When Sheltering the Poor Becomes a Legal Battle

There is something almost absurd about the situation unfolding in Ocean City, Maryland. A church opened its doors to people with nowhere to sleep, and now faces a potential legal clash with city officials for doing exactly that. The institution designed to protect the vulnerable is in conflict with the institution claiming to protect the public — and the question worth sitting with is which institution has its priorities in the right order.

An Episcopal parish in Ocean City began allowing unhoused people to sleep inside its building, according to a report from the Christian Century. City officials are reportedly unhappy about it. The church's position is fairly straightforward: the law has made it dangerous or illegal to sleep outside, there aren't enough shelter beds, and so we will be the shelter. The city's position appears to be: that's not what we want here.

This is not a local story. It's a national pattern wearing local clothes.

The Legal Landscape These Churches Are Walking Into

The Supreme Court fundamentally shifted the terrain for this kind of dispute in June 2024, when it decided Grants Pass v. Johnson, 6-3. The ruling held that cities can enforce anti-camping ordinances against unhoused people even when adequate shelter alternatives don't exist. It effectively reversed the logic of the 9th Circuit's influential decision in Martin v. City of Boise, which had held that criminalizing homelessness without available shelter alternatives constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

What Grants Pass did, practically speaking, was give cities permission to clear encampments and cite individuals for sleeping outdoors without first demonstrating that those people had somewhere else to go. American cities moved quickly to use that permission. The National Homelessness Law Center's "Housing Not Handcuffs" report had already identified at least 187 U.S. cities with some form of anti-camping or anti-sleeping legislation by 2021 — and that number has grown substantially since the 2024 ruling.

This is the context in which Ocean City's Episcopal parish made its decision. They weren't being politically provocative. They were responding to a simple math problem: there are people who will be cited or jailed if they sleep outside, and the church has space inside. When the law makes mercy into a liability, what does a church do?

The geography of Ocean City sharpens the calculation. The city's permanent resident population of roughly 6,700 swells to tourist peaks exceeding 200,000 on a summer weekend. The unhoused don't disappear during tourist season — they become more visible and more inconvenient to the resort economy. That is, in my view, probably not incidental to the city's legal posture here.

What Churches Actually Have to Work With Legally

Churches that push back against local governments over shelter operations generally have two main legal tools available to them, and neither is simple to deploy.

The first is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). This federal law prohibits governments from imposing zoning and land use laws in ways that substantially burden a religious institution's exercise of religion — unless the government can show it has a compelling interest pursued through the least restrictive means available. Courts have used RLUIPA to protect churches running food pantries, overnight shelters, and day centers from exclusionary zoning enforcement.

The second is the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, which has become a significantly more powerful tool since Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021), where the Supreme Court expanded religious liberty protections in contexts where government selectively exempts similar secular conduct.

Here's how those frameworks compare in practice:

Maryland operates under its own state religious freedom framework that sits alongside RLUIPA, and it's worth watching whether the Ocean City parish invokes both federal and state protections.

What strikes me about this table is how much legal apparatus a church now has to navigate to do the oldest thing churches do. Documenting religious purpose. Retaining counsel experienced in RLUIPA. Mapping the local zoning code. The early church's reputation was built on sheltering the poor as an identity, not a compliance program.

The Scale of What Churches Are Actually Carrying

The Ocean City dispute is happening against a backdrop that most city officials would prefer not to discuss directly. According to the 2023 HUD Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, 653,104 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2023 — the highest figure recorded since the federal government began systematic tracking, and a 12 percent increase from the prior year. The unsheltered portion of that population — people living outside, in vehicles, or in spaces not meant for human habitation — reached 256,610 on that same night.

Those numbers tell you the scale of the gap between the problem and the public system's capacity to absorb it. What fills the gap, substantially, is religious institutions. Estimates from homelessness advocacy researchers suggest faith communities provide approximately 40 percent of overnight emergency shelter capacity across the United States. That is not a marginal contribution — it is a structural dependency. American cities have, in many cases, quietly offloaded a core public welfare function onto religious institutions and then, in some cases, turned around and tried to regulate those institutions out of performing it.

Ocean City may be a small resort town on the Atlantic. The pattern it's enacting is not small and not unusual.

Churches That Have Navigated This Successfully

Churches have won these fights before, and the wins offer a useful map for what works.

First Congregational Church of Long Beach, California, operated an outdoor shelter on church property for years and successfully used RLUIPA to resist city zoning enforcement. The key in that case was the church's ability to demonstrate that sheltering the unhoused was a direct expression of its religious mission — not incidental charity but theological practice. Courts have consistently given weight to that argument when a church can make it coherently.

Westside Vineyard Community Church in Los Angeles prevailed in a similar dispute after the city attempted to use code enforcement to shut down its feeding ministry. The church's documentation of the ministry's religious purpose, combined with the city's failure to show a compelling interest in exclusion, was decisive.

The pattern across successful cases is fairly consistent: churches that document the religious rationale explicitly, that build a record of faith-motivated service before a conflict arises, and that engage legal counsel proactively rather than reactively tend to survive these fights. Churches that are surprised by the conflict, that haven't articulated the religious dimension clearly, or that shift building use suddenly and without community process face harder odds.

