Homeless Court is a free, voluntary diversion program designed to help people experiencing homelessness exit the criminal justice system with little-to-no impact on their record. Rather than being held in a typical courtroom, Homeless Court sessions are held at Triune Mercy Center and target those with nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting, trespassing, or simple possession of marijuana.

Homeless Court is overseen by new Chief Municipal Court Judge, Lucas Marchant, following the retirement of former Chief Municipal Judge, Matthew Hawley. After being sworn in, Marchant said, "Thank you for the honor and the trust you've placed in me with this appointment. Serving as Chief Municipal Judge... Judge Hawley, I will be calling you from time to time for guidance. I am ready to go to work. Thank you, Greenville." (sadly, Judge Hawley passed away recently)

Greenville Homeless Court began in January of 2024, and was led by Judge Hawley until Marchant took the reigns earlier this year. After the most recent Homeless Court session at Triune, we asked Judge Marchant for his thoughts on leading the program. "I'm happy to be here, and I'm looking forward to expanding the program, offering participants the education and resources they need to succeed." Along with the judge, attorneys, city officials, and participants, local service providers are also present at each Homeless Court session to offer information about their services and to serve as resources for participants and the local community. These service providers partner with the volunteer attorneys to walk alongside Homeless Court participants as they work to overcome whatever circumstances may have contributed to their current legal situation.

So far this year, we have celebrated multiple Homeless Court graduations, with participants achieving their goals of securing housing, finding jobs, accessing rehab, or other such achievements that lead to a fresh start. Homeless Court graduates have seen their charges dropped and records cleaned as a result of completing the program. If you have questions about Homeless Court or would like to speak to someone at Municipal Court, please call 864-467-6650 or email Court Services.

Heather is a name that means “an evergreen flowering plant with small pink, purple or white blossoms.” It is a plant that grows well in rough, rocky ground. It is a beautiful symbol of our friend, Heather Gatchell, at Triune Mercy Center. She is like the color pink, for it stands for love and compassion. She is like the color purple, for it stands for wisdom and creativity. And she is like the color white, for it stands for a fresh start. She is all of those beautiful things in our midst. After a recent cancer diagnosis, she knows well what it means to grow in rough, rocky ground. She just stepped down from her work at Triune Mercy Center with Greenville Together’s Housing Surge, a community effort launched to rapidly rehouse unsheltered individuals within the city of Greenville, to focus on hope and healing. I was blessed to be in the office beside hers on the third floor of TMC. She kindly sat down with me to talk about her life and work. Here is our conversation.

There are moments when kindness arrives as something big and loud. But Heather Gatchell has learned that, more often, it comes in small and quiet ways. A loaf of homemade bread left at the door. Flowers appearing on the front porch. Cookies. A meal from someone she has not heard from in a long time. A text message that takes only a few seconds to write and send but comes at exactly the right time.

Heather has experienced a great deal of kindness during her life, but lately, she says, she and her husband, Mike, have been especially aware of what she calls “the collective kindness” surrounding them. “We’re blown away on a daily basis by the acts of kindness that are done for us,” she says, “sometimes by people we know, and sometimes anonymously.” In a season when questions about health, family, time, and mortality have suddenly become much more immediate, she has begun to see ordinary acts of kindness differently. “It’s not how big the act of kindness is,” she says. “It’s acting on the act, whatever it is.” Sometimes people ask, “What can I do for you?” Heather admits that she does not always know how to answer. Other people simply act. “I’m coming over and bringing this.” Or a friend appears with bread she baked herself.

Those acts say something bigger than the gift itself. “You’re thought about. You’re loved. You’re valued. You’re cared for.” And Heather believes there is something deeply spiritual in those moments. She has come to trust that when someone suddenly comes to mind—or when an unexpected thought to call, visit, cook, encourage, or help another person appears—that thought might be worth paying attention to. “I always feel like if somebody pops in your head or a thought pops in your head to do something that is just out of nowhere, to me, that’s always a leading of the Holy Spirit.” She laughs a little when she admits that she has not always followed those promptings. “There’ve probably been more times in my life than not where I’ve gone, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea,’ and then I may not act on it.”

But receiving so much kindness herself has changed that. “Now we feel really strongly that we should act. Do it. Just do it.” Because the small thing may not be small at all to the person receiving it. Heather believes the Holy Spirit may be speaking far more often than we realize. “I think the Holy Spirit speaks to us all the time,” she says. “She is constantly encouraging us, leading us, giving us thoughts. It’s really whether or not we’re present enough or quiet enough or open enough to hear and receive those leadings.” That idea—being present enough to notice what God may already be doing—runs through much of Heather’s story.

