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After living outdoors for weeks, she got a place to sleep, a shower — and a job

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kentuckylantern.com – Liam Niemeyer – 2025-05-21 04:45:00


Courtney Phillips, 32, found shelter at Abundant Life Church in Central City after losing her job and facing homelessness. With the church’s support, she quickly secured a new job at a nursing home. The church provided her safety and a place to sleep during the cold months, with help from the church’s pastors, Jennifer and Zachary Banks. Local organizations, including the Hope2All food pantry and Pennyrile Allied Community Services, are also working to address homelessness and housing instability in the area. A community group led by Gwen Clements is advocating for a permanent shelter and housing solutions.

by Liam Niemeyer, Kentucky Lantern
May 21, 2025

This story is the second of four parts in a series about homelessness in Western Kentucky.

CENTRAL CITY  — When Courtney Phillips left her friend’s home in Muhlenberg County on Halloween last year, she took with her what she could fit into a backpack along with a leash for her dog Joker. The two of them walked roughly four miles to the county courthouse in Greenville.

The 32-year-old had been fired from her job at a nursing home in Madisonville, she said, because she didn’t have reliable transportation or a phone to let her employer know when she lacked a ride. She had been raised to be independent and take care of herself but had few options. A tornado in 2021 whose path stretched for over a hundred miles had wrecked her late father’s home in Bremen and left it uninhabitable.

A case manager she had worked with saw her on the side of the road, stopped and drove her to a church she had been attending for a couple of months. She said others with nowhere to go had slept in the parking lot of Abundant Life Church in Central City without fear of running into law enforcement.

Phillips found a corner and laid down two quilts and her sleeping bag and put her comforter on top. Her backpack served as a pillow and Joker as a source of warmth. She slept there for weeks, angry and hurt that circumstances had dropped her on cold concrete.

“If I’m out of sight, I’m out of mind,” Phillips told the Lantern. “I’m used to making things happen, and nothing was happening.”

Abundant Life Church in Central City, April 27, 2025. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

As the nights grew colder, Jennifer Banks, one of the church’s pastors, watched Phillips and others sleeping outside through the church’s cameras. A van often parked there overnight. Police in late September had brought wheelchair-bound Mallie Luken to the parking lot and left her to sleep the night. Banks encouraged Phillips to stay in sight of the cameras so she could watch her for her safety.

After Thanksgiving, when overnight temperatures dropped into the teens, Jennifer’s husband Zachary brought blankets and hand warmers for Phillips and Joker, planning to place a small heater next to them. Phillips was unaware at the time, but Zachary saw that her lips were blue.

“We’re going to the church and letting her in. She’ll freeze to death,” Jennifer Banks recalls thinking. Her church hadn’t considered using their building as a shelter at that point.

Only four days after Phillips began staying at the church she landed a job at another nursing home, the pastor said. She’s still staying in a room at the church, walking and bicycling to work.

“All she needed to do is be able to sleep at night and get a shower, and she got a job,” Jennifer Banks said.

Phillips is grateful for the help she has received from the Bankses and others. As for some in the local community, she says, “They try to sweep us under the rug like we don’t exist.”

A loose coalition emerges 

Zachary Banks and Jennifer Banks each had their own personal struggles before moving their family to Muhlenberg County in late 2023. The pastor of their “mother church” in Hardin County, also called Abundant Life, had called the couple to lead the new church in Central City. They bought a building that had been home to a Presbyterian congregation.

Zachary Banks had been in and out of prison while struggling with addiction, and Jennifer Banks had dealt with alcoholism. How their Christian faith helped them overcome those challenges informed how they wanted to build their new church community.

“If I can share my experience, if I can share my testimony with people like, ‘Listen, you don’t want to sit in a prison room for seven years,’” Zachary Banks said earlier this year. “I treat the people the way that I wish that somebody would have treated me.”

