Evolution of a Ministry
Housed at First Pres, the Women’s Transformation Center has served hundreds of women over its forty years and multiple incarnations.
THE WOMAN WAS A LICENSED practical nurse at Piedmont Hospital when she visited First Presbyterian Church in the winter of 1981. After the early worship service, she approached senior pastor Dr. Paul Eckel. She was living in a lean-to behind the hospital because she had nowhere else to go, she told him. Why didn’t he do something to give women with no place to live a place to stay while they pulled their lives back together?
The conversation sparked a ministry that began within a month and, forty years and several hundred women later, is still going strong. The residents of what is now the Women’s Transformation Center (WTC, formerly called the Women’s Transition Center), and the staff and volunteers who work with them, have faced almost every challenge of life, including, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. After staying in the WTC, some residents have had additional experiences of homelessness, but most have moved forward into self-sustained, independent lives with renewed self-confidence.
The WTC has welcomed not only women in need of a safe place to stay but also countless volunteers. It was one of the ministries that drew Jennifer Pendergast and her family to First Presbyterian. She appreciates feeling a part of the community of women by taking meals to share with them, she said. “It’s nice to know your church provides a safe place for women to get back on their feet.”
The WTC was only one of more than a dozen shelters established at churches and synagogues during the early 1980s, a time marked by growing awareness of and concern for those who were living on Atlanta’s streets. And there seemed to be more unhoused people than ever, the culmination of several societal shifts, as cited by William Wyatt Holland in a 2009 dissertation for the sociology department of Georgia State University.
Thousands of patients had been released from residential mental health facilities in Georgia with the promise of community clinics that never materialized. Changing views of alcoholism from a criminal offense to a disease meant that public inebriates were no longer automatically hauled off to jail.
And the end of legal segregation had changed the racial makeup of the poor on downtown streets. During the height of Jim Crow, poor Black people mostly stayed in predominantly Black parts of the city, invisible to the white business class, according to Holland. But with the end to legal segregation, Black men without homes were more likely to be in areas where white lawyers and bankers walked past them daily on their way to and from their offices.
When Maynard Jackson was elected in 1973 as Atlanta’s first Black mayor, city business leaders, known for their emphasis on image, pressed him to do something about the number of “street people” who populated the city’s downtown parks. Taking advantage of a technicality in the law, Jackson’s administration changed the status of the parks to “neighborhood” facilities so that they would be closed to visitors at night.
Those issues were percolating when, on November 1, 1979, the twenty-five-member Clifton Presbyterian, in the Candler Park-Lake Claire part of Atlanta, opened its doors to let homeless men sleep on its pews. The story goes that the little flock was studying Isaiah 58, in which the prophet says that God is not impressed by fasting and instructs the people to “loose the bonds of injustice . . . to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.” Convicted, the Clifton members closed their Bibles and took the church van downtown in order to bring homeless men into their house.
A little over a year later, the sheltering movement got underway in full, spurred by the deaths of three homeless men within a few days in the winter of 1980-1981. Two men died in a fire in the vacant house where they were sleeping; another froze to death on the street near the state capitol, just a block from Central Presbyterian Church.
Rev. Joanna Adams, later interim senior pastor at First Presbyterian, was community pastor at Central at the time. She recalls getting a call in January 1981 from Bill Bolling, a parishioner at All Saints Episcopal Church and founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, asking about opening an old gymnasium on Central’s campus as an emergency shelter. Central’s senior pastor agreed, and within a week about 100 people were sleeping at Central. The crowd would eventually swell to about 250, with men on the gym floor and a few women and children confined to a separate area, a small room on a balcony.
Volunteers came from churches and synagogues around the city to spend the night and to bring food. The effort was “very ecumenical from the beginning in terms of volunteers,” Adams said. “Clifton was a little operation. This was something big in the heart of Atlanta.”
By the fall of 1981, several more religious institutions whose clergy and lay leaders were involved with the Clifton or Central shelters had opened shelters in their own facilities, but none offered transitional housing for single women. When the Piedmont nurse challenged Rev. Eckel, a committed core of activists at First Presbyterian was primed and ready to go. They were led by the church’s outreach minister, Rev. Bob Bevis.
A church member who worked for Sears arranged delivery of mattresses, members converted a restroom from men’s to women’s, and the shelter opened in November of 1981 in two Sunday school rooms on the third floor of the education annex. With no sprinkler system, the church was allowed to house no more than fifteen people, so it was set up for twelve guests, two volunteers, and Bevis.
While the women slept on mattresses on the floor of one room, volunteers stayed up all night in a room across the hall, aided by a coffee pot. The only shower was four floors down in the basement; a female volunteer would accompany two or three women each night to take a shower.
Volunteers provided sandwiches and fruit for dinner, and a church member who lived near the church washed all the sheets and towels.
“A lot of the ladies were middle-aged and older,” said Mary Joe Dellinger, an elder and former Community Ministries staff member who was on the original committee. “A lot had mental health issues. Many had been on the street for years.”
The shelter stayed open for six months before closing for the summer. When it shut down, Bevis and his team made sure every woman had a place to go.
The church members who were involved with the shelter unanimously wanted to keep the program going, Dellinger said. They met weekly as a committee chaired by elder Jerry Peterson to plot the course to reopen for good in the fall of 1982.
When Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting (AIB), a television ministry headquartered at the church, moved to other facilities, space opened up for more suitable conditions: two six-person rooms, a lounge/dining room, and a tiny kitchenette. A Sunday school class built platform beds and hanging closets. Volunteers stayed in what had been AIB’s office. People began bringing full meals.
Harrilee Underwood, who began volunteering in the mid-1980s, remembers relying on a microwave and “one sharp knife.” She developed relationships with a few of the women that continue today.
Conditions stayed about the same, 365 nights a year for sixteen years, until 1998, when the Hal and John C. Smith Christian Community Center opened with its fourth floor designed specifically for the shelter. (The building was renamed the Hal and Julia Smith Family Christian Community Center in September 2018 to honor Julia, wife of Hal and mother of John.)
Along with the accommodations, the residents have changed. Most women today are referred by other agencies and are working or going to school. The program has also advanced from a shelter into a network that includes many services and partner agencies that help it live up to the name Women’s Transformation Center.
At the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, in 2005, more than one thousand women had stayed for some time in the WTC, and another thousand people had volunteered with time, food, and friendships. In honor of the occasion, a former guest wrote a poem that says, in part, “I still believe in God’s good grace for it is evidenced in this place.”