It also runs through her experience leading Triune Mercy Center’s Housing Surge. Heather uses a phrase for the moments when something needed appeared at exactly the right time. “Manna moments.” During the Housing Surge, there were many of them. “The exact thing we needed showed up,” she remembers. “Not more, not less. The exact thing at the exact moment.” It was not a one-time occurrence. “It happened over and over and over and over again.” Furniture appeared. An apartment opened. Documents surfaced. A requirement that seemed impossible suddenly became possible. A partner called. A resource arrived. Sometimes there was a logical explanation. Other times, the timing was so unexpected that the team could only stand there astonished. “Holy cow,” Heather remembers thinking. “I can’t believe that just happened.” Eventually, the Housing Surge team began watching for those moments. “We were expectant,” she says. And expectation changed the way they saw. Once they began noticing the gifts, they noticed more gifts. Once they became attentive to grace, grace seemed to be everywhere.

That same attentiveness has become increasingly important to Heather in her own life. When asked about the most important lessons she has learned, one of the first words she offered was presence. “Being present is really important to me right now.” None of us knows how many days we have, she says. Most of us simply do not think about it very often. “When we’re forced to think about it, then we start saying, ‘How do we make sure everything counts without that making us feel pressure?’” Heather does not want to turn every ordinary experience into an anxious search for significance. She does not want to walk through life asking, “Is this a profound moment? Is that a profound moment?” Instead, she has discovered a simpler practice. “Be where my feet are.” When she is with someone, she wants to be with that person. When she is outside, she wants to see what is around her. When something beautiful happens, she doesn’t want to hurry past it. “If I can try not to be distracted when I’m in a conversation with the person that’s in front of me, if I can not be in such a hurry that I miss beautiful things or important small moments—that’s really important right now.”

Another phrase matters deeply to her: Be fully alive. For Heather, being fully alive does not mean pretending everything is joyful. It means allowing herself to receive joy and sorrow together. “It means trying to appreciate the good things that are around me,” she says, “and not being afraid to suffer and to feel that, because that is a part of being fully alive.” There is hurt. There is joy. There are happy moments. There are sad moments. “I want to embrace all of them because they all bring something beautiful to us, and we can learn from them and grow in them.” Some days, she says, that is overwhelming. But beneath everything is a conviction Heather speaks with remarkable confidence: God has always shown up. “The one thing I can say with great authority is the thing that keeps me strong in all of this is that God has always shown up for me. Always.”

That trust does not make suffering easy. It does not erase fear. It does not guarantee that the road ahead will unfold the way she wants. But it allows Heather to keep walking. “There’s never been a time when God’s not shown up for me,” she says. And so she believes there will never be anything ahead for which she will be entirely alone. That lesson has shaped her work with people experiencing homelessness, too. Anyone who does this kind of work eventually encounters one of its most difficult truths: You cannot make people do what you know might help them.

During the Housing Surge, Heather and the team eventually had what she calls a “come-to-Jesus moment.” They had to acknowledge that not everyone placed in housing would remain there. “Not everybody’s gonna make it.” The team hated saying it. They wanted everyone to succeed. They wanted every participant to remain housed. Sometimes the path forward seemed so obvious that Heather wanted to say, “If you would just do this one thing.” But people are people. They have agency. They have trauma. They have choices. They have stories we may only partly understand. Heather eventually came to see that a person leaving housing did not mean the experience had been meaningless. “Just because they don’t make it, they don’t stay in the housing, they choose not to stay in the housing for whatever reason, that doesn’t mean we’re not a part of their journey.” Perhaps the Housing Surge was one step among many. Perhaps the experience would prepare someone to accept a future opportunity. “We are still impacting their lives. We’re still a part of their journey. They’re just not to the place yet where they’re ready to take this step.” That realization did not remove the sadness. “It still sucks,” Heather says with a laugh. But mercy, she has learned, is not the same thing as control. Mercy makes room for another person’s humanity.

Heather has seen that mercy nowhere more clearly than at Triune Mercy Center. “One of the most beautiful examples of mercy I’ve ever seen in my life is in the halls of Triune.” She had worked around homelessness for years before joining the Housing Surge, primarily in advocacy and education. But working at Triune brought her closer to the daily realities people face when they are living without stable housing. She saw staff members welcome people. She watched parishioners care for one another. She watched Housing Surge participants become part of the community. “It’s like big open arms just calling people in as they are.” At Triune, people often use the phrase “our people.” Heather came to love that language. “They become part of you.” Once that happens, homelessness can no longer remain an abstract issue. It becomes George. Maria. A senior living on a fixed income. A person with a disability who cannot work. Someone who lost housing because one fragile piece of a fragile support system collapsed. Someone whose story begins sounding frighteningly familiar. “Until you know someone and have interactions with someone and realize that literally, but for the grace of God, it could be any of us, it changes things.”

