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Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

Find a church - neither too big nor too small. Introduce yourself as someone willing to do assist with the IT/ secretarial / etc. in exchange for warm food and a shelter bed. Churches have very large networks. When you get on your feet, and you will, remember who helped you survive.

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Churches aren't like that in Europe. They are not communities nor are they huge. A church is an office where a priest and maybe some assisting staff work, and the priest performs weekly some ceremonies. But there is really no community as such.

This might depend heavily on the country and location, but that's not my experience. I'm not religious, but I know some people who are, and their churches are quite active in their local communities, doing charity work, helping the homeless and the poor in general.

I live in an area that's heavily dominated by protestants, so my experience is mostly with them, I don't know how that's for catholic areas. The Netherlands are famously protestant as well, might be similar.

Ok, cool, I was not aware of this. I thought they were all sadly just waiting to become obsolete. In what area are you in?

I'm in Northern Germany. The planned/willful obsolescence here mostly applies to the "official" churches imho. The smaller, free ones tend to be a bit more radical and more grass-roots oriented, so they're more hands-on (which probably also has to do with them not having a lot of old wealth and close ties to the state).

The churches that are full of people who attend church because their parents did are, as you so well put it, sadly waiting to become obsolete.

There are churches, however, where many of the people are there because they genuinely believe it, and they think that they have very good reason to believe it (and they aren't afraid of engaging with atheists who think otherwise), and they try to live out what they believe in real life. If you find a church like that, it feels and acts completely different.

I recognize this comment may sound derogatory. I merely attempted a poetic reference to the well-documented secularization of North Europe.

From my experience, church groups and events are one of the few bits of community left in Europe.

Which Europe ?

In orthodox churches and especially monasteries it is essentially mandatory to give you a place to sleep while doing some work for them until you get back on your feet.

It also used to be customary for people in villages and towns to always accept a traveler for the night, but not anymore, unfortunately.

Orthodox churches do not feel obligated to provide lodging. Sure, some parishes will let the homeless bed down at night, but this is a small minority, and in general Orthodox parish priests would prefer you take advantage of homeless shelters instead of expecting lodging from a parish church.

Orthodox monasteries larger than a skete are obliged to provide hospitality, but the prevailing interpretation is that this hospitality is limited to three days, and then it is the abbot's call to let you stay further or ask you to leave.

That's a huge generalization for something that differs so heavily even within countries. Cities vs rural, east vs west, catholic vs protestant... Compare Poland and the Czech Republic, both V4 countries, neighbors, former Eastern Bloc, yet one is pretty much the least and the other one of the most religious countries in Europe.

Second that. I‘m from Germany and attended a conference at a an Evangelical Church in the Netherlands (in Ede: https://www.schuilplaats.net/) a couple months ago without having booked a place to stay. At the end of the last evening session, I simply asked the pastor if he could help me and sure enough, one church member offered me an entire vacation apartment that he owns for one night for free. This is not a suggestion to take advantage of their hospitality but I have to say that the people at the church were very open and welcoming to new people without displaying a missional agenda.

This not relevant at all to this thread but I was very pleasantly surprised to see my hometown and a church I am familiar with pop up here.

OP: If you can, do go there. I am not at all religious, and you don't have to, but this is a solid place to start.

that might work in the US, but in Europe churches are poor and mostly attended by old ladies with networks of other old ladies.

so what? Old ladies can be warm and very helpful too

this is true. And I guess it could result in couchsurfing to stay off the streets, at least.

And old ladies have kids and grandkids who might also be in a position to be of assistance. OP should open every door he finds, one of them is going to lead to a better place.

Be careful in the US too, churches aren't so nice here.

In my experience, churches are filled with the nicest people. Even though I'm not religious I go with my wife sometimes and everyone is very welcoming.

Seems like you had a bad experience at a church or maybe you've never been in one and you're judging them based on the media you view.

Either way, not a good reason to make wide blanket statements like that.

Sounds like you had a bad experience with a church. Every church I've ever gone to even without me being very religious has been very accepting and nice.

Making blanket statements after one or even a handful of experiences doesn't help anyone and can be said about things also not relating to churches as well.

This is really not true of 90% of churches. Let's distinguish between actual churches and personality cults like Westboro.

EDIT: Looks like I'm outside the edit window.

A late family member of mine in the OP's approximate situation was taken advantage of by a local church, which gives me pause when people say going to one for help is a bulletproof-good idea.

I'm sorry for not providing context right away, the original statement on it's own was too broad.

As an ex-Catholic, all the churches I was a member of growing up took charity and things like this very seriously - there were many immigrant families that came to our churches and we would find them families that would let them stay with them until they got on their feet.

It is, however, unfortunately not universal. I recently tried to drop off some extra Christmas toys I had mistakenly ordered on Amazon to a local Catholic church and they absolutely refused to take them and distribute to a needy family. I was floored.

I don't know the situation with the church in question, but I've been on the other side of a similar situation...

For the last ~9 years, I've helped run a homeless shelter based out of a church in London, UK. We often get offered donations of clothes and unfortunately we have to turn them down unless we know of guests who need those specific items (e.g. men's 32-34" waist trousers or a pair of size 10 shoes). This is because otherwise we find that very few items get taken and we don't have space to store them, so it just means we have to take them to a charity shop anyway.

Please don't be upset by your offering not being accepted - it can be hard to find the right place to use it and, if the organization is run by volunteers (as the one above is), they might not have the time to manage this.

Incidentally, other shelters operate very differently from ours, and some definitely do accept clothing donations.

> mostly attended by old ladies with networks of other old ladies

Certain flavors of US churches look like this, too.

Try the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Best of luck to you.

This could very well be a Job situation, but I have to wonder how someone ends up like this.

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