The Bucket

Last night at the AfterHours Denver Christmas Shindig I told a story about our tub with a yellow lid. Except it's not merely a tub with a yellow lid.

Around AfterHours we call it "The Bucket." Denver Central Library gave us this bucket and adorned it with AfterHours Denver stickers. They even used their color printer to make them!

A few weeks ago, as I was delivering lunches someone called out to me, "Hey, Logan."

I looked over and saw Osage, a familiar community member and a man who has his fair share of experience with homelessness. I said, "Hi Osage."

He said, "I love to see you carrying something." When I asked him what he meant he said, "When I see you carrying something I know something good is going somewhere in the world." 

I told him how much it meant to me to hear that from him and as he hugged me and clapped me on the back he said, "It's f&%kin' true."

Osage is not the type to mince words. He's been around the block. It's not an understatement to say this guy is hewn out of rock. He's one of the toughest men I know: a marine who served in combat zones, homeless most of his life. These days he’s thinner than I’d like to see him. The truth is he’s dying of cancer. But every time I see him he has a smile on his face. And when he sees the AfterHours bucket he calls it out, he says, “Look at that—something good is going somewhere."

A few days after this encounter with Osage, I had a conversation with another homeless man named Charles. We were chatting about life and suddenly Charles looks at me and says, "The gospel of Jesus Christ is simple: you see someone who needs some help you help ‘em."

Some theologians may quibble about this. I'm sure we could get into a long discussion about the ins and outs of what the gospel is and how we understand it. But Charles is another one of those guys who has been around the block forever. He knows what it's like to receive care and he knows what it's like to give it. And he knows what it's like when that care doesn't come. When someone like that tells you, "The gospel of Jesus Christ is you see someone who needs some help you help ‘em," you just nod your head and try to really listen.

This is not merely a tub with a yellow lid. This is our bucket and in it we carry peace, hope, dignity, and love... Right now it’s full of lunches people will eat tomorrow. It isn’t just AfterHours bucket. It is a bucket of grace and it belongs to the Holy Spirit. This bucket belongs to all our partners, it belongs to the people we serve, it belongs to YOU.

For us this bucket is a small part of seeing someone who needs some help and helping them. Thank you for helping us fill this bucket week in and week out. We could not do this without you.

Summer ‘24 Update

This summer, AfterHours has been hard at work getting lunches to people who need them as well as water. Water is a huge need among people sheltering outside, especially with the scorching temps in Denver this summer. 

AfterHours has also been playing an advocacy role on behalf of our friends on the street. With increased enforcement of various anti-camping ordinances in the city, and the efforts of Mayor's office to clean up camps and get people housed, the approach of police and others has become unnecessarily aggressive.

Just last week I had a meeting with Mayor Johnston and his staff to encourage them to continue seeking creative solutions to solving homelessness in our city. I pray the Mayor's office can communicate with police effectively to encourage them to take a more humane, trauma informed approach to camp resolutions.

I also have the honor to partner with Network Coffee House to remember and memorialize our friends from the street who have died. Gerry was a long-time member of the homeless community in Denver who found housing near the end of his life. He was a whole person, a great wit, a complicated, highly intelligent man, who could sometimes be a real pain in the ass.

His memorial was well attended. Every seat in the house was filled. It was good to remember him. He will be missed.

Thank you being a part of what we do at AfterHours. We couldn't do it without you.

Coming up at AfterHours

Coming up at AfterHours:

January 16 – Cap City Tavern

January 23 – Providence At 5280

January 30 – 6:30pm to 8:30pm 20% of all beer sales at Max Taps Centennial go to support AfterHours Denver!

2022 Wrap-up

Happy New Year from AfterHours Denver!

2022 has been a year of remembering our history at AfterHours Denver and looking forward to the future of what AfterHours can be. We give thanks for our founder, Jerry Herships and for the service of Tyler Kaufmann who saw AfterHours through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recommitted ourselves to creating places for human beings in search of love, belonging, kinship, acceptance, and safety. That means for homeless people and housed people too. We continue to provide welcoming places in bars around the city for all kinds of folks: that includes atheists, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, and people who just think PB&J has a little bit of power to make the world a better place.