Heather believes many people experiencing homelessness are not far removed from people who are securely housed. Often, the difference is simply that one person had somewhere—or someone—to catch them when life fell apart. “That lack of a support system” can be decisive. The Housing Surge revealed another reality Heather hopes Greenville will not ignore. There simply is not enough deeply affordable and permanent supportive housing for the people who need it. Heather saw this especially clearly when referring organizations were invited to send the Housing Surge their most vulnerable participants. They did. Seniors. People with significant disabilities. People unable to increase their income through employment. People surviving on fixed incomes in a housing market where even modest rents are often far beyond their reach. “A huge majority of the participants that are in the Housing Surge need permanent supportive housing,” Heather says. “And we don’t have it.”

Her hope is that the demonstration plot will help the larger community see those gaps clearly. “I hope it will be a real aha moment for our community.” That is one reason the word “demonstration” matters. A demonstration project does not begin with the assumption that every answer is already known. It tries something. It learns. It adapts. It fails occasionally. It tries again. Heather believes one of the gifts she brought to the project was a willingness to say openly, from the beginning, that not everything would work. “If it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean failure,” she says. “It just means it didn’t work.” Then the question becomes: What do we try next? “There’s always a solution,” Heather says. “It may not be the one we want, but there is always a solution if we’re willing to look for it and work toward it.”

That willingness to experiment is connected to another transformation in Heather’s life. About eight years ago, she and Mike looked at the life they had built and realized something was missing. They had a beautiful house on a golf course. Mike had a good job. They had many of the things people are told should produce happiness. But they were not happy. So they began asking questions. “If we wanted life to be different, then we had to do different things.” Mike left his job. They sold their house. They began attending Triune. They formed new friendships. They encountered people and realities they had not previously seen. “There was just a real awakening that happened in our souls.”

One of the things they saw was homelessness. And Heather discovered that some things cannot be unseen. “Once you see certain things like homelessness, you can’t not see it.” Then comes a choice. “I’m either going to pretend I haven’t seen it, or I’m going to do something about what I’ve seen.” That awakening also led Heather and Mike toward a more authentic way of living. They began asking questions they might once have avoided. They tried to become more transparent. More willing to admit when they were wrong. More willing to say they did not understand. More willing to change. Heather describes the result in one word: Freedom. “The freedom suddenly we felt of just being who we really are.” Authenticity, she learned, does not mean believing you are always right. Sometimes authenticity sounds like: “I’m sorry.” “I didn’t realize I saw things that way.” “I don’t want to see things that way anymore.” “How do I change?” When failure stops being something to hide, it becomes something from which we can learn. Heather recently heard someone explain the word FAIL as “First Attempt In Learning.” She loved it. Failure is not necessarily the end of the story. There may be another way. Another solution. Another attempt.

This openness—along with faith, mercy, kindness, creativity, and a willingness to laugh—became part of the Housing Surge itself. And Heather is quick to say she did none of it alone. She speaks with enormous affection for the Housing Surge team. “The privilege of being a part of this work has been profound.” Heather believes the Holy Spirit assembled the group. Even when the work became difficult, that belief gave them courage. “It was really his work that we were just participating in.” She praises the team’s compassion, creativity, and willingness to pivot again and again. She praises Triune’s staff for making room for the project, even when the Housing Surge itself was moving rapidly and improvising solutions. She praises Triune’s board for taking a chance on an experimental project no other organization even applied to undertake. “That speaks to Triune’s heart,” she says, “and to their willingness to step out and do important and hard things.”

And after her cancer diagnosis, Heather experienced personally the mercy she had witnessed being offered to others. Jennifer, Pat, and the Housing Surge team gave her room to step away and care for herself. “I didn’t just see mercy,” she says. “I felt it.” There is perhaps no better description of Triune Mercy Center than that. Mercy seen. Mercy felt. Mercy practiced. Mercy offered without requiring someone to become a different person first. Sometimes mercy looks dramatic. Often it looks remarkably ordinary. A wheelchair brought to the parking lot for someone who has had far too much to drink. A colleague laughing because the situation is so strange nobody could possibly make it up. A participant receiving furniture. An apartment becoming available. Someone sitting beside another person. Someone looking a stranger in the eye. Someone listening. A congregation saying, Sunday after Sunday: You are God’s child. You are welcome here. Heather believes some people may need to hear those words a thousand times. So we keep saying them. You are God’s child. You are welcome here. You are God’s child. You are welcome here.

*One of Heather’s co-workers, Mary Kay Campbell, just left Greenville with a group of cyclists on the 2026 Challenge to Conquer Cancer, a 7-day relay bicycle ride to Lewiston, Maine. Please pray for them as they ride. Thanks, Mary Kay!