“Get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” - Acts 9:6
Neighborhood Action
St. Paul’s is known for our soaring music and glorious liturgies, but our splendid worship always directs us outward into the world around us as ministers of justice, reconciliation, and peace. Our mission is grounded in the immediate Uptown neighborhood, where we draw alongside our neighbors as friends, companions, and missioners. Our urban location calls us into mutually life-giving engagement with those around us, particularly during these years of upheaval and trauma in our city and world.
In the hard months and years of the pandemic, our SPiN (St. Paul’s in the Neighborhood) ministry flourished. Every Sunday of the year, we pack wagons with food (including hot soup in the colder months), clothes, and supplies, and walk through Uptown, engaging and befriending our neighbors. All four generations participate in this ministry, and we often are led by our teenage members. Meanwhile, we support a Little Free Pantry ministry every day of the year, and have noticed that neighborhood residents have quietly begun stocking our pantry. We build working relationships with local businesses, and share SPiN supplies with them for distribution in their entryways.
Several members of St. Paul’s have developed close allegiances with particular neighbors who experience shelter insecurity, and in a few cases we have helped them gain housing and medical care. We perceive God’s presence in every human being, and we work to expand our understanding of our own privileges and the impact of systemic racism, unregulated capitalism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. In all of this, we are just another ordinary Christian community. This is nothing new, but only enacts in our own time and place what Christ himself has both preached and embodied for twenty centuries.