Zachary and Jennifer Banks organize a community meal provided by Abundant Life Church at Gish Park in Central City, April 27, 2025. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

The two of them, with members of the previous congregation coming along, started talking about their vision and going out into the community, hosting picnics and weekly meals at the church and delivering food. One weekend they helped clean up trash at a local park. They saw people experiencing homelessness, some dealing with substance abuse, and invited them to come to church for food.

The church sought and received a grant from the Felix Martin Foundation, which funds initiatives in the county, to build a mobile shower outside the church.

The Bankses and their church aren’t the only ones who know people experiencing homelessness and want to do more.

Debra Gorham, the director of the Hope2All food pantry in Drakesboro in southern Muhlenberg County, distributes boxes of food to hundreds of families who line up in cars at her pantry. Some have unstable housing situations or live outside. Every Kentucky county is required to have an animal shelter, Gorham told the Lantern in April. But there is no such requirement for people.

“Something about that just doesn’t sit very well with me,” Gorham said.

Hope2All food bank in Drakesboro, May 14, 2025. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Kelsey Rolley, a community services coordinator with the agency Pennyrile Allied Community Services, or PACS, in Greenville, fields requests for aid from people dealing with housing, utility bill assistance and more, relying on federal Community Services Block Grant funds to meet those needs. 

But the funding can run out quickly as people struggle to afford rents of $1,000 a month or more, she said, for houses that still need repairs or are not up to code. People are “having to take what they can get.” Emergency shelters in other nearby counties face high demand. The people she helps, whether they have a disability or other issues, often need recurring help.

“I don’t think it would ever be enough for just PACS alone to be able to carry the weight of the burden that we are seeing down here, whether it be the homeless, whether it be just resources in general — everybody’s having to spread them out thin, because the demand is so high,” Rolley said earlier this year.  “If we don’t have enough resources as a community to carry our own — if we can’t help our own, how are we supposed to grow as a population?”

Putting her faith in ‘Beacon of Hope’

Gwen Clements, a Central City woman, started a Facebook group focused on homelessness and has worked with the Bankses, Rolley and others as a part of a loose coalition of the caring.

In the summer 2024, law enforcement officers serving a warrant came to a large encampment. Later, at the property owner’s request, police cleared the encampment, scattering the roughly dozen people who had been living there, some of whom Clements considers friends.

Gwen Clements stands in what remains of an encampment where about a dozen people had been living until police broke it up, April 27, 2025. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Clements took to Facebook angry at how the campers had been treated. 

“They’ve been living there for many months without ANY ISSUES!! The encampment is well hidden from public eye, so it’s not an eyesore for the city,” she wrote on Facebook in June 2024. “WHERE ARE THEY SUPPOSE TO GO??? Some of them work in town at local restaurants and walk to work…JUST WHAT ARE THEY SUPPOSE TO DO??”

She threatened to let the displaced campers pitch tents in her front yard “with a huge sign explaining why they are there” for people to see on their way to the dedication of statues of local musical heroes The Everly Brothers and John Prine in downtown Central City.

She said a Central City police officer came to her house shortly after her Facebook post to advise her against that, saying a city ordinance prohibited pitching tents in one’s yard.

With Clements’ help, some who had lived in the encampment rented rooms at the Central Inn, a motel at 300 East Everly Brothers Blvd. Clements’ Facebook group members sometimes send her money to put up people at the Central Inn to keep them out of dangerous cold.

The Central Inn in Central City, May 14, 2025. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Clements wants to do more. In her vision the county would have a shelter, community kitchen and space for people experiencing homelessness.

The Central Inn — and its possibilities — came into focus as a possible solution as support began to gather around an idea floated by Abundant Life Church: Buy the Central Inn and turn it into apartments where people without housing can stay, pay rent and build financial stability and a credit history, before moving on to another rental elsewhere in town. Other services would be provided by local agencies to help those dealing with mental illness and other issues. 

The church posted on Facebook about the proposal and Clements, a supporter of the idea, shared the post with her Facebook group.

The church called it the “Beacon of Hope.”

