The North Haven Congregational Church and St. John’s Episcopal Church will team up to provide nighttime shelter for a dozen homeless New Haven men during the week of Feb. 8, through the Abraham’s Tent program.

“This provides an opportunity to have a personal connection to a social problem that otherwise seems like it’s a faraway problem,” said the Reverend Scott Morrow of North Haven Congregational Church. “The reality is that if people from North Haven needed shelter, they would have to go into New Haven to get it.”

“Because it’s not in our community, it’s easy to think that it’s faraway and not our problem,” Morrow added.

Abraham’s Tent, an interfaith effort to provide shelter for homeless men, is sponsored by Columbus House Inc., a non-profit Connecticut organization that combats homelessness.

The men will spend the nights in the Congregational Church’s Carrol Hall, and will be fed and cared for by members of both churches. Columbus House will provide cots for the men, and will also transport the men to North Haven from New Haven at night, and then back to the city in the morning.

Morrow, who contacted St. John’s about the potential collaboration, heard about the charity opportunity through his church’s participation in Interfaith Cooperative Ministries, a New Haven area-based collection of Christian, Jewish and Islamic houses of worship. The ICM had teamed up with Columbus House to help house homeless New Haven men who have nowhere else to stay through winter nights.

“New Haven used to have a policy that when it was freezing outside, no one would be turned away from a shelter,” Morrow said. “New Haven ended that policy last winter because of cutbacks in funding. This year, there were cutbacks in funding again.”

In order to help those unable to enter New Haven shelters this winter, the ICM and Columbus House are asking local houses of worship to house a dozen homeless men each night for a week. The ICM members will each take one week during the 12-week program, which begins Jan. 18.

Columbus House will select the homeless men, who are intended to remain the same throughout the program. “Columbus House is providing a lot of assistance,” Morrow said. “They want this to be as good of an experience as possible for the homeless men and the churches.”

The men will rest in Hamden’s Congregation Mishkan Israel synagogue the week after their North Haven stop.

North Haven Congregational Church and St. John’s teamed up over a matter of logistics, according to the Reverend Mathew Lincoln of St. John’s, as the churches believed they could not provide ample volunteers and space to shelter the men without a joint effort.

Morrow thought the program would benefit the church, the homeless men and the continuing fight against homelessness.

“The interesting thing about this project is that it offers the opportunity to meet and host some homeless men here in church, which I think is kind of a natural thing for a church to do, thinking of the fundamental impulses of our faith,” Morrow said. “I also think in order for it to be fully meaningful, you have to connect that opportunity and offer of hospitality with an effort to be advocates in support of more state and local resources going to assist people in the midst of homelessness.”

Lincoln also believes that charity toward the neediest comes naturally to religious organizations.

“As Christians, we know how important it is to help people struggling at the most basic level,” Lincoln said, “and this is one of those perennial problems that is always in need of volunteers and resources.”

Both churches have increased their community assistance efforts since the last year’s economic downturn, and the large response has played a part in the churches’ enthusiasm for participating in the Abraham’s Tent program.

“Because we started doing community suppers every Friday night over the last year-and-a-half, I think the parish has become more aware that we can help,” Lincoln said. “Friday nights opened our eyes in a way.”

Lincoln believed that Friday night suppers have left St. John’s congregation more eager to take a chance in order to provide aid to the needy, evidenced by their quick decision to embrace Abraham’s Tent.

“When our vestry first thought about this, the short answer was ‘yes’ and the long answer was ‘How do we do it?” Lincoln said of Abraham’s Tent. “Whereas before we probably would have said ‘We’re not in a position to help – there are too many hurdles to overcome’.”

North Haven Congregational Church has also continued to stress charity amidst the recession.

“We do a holiday food drive, and there has been an ongoing demand for that and our pantry during the rest of the year,” Morrow said. “People are clearly aware that there’s a greater demand for food.”

Having already found such success in their churches’ recent efforts in aiding the impoverished, both pastors hoped the homeless program would further inspire others to take action against homelessness.

“I don’t mean to make light of the budgetary challenges in this difficult economy, but this is really a justice issue,” Morrow said. “We need to stand with these people who are homeless and demand that institutions start working with them and working to move them from homelessness to housing and employment.”

Morrow believed that one obstruction in combating homelessness is a negative opinion of the homeless, and Morrow hoped that Abraham’s Tent would break the taboo notion.

“I think that one interesting challenge for the volunteers in this program will be to overcome the assumption that there is something that makes homeless people radically different from us,” Morrow said.

“I just think that it’s important for us to realize that this is not an inner-city problem or a problem that is based on something that is wrong with these people,” Morrow added, “but really an indication of problems in our society, the gaps in what’s available for people to deal with unemployment, as well as issues with healthcare and addiction.”

Lincoln was pleased that St. John’s was willing to play a role in the fight against homelessness. “It no longer seems like a problem that somebody else has to do because we never could,” Lincoln said, “but something that we can help with.”