Pathway Home of Baraboo Area Homeless Shelter (credit: baraboo-shelter.org)

Alumnus leads effort to open homeless shelter

Dave Mowers ’07 (Pastoral Studies) knows a thing or two about different denominations because he’s personally journeyed through several of them. He was born into a United Methodist family, attended a Pentecostal church in high school, graduated from North Central, an Assemblies of God University, attended an Episcopal Church his senior year of college, and went to a seminary with Baptist roots. Mowers eventually found his call and his “home” as Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

It was perhaps this theologically eclectic journey that taught Mowers to learn to be a bridge-builder; in the past three years, he has played an instrumental role in building bridges in the community of Baraboo that brought a new homeless shelter into existence.

Understanding God’s love for the poor

As a deep-thinking college student in the early years of this century, Mowers felt amazingly at home and concurrently out of place as he wrestled with theology. “The seeds for everything I’m doing now were planted at North Central,” Mowers said. “And a lot of that had to do with the faculty I had the opportunity to interact with there.” Some of his most profound moments came when he contemplated the “worldly implications of what it means to follow Jesus and what it means to be a disciple … and what that means particularly for the poor.”

In studying the minor prophets while at NCU, Mowers said, “I realized that the God of Israel and the God we meet in Jesus Christ is so concerned for the material conditions of the poor—not simply their spiritual condition or their relationship to God.” Mowers said he began to see how deeply God cares for the poor. And this has compelled him to do the same.

Closed doors open eyes to a need

Dave and Elizabeth Mowers at fundraising event. Submitted photoMowers moved to Baraboo with his wife, Elizabeth, and their children in 2016. Two years into his service at Trinity, a shelter run by an independent church was suddenly shuttered. Mowers found out about the closure by accident when he drove by the church one day and saw a “for sale” sign in front of it.

“I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’” Mowers recounted. He reached out to a group of local pastors he met with periodically, and while none of them knew what had happened, but learned the couple that ran the church needed to relocate for health reasons. They all agreed that winter was coming, and they should see if there were some way they could help because the 30 or so people who had regularly used the facility would be in need.

While the pastors agreed they wanted to do something, there was no individual congregation that could answer with a solution standing on its own. Mowers said, “It became clear we needed to incorporate and have a separate, independent not-for-profit corporation; it needed to be a community organization.”

Mowers found himself at an intersection where his heart-preparation for the needs of the poor met his skills as a connector and administrator. When they incorporated the Baraboo Area Homeless Shelter organization in November 2018, Mowers was named president.

But having a formal organization and a leader didn’t mean they had a place for anyone to stay. The organization found it difficult to find a place to have the shelter, experiencing a series of closed doors and even a contentious battle with residents of an adjacent village who did not want to welcome a homeless shelter into their community.

Deep discouragement

They received a firm “No” from the village council 10 days before Easter in 2019. “We had been at it for six months,” Mowers recalled, “and we had no buildings and seemingly nowhere else to go. It was really discouraging.” For Mowers, the feeling of desolation he typically felt as Good Friday approached was almost palpable.

But they kept working and trying to figure it out. Finally, in September, a local business owner stepped up to help with the dilemma of a community without a homeless shelter. They were able to rent a former memory care center the businessman owned. They signed the lease in September, sailed through the approval process for permits and zoning with the City of Baraboo, and things started to click.

Funds to support the project were coming in, and people throughout the community offered all kinds of help. Local plumbing companies pooled their efforts and donated plumbing work needed for the project.

Persevering in the pandemic

The work slowed down dramatically in early 2020 with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic but eventually continued—even throughout the polarized political cycle of 2020. Mowers was amazed that in a town that is “purple,” nearly equally divided between the two major parties, people of all political persuasions and all faiths (or no faith) became part of making the Pathway Shelter a reality.

“We opened in January [2021],” Mowers said, “and have had about 30 clients come through so far.” He said they hired a full-time social worker as the director and are doing more than just providing meals, working with clients to address the problems that led to their homelessness, and guide them toward permanent employment and housing.

In January 2020, the Governor of Wisconsin recognized Mowers and his work to bring the shelter into existence. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience,” Mower said. “I got to meet the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor.” He admitted the recognition felt a little odd because it was a team effort that required the support of the whole community, but he also realized it was a situation of “the right gifts, right time, right passions, right place.” His journey had prepared him “for such a time as this.”

God turned up

In the darkest moments of the nearly three-year process to open the shelter, Mowers said they had to fight hard even when they knew they would lose. “There is a Sara Groves song that I played a lot during that time called ‘The Long Defeat,’”  Mowers said.

I can’t just fight when I think I’ll win
That’s the end of all belief
And nothing has provoked it more
Than a possible defeat

“I came to recognize and appreciate how the suffering of Jesus and the self-offering of Jesus on the cross … was thousands of times magnified over what we went through,” Mowers reflected. “I think when we’re in a situation [that seems hopeless], it’s like we never have to walk that path alone anymore because Jesus walked it alone for us. Even though it was stressful and hard, God sustained me; He sustained us.”

Mowers pressed on. “I just kept coming back to the thought that Jesus shows up for His poor, and in the face of this homeless person, you see the face of God. And I couldn’t walk away from that.

“It’s deeply lonely in some ways, and it’s really hard work. But my experience has been that God has just been so faithful in it. At every turn, when we were stymied, God turned up.”

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