None of that means the fight is guaranteed. It means preparation changes the odds substantially.

What a Church Should Consider Before Opening Its Doors

If you're a pastor or church council member watching Ocean City and wondering whether your congregation could do something similar — or whether you'd face the same legal exposure — several things are worth thinking through before anything else.

Insurance is the overlooked seam. Most general commercial liability policies for churches exclude or significantly limit coverage for overnight accommodations. Some insurers have developed endorsements specifically for shelter operations. Others will add coverage for an additional premium. A church that begins sheltering people without reviewing its policy is carrying risk that its insurer didn't price and won't cover. That conversation needs to happen first, not after the first incident.

Zoning is the first legal threshold. Most churches are zoned for assembly use, not residential or shelter use. Whether an overnight shelter crosses that line depends on local code language, and local code language varies considerably. Knowing where your municipality draws the line before you act is meaningfully different from discovering it after a code enforcement notice arrives.

Document the religious purpose explicitly. Courts have protected shelter ministries under RLUIPA most reliably when the church can articulate why this is a religious act — grounded in specific theological commitments, expressed in the church's official teaching, integrated into how the congregation understands its mission. That documentation is worth creating before it's needed for litigation.

Build relationships with local officials in advance. Ocean City's conflict may be harder to resolve precisely because the church's decision and the city's response are happening simultaneously and publicly. Churches that approach local officials proactively, explain their mission and their plans, and invite collaboration rather than confrontation sometimes find that the conflict never materializes. Not always — some cities are determined to fight. But many local officials are genuinely looking for solutions, not battles.

The goal isn't to avoid doing the right thing. The goal is to do the right thing in a way that lasts longer than the first complaint.

The Theological Question Underneath the Legal One

I keep coming back to what it means that we live in a society where a church has to mount a potential legal defense to do what churches have been doing since the first century.

The early church's reputation — what made it both countercultural and compelling to the Roman world around it — was built substantially on the practice of caring for people the empire had discarded. "See how they love one another" was an observation about behavior, not just belief. That care wasn't a ministry program with liability waivers and zoning compliance reviews. It was an identity.

The legal exposure this Ocean City parish now faces is a result of expressing that identity. A church that sheltered no one, fed no one, made no claims on the surrounding community's conscience would face no legal pressure from the city. A church that opened its doors to the sleeping poor has to retain attorneys.

Have you noticed that the institutions most likely to face legal conflict for caring for the marginalized are precisely the ones that take their theological obligations seriously? I think that's worth asking directly: is this incidental, or is there something structural going on — something about a system that criminalizes poverty inevitably coming into conflict with institutions whose theology forbids the same?

In my view, it's the latter. And there's something clarifying about that, even if it isn't comfortable.

The residents of Ocean City most inconvenienced by the visible presence of unhoused people near the boardwalk are not facing criminal charges. The unhoused people sleeping near the boardwalk are. The church that offered an alternative to that outcome is now in a legal dispute with the city. The shape of that problem tells you something about whose interests the system is organized to serve.

That's not an accusation against any specific official. It's an observation about a pattern that repeats itself in city after city, and it seems important to say it plainly rather than dress it up.

Three Sentences Worth Quoting

Faith communities provide an estimated 40 percent of overnight emergency shelter capacity in the United States — making religious institutions structural partners in the country's homelessness response, not optional volunteers whose methods cities can casually regulate away.

The 2023 HUD Annual Homelessness Assessment Report recorded 653,104 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, a 12 percent increase from the prior year and the highest number documented since federal tracking began.

Following the Supreme Court's Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in June 2024, which permitted cities to enforce anti-camping ordinances regardless of shelter availability, municipalities across the country moved quickly to expand enforcement-based approaches — creating a gap that churches, in city after city, have stepped into.

What Comes Next in Ocean City

The Christian Century report describes the situation as a "potential new legal clash" — language that suggests the conflict is still forming rather than fully joined. That matters, because the outcome of a dispute that escalates to federal RLUIPA litigation is different from the outcome of a dispute that gets resolved through direct negotiation between the church and city officials.

Episcopal parishes in particular have a track record of pursuing these conflicts strategically. The Episcopal Church's national structure provides legal resources and institutional support that many independent congregations don't have access to. Whether the Ocean City parish will need to use those resources depends on how hard the city presses.

What I'm watching is whether this becomes a test case — one of those situations where a church, a city, and a set of legal arguments combine to produce precedent that matters beyond the original parties. That's not inevitable, and it's not necessarily what the church is seeking. But it's a real possibility, and people who care about religious freedom and about homelessness services should be paying attention to how it unfolds.

For more on the intersection of institutional power and religious communities, see related analysis here at Christian Counterpoint. And if you're thinking about the ways churches navigate civic conflict in their own communities, the broader question of what religious institutions owe their neighbors runs through much of what I write here.

Last updated: 2026-06-20

Jared Clark is the creator of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry.