Things are about to get really interesting at Holy Moly, my small Episcopal mission parish that I love so well. For one thing, we’ve got a new vicar, and the old one has a new job, and this all happened really quickly. For another, we totally changed our service time to 9am. It’s the tag end of summer, and attendance hasn’t been very good, so the time change could potentially be really damaging.
But. I talked to a reporter earlier this week. 😉
The supplemental food pantry we started last Christmas during Advent has slowly been gaining ground, and in the spring we committed ourselves to just a once-a-month distribution, every Third Tuesday, without fail. It’s hard to get anyone but the Bishop’s Committee members interested in showing up on that night, but we made it the lead-in to our monthly meetings, so we HAVE to be there.
The reporter called because I sent a press release to a couple of the local papers describing how our most recent distribution was our biggest yet – a total of 5 families that week came by for pre-packed bags of groceries. Over the entire course of the summer, we’ve fed about 12-15 families, two or three bags at a time (we also respond to calls to the office). I was crowing about it a little because, frankly, it was the best news we’ve had in a long, long time.
I got a bite from the local neighborhood “shopper” newsweekly, who was intrigued by the concept. We don’t have a lot of room for storage, and we wanted the convenience of having bags already packed with two meals ready to give out, either for a family with cooking facilities, or a family without access to a kitchen.
The dynamic right now is interesting; the new vicar is a very forward-leaning fellow, and there are one or two members of the Old Guard who keep saying “Father” and “His” where the bulletin says “The Lord” and “God’s” for… going on 5 years now.
Several older parishioners fell away this summer, and only now am I hearing undercurrents of exactly why some of them won’t come back, and it’s not for the reason you’d think, either. Our former vicar’s sexuality was a problem for some, and a convenient excuse for others.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to meeting some new people. The folks over at our new partner parish, St Nicholas, are quite lovely and I can’t wait to get to know them better.