When St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas closed their school in 2006, it impacted both the congregation and the community. Students and families needed to find new schools. School faculty and staff were unemployed. The empty school building provided a visible reminder of all that was lost.
Today, Spanish and English voices fill the halls at the former school. Now known as the St. Alban’s Outreach Center, the building is home to the Central Texas String Academy, Waco Children’s Theatre, Camp Fire USA, and Avance Waco. Jeff Fisher, priest at St. Alban’s shares, “we serve four times as many people in the community than we did when we operated a school. We have four outreach partners each paying rent to the parish. The parish has also grown by leaps and bounds; average Sunday attendance is up over 60% from 2005. We now have parishioners who do not remember us ever operating a school. A new day of resurrection has truly dawned.”
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Eastern Massachusetts is in the midst of its fourth or fifth ‘major’ snowfall since Christmas. The governor has asked all ‘non-essential’ workers to stay home; the TV crawl is filled with notices of closed schools and organizations, including no Meals on Wheels delivery.
I work from home, so in theory don’t ‘get’ snow days. Unless the power goes out, I can work and enjoy the beauty of snow falling. For others, a snowstorm causes anxiety and havoc.
What happens to people who can’t afford to not go to work? Who cares for their children on a snow day when schools and day care centers are closed? What happens to food pantries, meal programs, or free clinics when there is a major storm? Are the people who use these services ‘out of luck?’ Do they and their children go to bed hungry or sick?
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My weekend plans were simple: pack the remaining Christmas items away and visit my mother. Bake something to bring to my mother and to share with our next door neighbor who clears our sidewalk with his snow blower.
That all changed when my husband handed me a copy of Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World."
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I miss the tree burning.
For many years my community celebrated 12th night by burning Christmas trees at the beach. As darkness approached people would add their trees to the pile collected by town workers. A member of the local clergy offered a blessing; firefighters then set the mound of trees ablaze.
As the inferno grew, the crowd of families with young children, teenagers, older people, and dogs instinctively stepped back as the blazing heat spread out from the bonfire. People stood in silence, mesmerized by the flames and the crackling and popping of the burning pines. Smoke blew in all directions as the wind shifted; people momentarily turned away then again looked upon the fiery blaze.
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We’re kicking off the year in a big way. Tomorrow I head to the Diocese of Spokane to spend three daSys training about seventy-five lay people, clergy, and bishops in organizing for mission. Why? To equip us to respond to God’s call to serve the hungry.
This isn’t to say that church folks haven’t done this before. Like my parish, many congregations provide a food pantry, soup kitchen or outreach ministry to fill needs in the community and live out Jesus’ command to love and serve our neighbors.
But the people in the Diocese of pokane aim for another level of response.
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Eight months ago I sent a response to a question posed by the White House on LinkedIn: “What are your ideas to end childhood obesity within a generation?” This query was part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s work with the Childhood Obesity Task Force. Responses have ranged from glib to thoughtful, addressing exercise, nutrition, access to affordable healthy food, lifestyle, education, and the role parents and schools play.
My response related to diet and exercise. Living near an elementary school, in a community that still has neighborhood schools – and sidewalks, I am dismayed by the number of children who are driven to and from school each day. I’m also disheartened by the stories I read relating to urban food deserts and the high cost of fresh food relative to nutritionally questionable convenience foods.
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My dad can hold a grudge.
When someone has really wronged him, it’s hard for him to forgive. And forgetting doesn’t even enter the equation.
This is one of the reasons I believe in a God that changes hearts and transforms lives.
Three times a week, dad goes to prison. He teaches Bible studies and workshops on how to live outside the bars. On Sundays, he worships with the inmates.
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“May I borrow some water?”
Nine years ago, JT knocked on the back door of Christ Episcopal Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a five-gallon jug in hand. JT lived in a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartment next to the church; the city had turned off his water and he hoped to fill his jug so he could flush his toilet. When the rector opened the door that day, he had no idea how this simple request would bring about radical change in the Christ Episcopal Congregation.
Here’s their story, as shared by Robert Towner, rector of Christ Episcopal Church:
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We’re two days out from the celebration of St. Lucy, but her story resonates strongly in this season of Advent.
A patron saint of the blind, Lucy was martyred around 304. Legend has it that guards, unable to move or burn her, poked out her eyes. Throughout the centuries, her story has been told as a symbol of transformation, of seeing the world in a new light and with new eyes.