Next in the Lantern’s series: In a meeting with local officials and downtown business owners, the “Beacon of Hope” faces pushback.

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Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

The post After living outdoors for weeks, she got a place to sleep, a shower — and a job appeared first on kentuckylantern.com



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content presents a thoughtful and empathetic examination of homelessness in a small Kentucky community, highlighting grassroots and faith-based efforts to provide support and housing. It emphasizes community solidarity, social services, and addressing systemic issues like housing affordability and lack of resources for vulnerable populations. The focus on social support programs, community activism, and a critical viewpoint on the insufficiency of current resources and policy aligns with a center-left perspective, advocating for more proactive, compassionate social policies and local engagement without strong partisan language or ideological extremism.

News from the South - Kentucky News Feed

WKU baseball holds youth camp at Nick Denes Field

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www.wnky.com – Samantha Money – 2025-07-10 17:28:00

SUMMARY: During summer break at WKU, the baseball camp energized Nick Denes Field with boys aged 6-12 learning hitting, throwing, fielding, and sliding. Hilltopper pitcher Gavin Perry actively coached, challenging campers with batting practice while keeping the atmosphere fun. Perry joked about losing count of home runs given up, highlighting the camp’s competitive yet enjoyable spirit. WKU director of operations Derek Francis emphasized the importance of remembering baseball as a fun game, noting how the kids’ enthusiasm and positive attitudes remind coaches of the joy in sports often overlooked in higher levels.

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Franklin man charged after marijuana operation found in home

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www.wnky.com – Amelia Brett – 2025-07-10 14:04:00

SUMMARY: A Franklin, Kentucky man, Terry Moss, 60, was arrested following an investigation by the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force on July 10. Authorities discovered an indoor marijuana cultivation operation at his residence on South Main Street. Moss faces multiple charges, including marijuana cultivation (five plants or more) with firearm enhancement, marijuana trafficking with firearm enhancement, drug paraphernalia possession, and first-degree possession of controlled substances including hydrocodone. The search uncovered several marijuana plants, processed marijuana, two firearms, drug paraphernalia, prescription pills, and U.S. currency. Charges will be presented to a grand jury. Multiple local law enforcement agencies assisted in the operation.

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100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial

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kentuckylantern.com – Berry Craig – 2025-07-10 04:40:00


A century ago, John T. Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted for teaching evolution, violating the Butler Act. The 1925 “Monkey Trial” symbolized the clash between urban modernism and rural fundamentalism. Despite Scopes’ conviction and $100 fine, the trial became a cultural milestone, broadcast live and attracting global attention. William Jennings Bryan prosecuted, while Clarence Darrow defended Scopes, highlighting tensions between science and religion. Though fundamentalism prevailed legally, public opinion shifted toward science. Today, as Christian Nationalists challenge church-state separation again, experts warn the principle requires active defense. Scopes died in 1970, remembered as “A Man of Courage.”

by Berry Craig, Kentucky Lantern
July 10, 2025

Today I’m remembering what Lela Scopes told me about her famous brother for my Paducah Sun story going on 46 years ago.

She said before John Thomas Scopes left to teach science and coach football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tenn., in 1924, he explained, “I’m going there because it’s a small town with a small school where I won’t get in any deep water.”  

The skinny, bespectacled, freckle-faced 24-year-old from Paducah ended up the defendant in one of history’s most sensationalized courtroom battles.  

A century ago this month, Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Volunteer State law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. His punishment was a $100 fine. 

But the “Monkey Trial” grabbed newspaper headlines worldwide. Dozens of reporters converged on Dayton. So did tent revivalists and swarms of hucksters hawking popcorn and pink lemonade and hustling Bibles and souvenirs, including stuffed monkeys. 

John Thomas Scopes, second from left, stands in the courtroom during his trial for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to high school science students in Dayton, Tenn., July 1925. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“The State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes” was also the first trial broadcast live on radio.

I interviewed Lela Scopes in August 1979, when I was a Sun feature writer. She also said John had worried about what their mother might think of the trial: “He was afraid it would get in the Louisville paper, Mother would read about it and think he was a hothead.”

