For the second year in a row churches in Warsaw are taking turns--serving as homeless shelters.

Project Refuge began this week and will run through March.

The New Life Christian Church on S 325 E is first in line to house this year’s program. The shelter there opened last Tuesday. It didn’t take long before the first guests arrived.

“We opened just a few days ago, December 1st, and we had three people within the first hour and a half that we opened,” said New Life Christian Church’s John Bryan Lowe.

The three people slept in a warm, dry, place, received two meals, and shared their troubles with shelter staff.

“Someone was arrested inside the family who was the main bread winner, the rent was past due, landlord basically had no other option but to put the family out, and an officer saw them trying to sleep on the steps of our local courthouse,” said Lowe.

The situation doesn’t surprise Ken Locke, he leads the Greater Warsaw Ministerial Alliance. “There’s no community that doesn’t have a homeless problem. The homeless are there, in a rural setting. It’s challenging because the homeless are well hidden.”

Locke says that you won’t see people sleeping in boxes on the streets of Warsaw, but police do find people sleeping in cars and vacant buildings.

Now, the homeless have another option.

“We averaged about four to six people a night. It just depends, and as the temperature goes lower, then more people come into the shelter,” said Locke.

While Project Refuge is now a part time program designed to protect the homeless during the cold winter months, there are hopes that it will become much more.

“The goal eventually for Kosciusko is to have a full time facility and hopefully through us continuing to do this, and continuing to report, okay, this is the need, this is what we've seen, this is who we've helped, that creates more of an understanding that we need a full time facility,” said Lowe.

For now, people can report to the New Life Christian Church or to the Warsaw Salvation Army where bus transportation to the shelter will be provided.

Plans call for the shelter to move to another church next month.