PHOENIX - On Saturday mornings, crowds of homeless gather with other needy people at picnic tables outside a church in an upscale Phoenix neighborhood, listen to sermons and settle in for sausage, pancakes and scrambled eggs.
The pastor says it's the Lord's work. Neighbors say it should be done elsewhere, preferably the proverbial "Not In My Back Yard."
Residents say the homeless create blight and pose a danger to them, pointing to the case of a homeless felon caught with child pornography in the neighborhood. A complaint prompted city officials to order the year-old breakfast halted, saying it violated zoning laws.
Now, the dispute is in federal court in Phoenix, with the church saying the city is violating its First Amendment rights and a federal law that protects religious groups from city zoning rules.
"This is what it means to be a church," says the Rev. Dottie Escobedo-Frank of the CrossRoads United Methodist Church. "We're just trying to take care of some people who are hungry."
City officials say that they've never disagreed that the church is doing good work but that it's violating zoning laws.
Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the Nashville-based First Amendment Center, said such spats have become quite common across the country since Congress passed the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act in 2000.
The law gives religious groups a high level of protection in zoning cases and forces cities to show there's a compelling reason, such as public safety, to restrict them.
And "churches are winning more than they're losing," Haynes said. "The law has teeth."
In San Diego, for example, the city's parks department sought to require a group of ministries to stop serving food to the poor at a popular bayside park and relocate to a fenced-in dirt lot.
The department scrapped that idea in March after receiving a letter threatening suit from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based legal group that takes on religious -freedom cases on behalf of Christians.
Cities often target events that help the homeless because they don't want them to be seen, says Kevin Theriot, ADF's senior counsel. The group is not involved in the Phoenix case, but Theriot says the church's freedom of religion is being violated.
"Feeding those who are hungry has been recognized as an important religious belief for years," he says. "My guess is if they were serving a pancake breakfast to local neighborhood folks that aren't homeless, then nobody would have a problem."
For the past year, a bus has given rides to the church to hundreds of people from their spots among bushes, in alleyways and the barren hillsides overlooking the city. The church says they get bused back after the breakfast.
Attorneys for the neighbors say that some have stuck around and have urinated in yards or broken into cars.
One homeless man took up residence in an alley behind Kevin Swatich's home. Police found that the homeless man was keeping child porn in an electrical box and was a convicted felon.
Escobedo-Frank says it was an isolated incident that happened months ago. She says if any homeless are hanging around the neighborhood, residents can't possibly know whether they attended the breakfast.
"It doesn't make sense that they would leave here, where there's a bathroom, and go urinate on someone's yard," she says.
The first federal court hearing is set for March 24. In the meantime, the breakfasts continue.