Tim Steller’s column: Pantry puts faith on trial

For 27 years, Olga Yirapati has had the best view of Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in her whole midtown neighborhood.

That’s not a good thing anymore.

She testified Thursday in a Tucson courtroom overflowing with more than 80 attendees that “The church used to be a vibrant place where neighbors would go with kids and hang out in the courtyard.”

Since the COVID pandemic, she said, the church’s three-times-a-week services for the homeless and needy have brought to her Blenman-Elm neighborhood “fires, drugs, threats, dog fighting, dog attacks, drug paraphernalia.”

Her side in a lawsuit against the church is arguing that the services, known collectively as Joseph’s Pantry, have become a nuisance under the law. A group that she and other neighbors formed in 2025, called Friends of Blenman-Elm, is asking Pima County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Kuhn to issue a preliminary injunction shutting down or moving the services.

The people filling the courtroom’s 50 seats and standing and sitting along the walls mostly supported Joseph’s Pantry, many of them as volunteers or members of the church. Some of them even live almost as close to Grace St. Paul’s as Yirapati does.

Attendee Greg Hodgins lives a few doors down from Yirapati on East Adams Street and began volunteering at Joseph’s Pantry, founded in 1992, in 2025.

“I’ve been seeing people going past my house for 23 years,” he told me during a break in proceedings.

Volunteering, he said, “has been one of the most remarkable things in my life.” Now, he said, “I know their names.”

That’s something that keeps striking me as Tucson has experienced a surge of drug addiction and homelessness in the post-COVID period: Different residents can have almost the same experiences but perceive them oppositely.

Proximity breeds contempt

Perhaps the biggest factor is fine gradations of proximity. I know this from my own neighborhood, where people living near a culvert once populated by drug users suffered a lot of problems while those of us only a couple of blocks away barely noticed it.

“If you live within a block of Grace St. Paul’s, you’re impacted every day,” Frank von Hippel told me.

He and his wife Cathy live adjacent to the church’s parking lot and each provided a sworn declaration to support the request for a preliminary injunction. Cathy von Hippel told of being followed in 2025 by a locally notorious man who drives a green Isuzu and is thought to be a drug dealer.

Just this week, Frank von Hippel told me, the family found human feces in their carport. And within the last two weeks, someone came to the door, talked to their adult daughter, and demanded to come into the house.

“Most of the people right around the church are impacted in ways that are not true if you live even two blocks away from the church,” he said in an interview.

But there are also those like Hodgins, who support the church’s efforts despite living right nearby.

“I live within earshot, so we do hear people screaming,” he told me, referring to occasional outbursts from church guests.

Rob Rauh, who lives two houses down from the church, is a longtime leading church member and said in a sworn declaration he’s seen nothing unusual resulting from the church’s ministry to the poor in his 35 years in the neighborhood.

“The things I have seen in the neighborhood relating to the unhoused are no different from what I have observed happening all over Tucson.”

Vulnerability drives fears

Either bad experiences or a vulnerable status may also turn people against service centers like Joseph’s Pantry, which offers not just food, but help getting IDs, showers and laundry.

In a sworn declaration, a resident named Ben Thiltges said he lives a few blocks from Grace St. Paul’s. In 2022, he wrote, taking a walk with his then-two-year-old daughter, a man who had been to Grace St. Paul’s ministry that day spotted them and said “Come back here, I’ll kill you!”

Though they tried to escape and lose the man, Thiltges said in the declaration, the man found where they were, stood in front of the house, grabbing the bars of the front gate, and repeatedly yelled “That’s my daughter! Bring her out! I’m going to kill you!”

Note that this happened four years ago but was still significant enough to be the heart of a declaration that also touched on familiar complaints about people using drugs, defecating, camping and overdosing in the area.

Having children, being a child, being female or being physically frail can make people feel more vulnerable to a population that may be harmless in its majority.

However, a series of older female residents of Blenman-Elm testified Thursday that they live within blocks of the church, walk past the church frequently and never experience significant problems. So again, these tendencies aren’t universal.

Adjust your attitude

Some of the difference is also attitudinal. You see this all over Tucson and, for that matter, throughout humanity. Some people simply have stricter ideas of what is acceptable than others.

When I was at Grace St. Paul’s on Friday morning, for example, somebody was playing a tall drum with their hands. It wasn’t that loud, and it didn’t bother me for the half-hour or so I was there, but I could imagine someone being bothered by it, especially when recorded music joined it, more loudly, around the noon hour.

Much of what you see in the declarations by those opposing the church’s ministry represents a sort of generic tableau of complaints associated with groups of homeless, mentally ill or drug-using people: Trash, fights, dogs, drug use, drug sales, yelling, threats, feces, urine.

It’s hard to tell what was an actual individual experience someone had, and what is a general feeling about the people who are around.

Jim Malusa, a Blenman-Elm neighbor and volunteer at Joseph’s Pantry, noted it’s true that “One bad incident can completely change your perspective."

But he said another factor is “the gossip that circulates. Some people are more swayed by that than others. They’re susceptible to what they’ve heard but not what they’ve seen.”

Complex solution

To me it would be disappointing if Judge Kuhn orders the ministry closed or moved as a nuisance under Arizona state law. Not because some neighbors don’t have legitimate complaints, but because the church serves a clear need and should be able to accomplish that with fewer problems.

One complaint has been that Steve Keplinger, the priest who leads the church, seems more concerned with the mission of serving the poor than its negative impacts around the church.

“The neighborhood doesn’t oppose the mission of the church,” said Alan Myklebust, president of the Blenman-Elm Neighborhood Association. “The thing we have a problem with is the way the program is run.

“The protocols in place simply are not enforced. We’ve asked multiple times that they enforce their own protocols.”

Keplinger testified Thursday about the many measures put in place. They include daily trash cleanups, three times a night visits by a security service, banning drug users and moving encampments when they appear.

“We address each issue as it comes up, and we bend over backwards to keep the place clean and orderly,” he said.

But for him the mission is clearly the greatest need — what the church terms “Earth justice, migrant justice, social justice.” The few bad actors are a small price to pay for serving more than 100 people every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

“Jesus spent his entire ministry caring for the poor and people who are left out of society,” he testified Thursday. “Some people think of church as people going to a service on Sunday morning That’s not how we understand it. Church is caring for other people.”

There’s got to be a way to keep that mission going while cracking down more minutely on whatever problems the ministry causes.