We distributed well over 200 pairs of thermal underwear this Thanksgiving in partnership with Network Coffee House, Denver Central Library, and the St. Francis Center Safe Outdoor Space.

At Christmas in the Park '22, 270 volunteers served 360 people on Christmas Day. Less than a week after some of the most brutal cold Colorado has experienced we distributed hats, gloves, bags, tarps, sleeping bags, coats, hand warmers, duct tape, and socks. As I write this, another winter storm is bearing down on Colorado and we know all of that gear will be put to good use as people take shelter from the weather.

2022 saw us celebrate AfterHours and raise support for our homeless friends as we came together for our first Walk for Feet in May.

Shindig '22 saw us roll out our new mission statement, a vision for what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for. It goes like this:

AfterHours’ mission is to put more love into the world by providing necessities for people who need them, especially the homeless, and by creating places where all are welcome.

And finally, as always, we served thousands of lunches to people in Denver who need a bite to eat and a little love in a world that is too often unloving.

At AfterHours WE love YOU for your donations, your support, your prayers, and your good feelings. We thank you for your presence in the bars and on social media. We thank you for telling your friends about us. We love you for believing in what we do and helping us make it happen.

Today and tomorrow are the last days of our year-end campaign. If you haven't given yet we invite you to start off 2023 by joining us and taking advantage of our $10,000 match. If you've given already, good on ya. Happy New Year!

https://afterhoursdenver.networkforgood.com/projects/176026-year-end-campaign-22

Lions, Lambs, and Puppy Dogs

It was great to see a larger than usual Don's crowd last night.

We talked about lions lying down with lambs* and what it has to do with safe spaces. We talked about why domesticated dogs and cats are pretty chilled out animals (hint: *they're descended from predators*). So maybe it's relatively easy for a fierce wolf to become a sweet dog (because somewhere inside the dog she still thinks she's a wolf). But for a sheep or a lamb there's a lot more risk involved than there is for a lion. We've been talking about Place a lot lately at AfterHours and we'll continue the conversation next week when we talk Brave Spaces, and a potentially more beautiful vision than the one we find in Isaiah:

Untitled Poem by Beth Strano

There is no such thing as a “safe space” —

We exist in the real world.

We all carry scars and have caused wounds.

This space

seeks to turn down the volume of the world outside,

and amplify voices that have to fight to be heard elsewhere,

This space will not be perfect.

It will not always be what we wish it to be

But

It will be our space together,

and we will work on it side by side.

If you want a primer on Brave Spaces, check out this episode of On Being, it's well worth your time: https://onbeing.org/programs/jennifer-bailey-and-lennon-flowers-an-invitation-to-brave-space/

*Isaiah 11:6-10

6 The wolf will live with the lamb,

and the leopard will lie down with the young goat;

the calf and the young lion will feed together,

and a little child will lead them.

7 The cow and the bear will graze.

Their young will lie down together,

and a lion will eat straw like an ox.

8 A nursing child will play over the snake’s hole;

toddlers will reach right over the serpent’s den.

9 They won’t harm or destroy anywhere on my holy mountain.

The earth will surely be filled with the knowledge of the Lord,

just as the water covers the sea.

10 On that day, the root of Jesse will stand as a signal to the peoples. The nations will seek him out, and his dwelling will be glorious.

Tree of Life

Greetings from Denver on this World Homelessness Day.

I recently met a young man named Kenneth just on the outskirts of Civic Center Park. He had been homeless in Denver for about a year. He told me about some of the misfortune he experienced that led to his becoming homeless. It was one of those one-thing-after-another type of stories: shaky relationships at home, a lack of funds, a big move and a job that fell through soon after, few friends and no family that could help. I listened to him as he very matter-of-factly told me how he ended up where he was. To be honest, I wondered about how stable his mental health was, but rather than sit in judgement I decided simply to be curious and listen to his story.

