Episcopal Press and News
Bishop Allin Hails First Jubilee Center
Episcopal News Service. June 23, 1983 [83118]
LEWISTOWN, Penna. (DPS, June 23) -- Jubilee Ministry -- a strategic part of the Episcopal Church's effort to meet human need -- took another step toward realization on June 19 when Presiding Bishop John M. Allin presented a certificate designating St. Mark's Church, here, as a Jubilee Center.
The certificate was received by the Rev. Peter Greenfield, rector, at a Eucharist with Alice Emery, executive for National Mission at the Episcopal Church Center and Bishop Charlie McNutt of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania also present. The celebration followed, by two days, the action of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in affirming St. Mark's and seven other programs as the first Jubilee Centers in the Church.
Congregations and clusters of congregations meeting certain criteria may be designated Jubilee Centers by a diocese. The designation is then affirmed by the Council. The criteria are based on the five functions of mission that were adopted at the 1982 General Convention as part of the Episcopal Church's Next Step in Mission: service, worship, evangelism, education, and pastoral care. Soon after the General Convention, McNutt suggested that St. Mark's apply for Jubilee Center designation. The parish did and was so designated by the Central Pennsylvania diocese. The Executive Council affirmed the designation on June 17 at their meeting in Des Moines, Iowa.
Other congregations affirmed as Jubilee Centers at the same meeting include: the Episcopal Pastoral Center, Denver; St. Paul's Parish, Saginaw, Mich.; Durham Ministries, Durham, N.C.; Holy Cross Parish, Miami; East St. Louis Metropolitan Ministries, East St. Louis, Ill.; Episcopal Ministries of Middle Tennessee/ Urban and Regional Ministries, Nashville, Tenn.; and Urban Mission Training Program, Washington.
All the Centers have in common programs to provide human services and leadership in some form of social advocacy.
St. Mark's Church has a long history of community leadership in Lewistown. The parish participates in the meat and broth canning project of the Central Pennsylvania World Hunger Association, distributing such food to the poor. St. Mark's started a Benevolent Endowment Fund, an ecumenical source of more than $912,000 in grants to needy people each year. Meals on Wheels and Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, an ecumenical food pantry, are both based in the parish house. St. Mark's parishioners took the lead in challenging a cutback of 120 CETA workers from the country payroll, and in reconciling a 1978 teacher's strike. Work parties from St. Mark's have traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to aid in flood relief, to Belize for farm work, to Colombia for a reconstruction project. Over 100 homes in Lewistown have been repaired by St. Mark's volunteers and many people are fed each year with food grown in the parish garden.
Much of this ministry is under the oversight of Laura Farley, parish outreach chairman. She called the Jubilee Center designation "fabulous," and said it presents new challenges for St. Mark's.
Her words were echoed by Greenfield, who said that at St. Mark's "our concept of church is a family."
"We see that family being a large one," he said. "It includes our parish, our diocese and indeed the whole world."
Greenfield noted that "poverty and living on the edge" are a "way of life in Lewistown." He said that the parish family concept enables the congregation to both respond to need and also take an advocacy role in the community when needed. The rector also serves as Province III representative to the National Hunger Committee.
The Presiding Bishop spoke of the church as a family in his June 19 sermon at St. Mark's.
"I am here as a member of the family," Allin told the congregation. "I am pleased I was not introduced as a guest. All of us are struggling with how we can be more effective as the family of Christ."
Allin traced the development of the Next Step in Mission as an Episcopal effort to renew ministry and meet human need. He praised St. Mark's for being one of the first congregations to take up the General Convention challenge and apply to be a Jubilee Center.
"It's a great mission," said the Presiding Bishop. "Your willingness to share in it is why I am here. Thank you for agreeing to be a model, so that each may discover that each has an offering to make to the Glory of God."
That model aspect that Allin referred to is a key factor in designation. In discussing the centers chosen for the first such honors, Emery pointed out that the Denver program has already been used as a model in several Church jurisdictions nationwide and has trained and funded staff for ten other ecumenical agencies.
One of its particular projects is the Statistical Advocacy and Mediation program which works with Denver social service agencies in attempting to determine and document systemic flaws and to provide advice on correcting them. In one instance, it was able to aid 2,000 people in five days.
The Tennessee project -- like many of these in existence for some years -- got a boost two years ago when federally-funded programs were cut back and forced local business, civic and religious groups into new cooperation to provide food, services and improved shelter to Tennessee's needy. The work of the project has been lately computerized and is therefore readily accessible for other interested groups.
While budget cuts were a spur to the Tennesseans, the racial difficulties of the Miami area are the focal point of the Holy Cross project, which attempts to build interracial and cultural understanding while providing the support services and assistance that serve as buffers against racial tension.
Holy Cross provides a model of what a single, strong minded parish can do. The Durham project opens up visions of what can happen when 37 congregations in one town work together. The group now runs a community kitchen, meals on wheels, food pantry, counseling and a woman's action program and is raising funds for a building -- to be sited next to St. Philip's Episcopal Church -- to bring all of these services under one coordinated structure.
At the June 16-18 meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, where the first centers were lifted up, Emery told the Council that other efforts are underway to support this ministry, including an audio tape and accompanying text of meditations on the Biblical theme of Jubilee; and the resource guides published through the Education for Mission and Ministry and National Mission in Church and Society units of the Church Center.