Anyway, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and now is one of those rhyming times.

“Public education is once again under siege from a sustained effort by Christian Nationalists to blur the line between church and state,” warns A.J. Schumann, a youth organizing fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Like today, the 1920s were times of “rapid social, economic and cultural change,” said David Krueger, professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah. 

Scopes admitted he covered evolution when he substitute taught for the absent biology teacher. (In their zeal to ban evolution, Tennessee lawmakers failed to remove the state-approved biology textbook, which included evolution.)

Scopes believed in evolution and agreed to stand trial on principle. 

The trial, which began on July 10, 1925, and concluded on July 21, was essentially a clash of competing values: urban science and modernism versus rural, old-time Protestant fundamentalist Christianity. 

A historical marker stands near the entrance of Oak Grove Cemetery in Paducah where John Scopes is buried next to his wife Mildred. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Berry Craig)

“The cause defended at Dayton is a continuing one that has existed throughout man’s brief history and will continue as long as man is here,” Scopes wrote in “Center of the Storm,” his 1967 memoir. “It is the cause of freedom, for which man must do what he can.”

The attorneys embodied the collision of values. Tennessee summoned William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as special prosecutor. A fundamentalist champion, he had been a Democratic congressman, secretary of state and three-time Democratic presidential candidate. 

The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow to lead Scopes’ defense team. Darrow was widely considered the country’s top defense lawyer. He was from Chicago, believed in evolution and was an agnostic.

Bryan and Darrow dueled like gladiators in the sweltering midsummer East Tennessee heat. The courtroom became so hot that the trial was moved outdoors to the tree-shaded courthouse lawn where the crowd of spectators grew even larger.

Bryan got a conviction as expected. But progressives, including liberal Christians, believed science and reason had vanquished “EVIL-lution” in the court of public opinion. They pointed to July 20 when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert.

“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” The New York Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion, and little even of ancient history.” 

… separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”

– A.J. Schumann, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

In “Only Yesterday,” his 1931 chronicle of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote:  “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”

Allen and the progressives of his day missed the mark. Donald Trump and his Republican Party owe a big part of their electoral success to white Christian evangelicals of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” persuasion.  

Schumann warned that “today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-modernist anxieties of the 1920s — fear that secularism is destroying ‘traditional values’ and that public institutions should reflect a ‘Christian America.’” 

He wrote that the First Amendment safeguards all Americans “from having any single belief system imposed on them by the state,” a fact that seems to be lost on much of the GOP these days.  

Schumann concluded that the Scopes “trial reminds us that the separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”

Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. He is buried in the family plot in Paducah’s Oak Grove Cemetery next to his wife, Mildred, and close to Lela, who died in 1989 at 92. “A Man of Courage” is his epitaph. A state historical marker at the cemetery’s main entrance tells about him.

John Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. His gravestone bears his epitaph, “A Man of Courage.” (Kentucky Lantern photo by Berry Craig)

Scopes said not a word during the trial. He got his chance at the end.

After the jury delivered the expected guilty verdict and the judge fined Scopes $100, one of his lawyers pointed out that the defendant had been denied the right to speak before sentencing. 

“Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute,” Scopes said. “I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom, that is to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.” 

After Scopes finished, the judge repeated the fine. The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, Schumann wrote, but the Butler Act wasn’t repealed until 1967.

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Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

The post 100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial appeared first on kentuckylantern.com



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content presents a viewpoint that emphasizes the importance of separating church and state and supports scientific education, framing the Scopes Trial as a historic battle between modernism and religious fundamentalism. It highlights concerns about contemporary Christian Nationalist influence on public education, particularly critiquing elements within the GOP, which indicates a critical stance toward conservative religious politics. However, it maintains a respectful historical recount and balanced tone by providing factual background and quoting multiple perspectives, reflecting a generally moderate but slightly progressive viewpoint favoring secularism and academic freedom.

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