The most eye catching story of the week comes from the Wilmington North Carolina area congregation of Holy Cross. It’s a new church plant. But there were some serious obstacles to overcome before it begin to worship in its own sacred space:
“The church was in a Catch 21 when it came to actually building a physical place.
‘We couldn’t get our membership up enough to get the Diocese (of East Carolina) to loan us the money to build a site. But you can’t do that when you’re meeting in a cafeteria,’ said Carolyn Moore, the church’s publicist. The church has been meeting each Sunday in the cafeteria at Myrtle Grove Middle School.”
So rather than wait around for something to be done, the congregation took matters into their own hand and ordered a prefabricated mail order building that will be delivered and installed as the first part of what is hoped to be a large church campus. Well done!
From here.
In an article about who volunteers in New Jersey are stepping in to help care for people who have been declared incapacitated by the courts but who have no relatives or close friends to care for them, comes this mention of the local ministry of an Episcopal parish:
Calvary Episcopal Church in Flemington offered support through their Prayer Shawl Ministries. The Rev. Ann Holt runs a ministry there where parishioners knit prayer shawls that are blessed and hand delivered to people in need of encouragement, companions and prayers. Holt delivered such shawls to a number of the wards served by Volunteer Guardianship One-on-One.
St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin is hosting a concert by Lungfish member Daniel Higgs.
It’s sort of hard to imagine his followers rocking out to Necklace of Heads (Simple Machines, 1989) in the car stereo, but the attraction to Lungfish was probably due to their impenetrability, antithetical to peers like Fugazi and Hoover. Expect a transcendent performance on Saturday afternoon, where Higgs will be joined by electronic musicians J.D. Emmanuel and Stellar Om Source (Christelle Gualdi).
(If you’re in the Austin area this weekend you should probably check it out. And then would you consider leaving a note in the comments to tell me what this paragraph means?)
And finally, on this snowy weekend with most of the east coast Café editors snowed under until Tuesday, this reminder that Episcopal congregations are joining with others all over the country are opening their doors and hearts to the poor and homeless in their communities who are seeking shelter.