"The person who is without a country is usually without a home too, the person without a home becomes restless and a stranger in a hostile world. To a large extent, overpopulation engenders a mass of surplus people who have to emigrate if they want to survive. Millions in the countries of the Third World have become migrants without either country or home. In the societies of the industrial West, the problem of homelessness is not a housing problem, or a matter of an 'overloaded boat.' This is an anti-social policy of pushing people out. There are 500,000 homeless people on the streets in Germany, and millions of empty houses and apartments where these people could live, but which they cannot afford. In the reports of an Open-Door community in Atlanta, Georgia, I read that (1) Housing precedes life, housing precedes employment, housing is a human right. (2) But keeping countless people homeless means that a cheap labour pool of disposable people is always available, because these people have no country, family, or other ties. . . .

"Without space no human being can live. Are the homeless of the streets, and the locked-up spaces of prison cells and forced-labor camps humanity's bottom line? Doesn't this mean that God, the indwelling God of the Shekinah, and Jesus, the homeless Son of man, are being pushed out of our world at the same time as these 'surplus people'? Won't God himself then become utopian, in the literal sense of the word — without any place? The Christian community will then become 'a dwelling place of God in the Spirit' (Eph.2:22), and instead of the excluding spaces of the cold-shouldering society create inviting spaces for the Son of man, who is present in the hungry, the thirsty, strangers, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned (Matt. 25: 35f.) It will be a home country for the God who in this world is homeless."