Abundant Life Church members Jennifer Wells, left and Jimmy Hart eat a meal provided by the church at Gish Park in Central City, Ky., on Sunday, April 27, 2025.

CENTRAL CITY — Pastor Jennifer Banks and other leaders of Abundant Life Church were not sure what to expect when the mayor of this Western Kentucky town called a meeting to talk about their plans for helping people who are experiencing homelessness.

They had briefed the mayor and a few city officials once before. This time they were surprised to see downtown business owners and other city officials also gathered in the room.

They soon heard that the church’s plan — they had dubbed it the “Beacon of Hope” — was setting off alarms.

They were warned that their outreach to locals in need would attract — was already attracting — people from other places, raising fears that the community’s already short supply of housing and services would be strained even further. The specter was raised of Austin, Texas, where voters banned panhandling and camping in public places in response to burgeoning encampments.

“What will happen to a city that takes in all of this stuff — it’s destroyed,” said Central City Mayor Tony Armour. “We’re short on homes for people that live here, but the more we reach out for people to come in here, the shorter we’re going to be for homes.”

Zachary Banks provided the Lantern with an audio recording of the meeting.

Mayor Armour did not respond to requests seeking an interview about the December gathering. The Lantern sent emails requesting an interview, left messages by phone and in person at city hall.

During the meeting, Armour said constituents were complaining about seeing homeless people around the church and about water running off from its mobile shower. “We’ve got major people upset here in the city about the church.”

Abundant Life had gained a reputation as a place people could come for a meal and other resources. The church had allowed people to sleep in its parking lot when they had nowhere else to go. The Felix Martin Foundation, a local nonprofit, provided a grant to install a mobile shower outside the church.

At one point during the meeting, the mayor said to Jennifer Banks, “You’re not seeing the big picture. You’re seeing the kindness of your heart, and I appreciate that. I love you for that. But you know what? We’re not willing to destroy our community.”

“We’re not either, sir,” Banks responded. “The church was supposed to take care of widows. The church was supposed to take care of orphans. We’re supposed to feed. We’re supposed to clothe, and at the end of the day, Abundant Life Church-Central City is just trying to be that.”

The meeting ended with tentative plans to meet again and Armour saying there were different visions on “how to move forward and what to do.”

The mayor and Abundant Life Church leaders haven’t had any meetings since, and the “Beacon of Hope” plan to buy a local motel and transform it into something more is still in the talking stages.

The motel is already a place where people without shelter stay, sometimes paid for by a local church or members of a loose coalition of community members trying to help people experiencing homelessness or unstable housing.

The “Beacon of Hope” idea for the motel: Turn the rooms into efficiency apartments, where tenants could pay rent to build up a financial record, eventually moving on to other housing.

Local agencies could come in and provide pop-up services — dental clinics, mental health care — and the church would offer Bible studies. When asked if the idea would be a form of transitional housing, Jennifer Banks said “what is in our heart fits in no category that already exists.

“If services are offered in one location, even if it’s once a month, even if it’s once every six months — if it’s accessible to you zero times a year, but now it is twice a year, that can change the whole dynamic of everything,” she said.

Jennifer Banks said the church is still in conversations with the owner of the Central Inn about a possible purchase.

Meanwhile, disagreements over how to help have frayed the informal coalition seeking solutions. Some arguments are over how to help people who are using drugs. The debates also center on numbers: How many people are experiencing homelessness in Muhlenberg County? Does that number justify something like an emergency shelter?

AsheLynn Andrews, operator of a tattoo shop in Central City, worked closely with Gwen Clements and Abundant Life Church until they split over who and how to help.

In an interview in October, Andrews argued there is no need for a shelter — something she thinks would attract homeless people from other places — because there are only a handful of homeless people in Central City.

Clements, on the other hand, says she knows of dozens of people across Muhlenberg County who are homeless at least art of the time. Numbers are fluid, she said, changing depending on the time of year, weather and individual personal circumstances.

The Point in Time Count — an annual, federally-coordinated count of the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country on one day of the year — counted just one person as unsheltered in Muhlenberg County in 2024.

Advocates for the unhoused and even federal officials acknowledge the count is an underestimate because unsheltered people can be hard to find, the number of volunteers surveying can vary from community to community, the timing of the count in January when it’s cold means fewer people are outside, and the count is only a snapshot of one day.

Another count by Kentucky school districts that seeks to capture the number of students in unsafe and unstable housing situations reported 34 students, all of them in kindergarten or first grade, in that category in Muhlenberg County during the 2023-24 school year.

Muhlenberg County spans hundreds of square miles of rolling hills, making it hard sometimes to find people who are known to be without shelter. Finding them becomes urgent when the weather turns dangerous.

Renters paying more than 50% of their household income towards housing costs are considered to be severely cost burdened. Their numbers are increasing in Kentucky. (Source: “Kentucky Housing Supply Gap Analysis,” Kentucky Housing Corp. 2024)

In January, the loose coalition sprang into action when bitterly cold air swept across the state, plunging temperatures into the deadly range.

Clements took to Facebook, asking her neighbors for donations to put unhoused people into motel rooms at the Central Inn and another hotel. Debra Gorham, a local food pantry director, met Clements at Wendy’s, and handed her hundreds of dollars Gorham had gathered for the effort.

Clements knew one of the people she had to find was someone she had known years before he started living outside, a man well known for walking the streets of Central City.

“Sometimes it’s difficult if you’re looking for him, it’s difficult to find him because you don’t know where he’s at, who he’s with, where he’s staying from day to day,” Clements said.

She had to find John Paul Shanks.

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Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.