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Last December, when temperatures dipped into single digits and the winter continued as one of the harshest on record, Milwaukee south-shore churches offered an all-night prayer service that gave the area’s homeless an answer to their prayers: a warm space in which to bed down. When asked about the all-night prayer vigil at St. Mark Lutheran Church, Cudahy, Mark Thompson, pastor, quipped, “This isn’t the first time people have fallen asleep in church.” The churches’ creative offering of space under the guise of a “prayer vigil” was both a response to brutally cold nights and to being denied a shelter program by the local plan commission, which called it inconsistent with the city’s zoning code. But fears about what such a shelter would mean have waned.