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I love Advent, now, but that hasn’t always been true. For almost my entire life, I described myself as impatient. “I hate waiting,” I used to say with a self-deprecating smile, as if this somehow made me a more productive person. Waiting. Who would want to do that?
Years ago, long before I ever consciously thought of changing my life entirely and going to seminary, I confided in a friend that I felt I was waiting for something, but I couldn’t figure out what. It was driving me crazy. I felt like a person in a hamster wheel, going over and over the same facts about my life. Nothing was wrong. What was I waiting for? I was frustrated. My friend reminded me that I needed to learn to just wait. “How can you ever be present to others in the same situation, if you don’t know how to be still and wait?”
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I regularly commute by bike to work. The hour-long ride gives me a chance to see details of the city I’d otherwise miss: the older women practicing Tai Chi in a park; the amber sunrises seen as I pedal along the curves of the East River. Of course at this point in the year I am riding with gloves and a light jacket. It’s cold now and getting colder, and everywhere I see evidence of this seasonal shift.
One sign of winter is the appearance of folks in sleeping bags. (More...)
A lot. Ask Eric Hillegas, former associate minister at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Upham’s Corner.
Today’s new Fieldwork posting begins the story of how Eric is bringing his vision of free tutoring programs to an inner city neighborhood. As associate minister at St. Mary’s in the Upham’s Corner section of Dorchester, Mass., Eric saw a great need for programs to break the cycle of academic failure that often plagues inner city neighborhoods.
The funding model was simple:
I recently heard a provocative interview with the Rev. David Beckman, Lutheran minister, President of Bread for the World and this year’s recipient of the World Food Prize, a prize frequently described as the equivalent of a Nobel in the field of food and agriculture. The interview begins with some startling figures: 14% of Americans are currently living in poverty (more than at any time since the 1960s) and that in 2008 one million kids went hungry. This number has almost certainly risen since although exact figures will only be available later this month.
As a person of faith, what I find compelling...
She said they were the best conversations she’d ever had with her three kids. And the best birthday present ever, in all her 70 years.
Little did I know when I suggested to my brothers that we tell stories for mom’s birthday last November, that we’d end up participating in StoryCorps’s National Day of Listening. What started as a simple idea to share around the dinner table became instead a series of one-hour interviews with my mother, conducted by her three grown children.
I love StoryCorps. Often I hear...
I spent the Saturday night before our All Saints celebration as the stage manager for an event at our cathedral entitled, “A Celebration of the Tree of Life in the Time of the Great Turning.” It was an incredible event anchored by a talk by Joanna Macy and two participatory stories by Michael Meade. Wrapped around them were dance performances led by Betsey Beckman, music by Gina Sala, and the singing of the Spirit of the Sound Choir. Ninety participants, 600 attendees; each making a $20 contribution. Beyond interfaith to transfaith.
This celebration occurred during a...
The separation of church and state is a key cornerstone of the U.S. government. At the same time, everyone at my noonday meeting on Tuesday had cast their vote in a local church.
This juxtaposition struck me today as we move from one of the most contentious, fractious election cycles in my lifetime into a new era of leadership. Our churches serve as polling stations as a way to support their communities. But we have so much more to offer, especially now.
But we have so much more to offer, especially now.
It’s easy to assume you know a place until an unexpected encounter, story or statistic startles you awake. In the end, it probably the most familiar places that hold the greatest surprises.
For this reason, I love this video about St. Paul’s in Huntington, CT. Not only does it combine health ministry and Anglican Spirituality, it also shows how one priest - the Rev. Janet Waggoner - is walking side-by-side with parish leaders to gain a deeper understanding of their neighborhood. In the accompanying article, Waggoner says “I was wowed by the incredible diversity of our community...Go north and you have the rolling hills and farms, and down to the river and all the houses have boats in their yard.” And while neither the video nor the article go into this, I wonder how these explorations have changed St. John’s ministry.
I made my own startling discovery a few years ago.
Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 17:11-19), tells the story of the ten lepers healed by Jesus and the one who said ‘thank you.’ In response to this act of gratefulness and humility, Jesus said, “Rise and go your way, your faith has made you well.” Those of us participating in the Eucharist on Sunday gave thanks to God and renewed our commitment to go into the world to do the work God has called us to do.
Today, society still has many outcasts with difference continuing to be a common denominator. In the October 7, 2010 issue of Time, Archbishop Desmond Tutu notes, “As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities. That would be awful if that was the end of the story. But, exhilaratingly, people also have an incredible capacity for good.”
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