November 2013
Answering Jesus' Call

Saying ‘Yes’

St. Francis Episcopal Church didn’t really set out to do mission work. Rather, the mission field gradually started showing up on our doorstep. The result? A parish with an average Sunday attendance of about 150 found itself housing a clinic, managing a community garden, providing a soccer field, giving out truckloads of food, and sharing our worship space with two congregations of refugees from Nepal and Liberia—all while opening our doors to 23 12-Step group meetings every week.

This work has been gradual and tentative. It has never been in the budget, but money has not been a critical issue. Most of the relationships so far are incidental—people working next to one another in the garden, congregations crossing paths in the parking lot on Sundays—but bit by bit the natural walls between people are coming down. At a recent celebration of St. Francis Day, the three congregations worshiped together for the first time, and staid Episcopalians were clapping and singing with all their hearts, shouting Amen when required, and sharing a noisy, joyful meal in the parish hall afterwards.

More than 10 years before that, though, we went through a visioning process, from which came the mission statement, Celebrating God’s Love with Everyone, and the parish took it to heart.

The first manifestation was just a willingness to tolerate the skateboarders on the newly built handicap-access ramps outside the church. Then there was a parish decision to stay in its now-urban location, which had once been far on the outskirts of the city. Our attachment to the park-like seven acres of property ran deeper than anyone really suspected.

So the decision not to move farther out into the affluent suburbs set the stage for the new rector, Patrick Ormos, a transplanted French Canadian whose family had emigrated from post-WWII Eastern Europe. He arrived in San Antonio from Indiana in August 2007. Around the same time, Catholic Charities in San Antonio began to help large numbers of refugees from all over the world: Rwanda, Somalia, Bhutan, Burma, Iraq, Nepal, Burundi—all places where people were trying to escape to a better life. With the Center for Refugee Services acting as advocates, more than 3,500 refugees eventually took up residence in apartment complexes in the St. Francis area.

So what did we do? Initially, not much—which may have been for the best. No one at St. Francis was equipped to take charge of “refugee relations,” so the mission work was largely passive. Father Patrick preached about the difficulties of being a stranger in a strange land and about how you don’t have to go anywhere to find mission work. He formed relationships with several of the refugees (aided by his fluency in French) and with the aid workers who were helping them.

Children who had never lived anywhere but a refugee camp started going to schools in the area, and after school they began gathering on our grassy field to play soccer. And we said okay, the kids could play soccer on our field.

Then a woman arrived whose call was to be a parish nurse. She volunteered to make contact with the University of Texas Health Science Center Nursing School, and before long a regular clinic was meeting in the Sunday-school rooms at St. Francis. Social workers gathered up interpreters, doctors volunteered time, and nursing students gained invaluable hands-on experience giving health care to people who had had precious little of it in their lives.

Still, the parish as a whole was involved only in projects like Worshipers for Warmth, donating coats and warm clothes to people for whom even a mild San Antonio winter was a shock. One teenager, who learned to knit so she could make scarves for the refugees, produced 15 in her first year. There was a general feeling that perhaps it was important to keep saying yes, to keep opening the doors, to stay alert for other opportunities.

When the San Antonio Food Bank called and asked to use our parking lot to distribute food to the new neighbors once a month in the summer, we said yes. And after a couple of these food distributions, someone noticed something: Some refugees never seemed to get any of the food. Because some cultures were fine with pushing to the front of the line, and other cultures required deferring to others, the refugees who held back often did not get anything. Not to mention that a lot of the food the Food Bank was giving out—cans of pork and beans, boxes of macaroni and cheese, packets of soup mix—was insurmountably foreign to Burmese farmers.

And so the International Community Garden was born in the unused back end of our property. The project was a joint venture among St. Francis, University United Methodist, First Baptist, and Catholic Charities. The official groundbreaking ceremony took place on a sunny, chilly day in February, the prayers and speeches completely disregarded by a handful of people already hoeing their plots with rudimentary tools and looks of utter concentration. Within a few months, the bare raised plots had turned into a massive jungle that produced vegetables some of the master gardeners had never seen.

At around the same time, we started holding an annual Renaissance Faire on grounds. This had very little to do with ministry to refugees, except for one thing: The faire happened on the soccer field. Late in the day of the second faire, the soccer players showed up to play. Instead, they spent an hour playing medieval board games with the parish teenagers running the games booth, then helped break down the canopies and decorations so they could put their soccer goals back up.

So St. Francis Church just kept saying yes. When another church wanted to put new sod on the soccer field, we accepted gladly. When two churches needed a place to worship, they found homes here. When several 12-step groups were displaced from their meeting location, St. Francis opened itself to them. A church that had once hosted a single Narcotics Anonymous group every week for 30 years now has 23 meetings every week. It’s just a different slant on refugee ministry.

Celebrating God’s love with everyone, indeed.

A cradle Episcopalian originally from New Orleans, Holly Zook has been a member of St. Francis Church, San Antnoio for 23 years and has done a little of everything in that time, from Altar Guild to managing the annual Renaissance Faire, with sidelines into editing the parish newsletter and starting the monthly book club. She is married with two children, both of whom have vacated the nest in favor of higher education, much to the delight of their introverted parents.

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This article is part of the November 2013 Vestry Papers issue on Answering Jesus' Call