AT TRINITY Lutheran Church in Harford County the other night, a television reporter asked the Rev. Steven Gosnell to recite a few words of Scripture. The reporter wanted them recited on camera. The reporter believed this would make a nice touch for the 11 o'clock TV news, a kind of shorthand version of the emotional conflict at hand: What do we do about all these homeless people?

Leaving aside the issue of television attempting to dramatize an event it is allegedly there merely to cover, Father Gosnell might have picked any number of biblical passages. But one came instantly to mind: The poor will always be with us.

The question is: How close?

And the question is: What will their presence mean to our community?

In Harford County, they are wrestling with such questions now in ways that they never exactly have. At the packed church meeting Tuesday night in Joppa, a coalition of faith and civic groups - Faith Communities and Civic Agencies United - met to present its plans for a permanent homeless shelter there. It would have 38 beds and be built on county-owned property on Philadelphia Road, between Blossom Drive and Raspe Lane.

The coalition members were offering these plans to residents who live in the area. This was not quite, as they say, preaching to the choir.

"It's an old issue," John Gessner was saying yesterday. He is the Faith Communities lawyer. "People are concerned. What do we do about the poor? We have this image. We're afraid of what we don't know. And then, of course, we have these stereotypes of the poor being dangerous people, and this image is reinforced all the time in the media."

"Fear of the unknown," added Pat Eiler, coordinator of the shelter effort. "It's all about dealing with people, and with situations, that we've never dealt with before. We haven't had to deal with the homeless out here. But the county population's growing, and so is the problem. And we can't run away from it."

For years, Baltimore has wrestled with the problem far more intensely than the surrounding suburbs. The city has long had the heaviest percentage of the poor, including those whose poverty sometimes leads them to criminal behavior. That lingering image is the thing driving some of the concern in Harford County.

"As far as we can tell," Gessner said, Harford "is the only county in the metro area that doesn't have a permanent facility for homeless men. For battered women and for children, yes. Mostly for victims of domestic violence. But, men, no."

For the past three years, Harford's homeless - some of whom work but do not make enough money to afford a residence - have been shuttled among several local churches for refuge. They sleep on folding cots in hallways and vestibules. The churches are located considerable distances from each other.

In many ways, this is obviously difficult for the homeless. It strips away privacy and personal dignity. For those homeless who are employed, it means getting to work from a different location every week.

But the lack of a permanent facility has also meant that no individual community needs to feel threatened by the constant presence of the homeless - or by the image that such a presence might give the community. The attempt to build a permanent shelter changes that.

"There was a time," Gessner said, "when Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra were giving us images of the poor. But they were idealized images. The image we have now is something different. We understand that. It's a threat to our emotional comfort zones.

"You know, we're suspicious of any change to our quality of life. We hear about a convenience store going in down the street, and we worry that it'll become a teen-age hangout or something. This is the same thing. We have to fight the images in our heads, the fear of the unknown."

At Tuesday night's church gathering, residents who live near the proposed shelter location expressed understanding about the need for a facility. But some asked: Isn't there a better location? Some wondered about the selection process that settled on this location. The questions seemed to mask some deeper, more sensitive concerns.

It's an old conflict. We can feel sorry for the poor, but not so sorry that we want them in our own neighborhood. It's a problem as old as the Scriptures. And, even if the TV news wants to show us a man of the cloth reading a touching biblical passage, we're still troubled by that other image from the late news: crime in the community, which is sometimes committed by desperate people looking for a way out of their troubles.