One thing that was clear is that Kenneth had hope. He told me how *interested* had had become in things since he had become homeless. He wondered more about how the economy works, how housing works, how the various service providers across the city do their work and what they offer. He told me how he felt like he finally had time to think about himself, his motivations, why he thought the way he did about himself and the world. He told me he started reading the Bible and he had lots of questions and good observations about what he had been reading.

I had given him socks and a water, which is how our conversation started, and I told him a little bit about AfterHours. I wanted to be sure he knew about the various smaller resources available to homeless folks that newcomers don't always know about, so I started listing them off and asking if he knew about them. In this back and forth about service providers he said the most interesting thing I've heard from someone in awhile: "I have kind of started thinking about the city as a garden, and right now what I'm doing is trying to find all Trees of Life in the urban garden." What an amazing way to explore the world!

Today, on World Homelessness Day, my hope is that AfterHours finds those Trees of Life. I hope that we can serve as loving gardeners spreading fertilizer through love and tending to all the plants and creatures who call the garden home, even if they don't have a stable place in it. Maybe some day we can even plant a lasting tree somewhere in this garden. If you want to help sustain AfterHours' work in the garden, I hope you'll consider making a donation today. Make a sustaining monthly gift and consider yourself a real professional composter!

Connections

AfterHours inspires me. I don't just mean the people who show up downtown, or the people who show up in the bar, or our folks who get in line for a lunch. I mean the whole dang thing inspires me.

• The history of the thing: the guts it takes to start something outside the box, outside the church building, outside expectations, outside of how things have always been done

• The people: the way people give their time, their resources, their love, and who give their attention to people living hard, outside, in the elements, under the scorn of so many relatively comfortable people

• The connections: everyone who pays attention to AfterHours, who receive our emails, who check us out on social media or our website, who donate their money, who send us good vibes and remember us in their prayers, and especially people who come over at the bar and ask, "What the heck are you doing?"

AfterHours connects thousands of individuals across every imaginable line of difference and boundary. Through AfterHours you and me and all our supporters are connected across riches and poverty, sex and gender, age and geography. We come together in person in downtown Denver, at the bar, and virtually on social media and the internet. And, we come together in the physical, emotional, spiritual, and monetary support we show for each other and to AfterHours as a community and to the people served by that community.

I am grateful for you. I am grateful for our connection, and for the connections we all share through AfterHours that we may not even truly know about.

Friendship

Had a good discussion on Monday at Cap City Tavern about friendship. This month we've been discussing friendship with Jesus and friendship in general. In John 15:12-15* we hear Jesus call us to friendship.

How to be friends with Christ? Love as he loved. And who does Jesus love best? The outcasts, the misfits, the poor, and the lost. So maybe the best way to know Christ is to love who he loves. For AfterHours that means serving and knowing homeless folks in Denver.

We also discussed conditions in friendship. Friendship is maybe the freest human relationship, and yet we do expect a certain mutuality from our friends. We show up, listen to one another, speak honestly to each other, and give support when it's needed. So while there aren't many of us who keep our friendships based on a command, it's true that we love each other as we are first loved. That's the condition for friendship to exist, and it's the condition Jesus expects if we're going to be friends with him.

———

*”My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

Max Taps + AfterHours

You're invited!

SAVE THE DATE
Monday July 25th
We're doing something a little different at AfterHours Denver

JOIN US at Max Taps Centennial at 5:30pm for their DONATION MONDAY

20% of sales that evening go back to AfterHours.  

You might have thought about checking us out for the first time, or maybe it has been a while.  If you are in the South Metro area, come on out and invite a friend to enjoy some Colorado craft beer!

We'll be making lunches and then just hanging out some.

