you saw a peculiar pledge form for future contributions to the Hilton Head Affordable Housing Foundation. I am asking you to take a leap of faith as an act of love on behalf of lower-income workers. You can be instrumental in giving these people a whole new lease on life, and you also will contribute to a new lease on life necessary for the entire island.
Here is what I hope we together will promise to do. My goal is that all of us will collectively make a pledge of at least $50,000 to this cause. With that pledge I will secure nine other individual pledges of $50,000, to match our $50,000, for a total of $500,000. Then I and/or other volunteer fundraisers will secure five other $100,000 pledges, to match the $500,000, adding up to a total of $1,000,000. Then we will secure four pledges of $250,000, to match the million dollars already pledged. With two million dollars, the foundation will be in a position to assist a community-wide effort to start to address a pressing need that unfortunately has never been widely recognized. Incidentally, I already have two pledges, one for $2,000 and another for $3,000, from people to whom I only explained my idea in passing without asking them for anything. That is 10% of the goal I am requesting for our congregation, so we now need come up with a mere $45,000.
You are not obligated to contribute anything now. All I am asking is that this small band of ecclesiastical and theological oddballs will be the catalyst to get something started for this community that this community has never sufficiently grasped. If affluent Hilton Head Islanders don’t provide housing for people who can’t afford to live here, the people who can afford to live here will find the community they thought this was won’t be what it has been. And that is because Hilton Head affordable housing isn’t.
This is the opposite of the way most major fundraising operates. Normally the biggest pledges are sought first, and then lower amounts are secured in order to guarantee the larger pledges will be honored. But The Chapel Without Walls is not The House of Hope Presbyterian Church, and we have neither a sizeable percentage of very wealthy people nor a $28,000,000 endowment. So I am starting low, and working up.
Will all of this happen? I don’t know. Can it happen? I have no doubt that it can. I also am confident that those of us in this room and others not here today can ignite a charitable expression of love to benefit workers who need assistance, and that will also greatly benefit our community.
Assuming we together pledge at least $50,000, we can be the catharsis that produces a charitable foundation that has $2,000,000 to start the balling rolling. If that happens, this island will continue to be what it has been for at least fifty years. Climate change will determine what occurs beyond that. In any case, we won’t be here anyway. But let’s make a brighter future for a community that will get bleaker if something isn’t done - - - and let’s do it now!