Mayor Kirk Caldwell grew visibly frustrated as he recalled standing in front of a room filled with Oahu religious leaders and asking them to house a homeless family, but not a single one stepped up.

Caldwell was not asking the representatives of various faiths to take in a chronically homeless person, or someone with mental health issues, or addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Instead, he said at the July meeting, the city would provide a converted shipping container for free, deliver and install it, clear any permitting issues, then work with social service providers to find an appropriate homeless adult or family who would be a good fit for each church.

“I have to say it was very frustrating,” Caldwell said. “I thought I was going to get a lot of ‘OK, we’re on board and we want to help.’ But it went around and around and around. Feeding folks in parks is nice. But if you really want to do something to help homeless folks, bring them back to your campus, to your church, feed them on your property, let them bathe on your property, help them get a job and help get them back on their feet.”

After reading in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about how churches of various faiths are working to help the homeless in Seattle, San Francisco and Salt Lake City, Caldwell said he’s going to take another run at getting Oahu churches more involved in finding answers beyond serving food in homeless encampments.

Next time, he said he’s likely to bring in social service workers who can walk church officials through the process of helping the homeless turn their lives around.

“I’m going to try one more time because the faith-based community needs to step up to make a difference,” Caldwell said. “It can make a huge difference.”

The Rev. David Gierlach of St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church on North King Street was not invited to the July meeting, and said he believes Caldwell was “talking to the wrong group of churches.”

St. Elizabeth’s is surrounded by homeless people and lets them use the church’s showers and bathrooms at any time . In June, the church even took up valuable space in its parking lot to temporarily accommodate a converted 8-foot-by-20-foot shipping container that has since housed a homeless family of five and is now being used by a homeless woman named Marie Kane, who is pregnant with twins and is expected to deliver just after Christmas.

Before the church offered Kane, 30, and her boyfriend, Augustine Pannell, 37, use of the two-room shipping container last month, the pair had been sleeping on a blanket on the sidewalk.

For the couple, St. Elizabeth’s offer of at least a month’s worth of temporary housing represented a “big relief,” Kane said.

More churches doing the same would make a big dent in getting people off of the streets, Kane said.

“It would help a lot of people,” she said.

Gierlach has heard the many reasons offered up by churches who aren’t following St. Elizabeth’s example, but he doesn’t buy any of them.

“We are called to serve the least among us because that’s what Jesus tells us,” Gierlach said. “I never heard Jesus once say a word about liability and I’ve read the gospels many, many times. It’s not there, trust me. Every church can do something to help a houseless family. It might be a container, it might be allowing them to sleep in a car in their parking lot and use the bathroom, or pitch a tent on their property, or help with another $200 or $300 per month so they can stay in a house.”

Klayton Ko, senior pastor of the First Assembly of God in Red Hill, who did attend Caldwell’s meeting, said he could appreciate some of the concerns expressed by his fellow clergy.

“One-third of the pastors don’t own their property,” Ko said. “For those of us who do have property, there’s liability issues, there’s practical issues like security if you have a school. What about those with mental health needs that far exceed what a church can offer? Those are issues that are real.”

But in the next couple of weeks, First Assembly of God will have a fiberglass, igloo-type dome structure it bought and shipped from Alaska for $12,000.

Ko said he eventually plans to use the 12-foot-tall dome in a pilot project and perhaps buy more to create a “shelter village” of temporary housing on church-operated agricultural land — either in Waianae or on the Windward side, but not on its Red Hill property where it runs a school.

“The Bible is very clear from the Old Testament to the New Testament: Jesus commands us to help the poor and the needy. That’s part of our mission,” Ko said. “We do lots of feeding programs and bus in the homeless to have services. But I’ve always struggled that we don’t take them a step further. What can we as a church do to help the situation?”

He said he hopes government officials can help the church get zoning approval to allow shelters on its agricultural land.

But first Ko will have to persuade his parishioners and church board to embrace the idea of the first shelter from Alaska.

“When it arrives it’ll be our first touch-and-feel with it,” he said.

Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, located near Honolulu Airport, is talking about bringing five or six shipping containers to its church property to accommodate homeless adults, said administrative assistant Carol Hoover, who works on the church’s homeless ministry.

The church already takes in a homeless family with at least one minor child for seven days at a time in partnership with Family Promise of Hawai‘i, a program that rotates six or seven homeless families through Oahu churches.

During the day, the families meet at Family Promise of Hawai‘i centers in Kailua and Chinatown where they can do laundry and find other services. At night, they spend a week at a time moving from one church to another, said Mary Saunders, the organization’s executive director.

“Some sleep in church multipurpose rooms,” Saunders said. “Some churches use their gyms, others use classrooms.”

Trinity houses its family in classrooms that it temporarily converts into living quarters for one week.

But the church wants to do more, Hoover said, and is considering adding converted shipping containers so it can house more people more frequently.

“It would certainly help to get people off the street,” Hoover said. “We feel like we need to be about God’s business and help those who are less fortunate than we are.”