Our sustaining challenge

Just last week as I was delivering lunches to the library I got into a conversation with a guy named Rick. Rick was asking me where the lunches came from and who makes them. So I told him about AfterHours, and gathering at the bar, and all the people who make lunches. He was intrigued and said, "I go to church on Sunday depending on where I'm camping. People are always a little weirded out by me at a regular church. But it sounds like I'd fit right in at AfterHours." I told him that when everyone at church is weird it's hard to stick out as weird. He laughed and took down info on our next few gatherings and said he'd try to make it.

Whether he makes it to the bar or not, this is the kind of connection AfterHours is all about. Rick heard about people who care about him, he got a water AfterHours provided, and a lunch lovingly made for him. I'm looking forward to seeing him again at the library or out on the streets.

Along with delivering lunches and water downtown to our friends living outside, AfterHours is also putting a premium on finding new monthly recurring donations to support our work showing love to people just like Rick.

Since last month we’ve increased our monthly recurring donations from 19 to 21! It's a start!

if you've made a donation in the past we absolutely love you for it. You're a huge part of what makes AfterHours go. We could not do what we do without you.

AfterHours isn't looking to be the biggest richest nonprofit out there; we're looking to be in this for the long haul, and sustaining monthly gifts are how we'll do it. If you've supported us in the past, my challenge to you today is to consider what it would take for you to split your amazing yearly gift into a sustaining monthly gift. If you've never made a gift or haven't done so this year, what kind of recurring gift makes sense for you?

Set up your sustaining monthly gift today!

No Stopping

Two weeks ago AfterHours Denver gathered on a chilly spring day for our Walk for Feet. We walked through the same streets the people we serve walk every day. We visited places and service providers where our friends who sleep outside find rest and survival. As we walked we paid attention to the city, to our feet, to the way the city welcomes or does not welcome those who need to survive in it.

As we walked we saw this bit of city sponsored graffiti, right at the spot at Civic Center where AfterHours has served for so many years.

Issac, a friend from the street who recently moved into Permanent Supportive Housing, once told me, "If you're homeless and you keep moving, you're legal. If you stop and stand or stop and sit or stop and lie down you're illegal." This is why we gathered to walk for feet. For someone experiencing homelessness, their feet are not only a tool for survival but an absolute necessity to stay safe from from all the various forces and powers whose constant message to the homeless is, "MOVE!" So AfterHours walked.

If you want to support AfterHours and our friends on the streets you can come on a Monday night to the bar to make lunches, or you can get in touch and take a walk with us, or you can beam up a prayer, or you can make a donation. There are lots of ways to get involved and we'd love to get to know you.

Everything is Holy Now

Something I love about AfterHours is how free we can be with our time together. Sometimes that means we have a good conversation and others things happen and I’m in tears at how beautiful our time together can be even (especially) when we don’t plan for it.

Totally unplanned, the great AfterHours pop-up band featuring Eric McEuen and Dan Perron offered up a song Eric thought would fit with the sermon. It was a perfect response. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=epXCX6BXYa4&feature=youtu.be

The thing is, no one is unclean, no one is unholy. Everyone is clean, everyone is holy. Just means we have to figure out what does it mean for us to respond to everything and everyone with grace.

Jesus is Trans

Friends, Pastor Logan here. Last week I posted that Jesus is trans and later preached that Jesus is a Black trans woman at the bar.

What does that mean?

We read Matthew 25:40 where Christ says, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Then listen:

According to the Human Rights Campaign, “fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color—particularly Black transgender women—and that the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare and other necessities.”

2021 was the deadliest year on record for trangender people, most of them being Black or Latina. More anti-trans bills were passed in 2021 than in any other year. And, not only are anti-trans bills being passed but 28 states have hate crimes that don’t include protections for trans people.

Transgender people in general are 4x more likely to be victims of violence than the cis men and women. Trans men are 5.4x more likely to be victims of violence than cis men.

Nearly half of trans people under the age of 26 have said they have attempted suicide compared to 6% of the general population. 56% say they’ve considered it. 59% of transgender youth said they had deliberately hurt themselves, compared with 8.9% of all 16- to 24-year-olds.

16% of trans women had experienced domestic violence in 2021 compared to 7.5% of cisgender women. Trans prisoners are ten times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault than the general prison population.

Finally, I raise up black trans people:

• Black trans people have a 26% unemployment rate, twice as high as the unemployment rate for transgender people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and four times as high as the unemployment rate in the general population.

• 41% of Black trans people have been homeless (more than five times the general population)

• 34% of Black trans people have household incomes less than $10,000 (more than eight times the general population.

Yet again, we read Matthew 25:40, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Whether Christ was a man or not, a gender bender or not, whether Christ experienced a “trans moment on the mountaintop,” or not is immaterial. Christ is trans because Christ identifies as anyone who experiences the violence of society, and right now no one now experiences more violence—physical, psychological, economic, familial violence—no one experiences more violence in our society than trans people.

As we move toward the moment of new life and new creation represented by Easter, we also move toward the death of Christ at the hands of his own society, at the hands of the Empire, witnessed by his friends and witnessed by us all through the Gospels. For all those who experience the violence of society, we have hope for new life and new creation, AND YET at the same time we also see God’s solidarity with all those who suffer as Jesus suffers on the cross.

Jesus is a gender bender. Jesus is a mother hen. Jesus is trans.

2021 Wrap-up

Anyone else having trouble remembering what year it is? It’s 2020 right? Wait, no, that’s not right.

As Omincron heats up and we all look for rapid over-the-counter tests without much luck, I want to look back over the last year and pay special attention to the bright spots.

Christmas in the Park 2021

We were back downtown for Christmas in the Park in ‘21. AfterHours and our partners, volunteers, strangers, and friends came together to distribute over 300 sleeping bags, and hundreds of backpacks, luggage, duct tape, hand warmers, coats, pieces of clothing, shoes, boots, socks, and MORE. A huge “Thank You” to all our table captains for pulling together an amazing event. Check out the story on 9News.

Annual Christmas Shindig

We came together on December 6 to celebrate Christmas, AfterHours, our supporters, leadership, and each other. At the event, we welcomed back our founder Rev. Jerry Herships. Personally it was meaningful for me to hear Jerry’s perspective on where AfterHours has been while we look forward to where we’re going together. There’s clear continuity between the founding days of AfterHours and what we’re up to now. That’s something to celebrate!

Thankful for Long Johns

Only a month ago AfterHours celebrated Thanksgiving Day with Thankful for Long Johns. We collected over 250 sets of thermal underwear, met dozens of people in need, and ended the day at the Regis Safe Outdoor Space site where we were told our donation would make a great Christmas present for their residents.

Where We’re Serving

In October AfterHours began providing lunches, water, and socks to Denver Central Library. We’ve made great connections with library customers, caseworkers, and even library security guards. The library is a wonderful resource and restful spot for our friends living on the streets. The shutdown of Civic Center Park also meant we began delivering lunches directly to unsanctioned encampments and other areas downtown. We’ve continued this every Sunday with lunches made at St. Andrew UMC.

Before the Civic Center shutdown, AfterHours and our partners were in the park nearly every day of the week as we sought to ramp back up to our pre-COVID presence in the park. During that time we met old friends and new, found new challenges, and felt the renewed conviction to be present with folks living outside in Denver.

The New Guy

Our new Pastor/Director, Logan Robertson (that’s me!), came on in July, and June marked our first meetings back in bars and at the park. At the same time AfterHours said goodbye to Rev. Tyler Kaufmann, Nicole, and Theo. Tyler and his family not only guided AfterHours through a pandemic but also through a transition from our founding pastor into a new season for AfterHours. We’re so grateful for his steady hand and service to this community.

Love

2021 has been a year of Zoom meetings, in-person reunions, shifting sands, expected and unexpected challenges, transitions, and new friends. Through it all AfterHours has continued to put more love into the world where it’s needed most. It’s who we are and what we do.

Thanks for being with us on the journey.