St. Stephen’s, an Episcopal church in Center City Philadelphia, isn’t open on Easter. There are no sermons on Sundays. It doesn’t have any members. And yet this castlelike Gothic Revival building on 10th Street is still a functioning, active church — just not in the ways you might expect.
Rather than opening on Sundays, the church operates on a four-day schedule, with midday services Monday through Thursday. And rather than focusing on growing the congregation, St. Stephen’s is fully invested in being present for the community, practicing a true open-door policy that makes it a place of support for anyone in need.
The church — an architectural landmark designed by William Strickland in 1823 — has long flourished in the active downtown neighborhood near Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. But the church hit a slump in the 1980s — not long after the Rev. Alfred W. Price, a particularly charismatic pastor, ended his nearly 30-year career in the pulpit. By 2016, fewer than a dozen worshippers might be found in the pews on a Sunday morning, and the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania made the difficult decision to shutter St Stephen’s.
But after Daniel G.P. Gutierrez was elected bishop of Pennsylvania in 2016, he visited St. Stephen’s and soon called for the church to be reopened.
“It’s at the center of the (sixth) largest city in the United States. It’s next to a major hospital. It’s a beautiful space in itself, a sacred space,” Gutierrez told Religion News Service. “How many thousands of people walk through those doors?
“If it’s offering different things and reopening it and re-envisioning what it could be to meet the needs of those people,” the bishop added, “that’s what we have to do.”
The Rev. Peter Kountz was brought on to oversee this new version of St. Stephen’s, which included being present, physically, in the building for more of the week than before. With the help of the church’s digital content manager, Rebecca Harris, Kountz led an online outreach campaign that included launching a new website and advertising St. Stephen’s new accessibility on Facebook, sharing tidbits about the church’s history and info about arts programs. When the church reopened for an Ash Wednesday service in March 2017, 117 people filled the sanctuary, a number of whom had never stepped foot in the church before.
“What we do is we practice a ministry of engagement and welcoming,” said Kountz. “Because what we learned early on is that people walking by this place had no idea what it was for, in some cases, that it was a church. So it’s primitive, but we opened the church.”
St. Stephen’s started a neighborhood outreach program, opening the sanctuary to all comers, from those experiencing homelessness to patients from the nearby hospital and curious tourists. The church made sure to welcome visitors of any faith who use the sanctuary to pray and meditate.
“We decided this is our home, we’re going to make it available to you, we’ve got a set of basic rules, but that’s all it is,” said Kountz. “We can give you safety, we can give you heat. We can give you coffee and fruit and cookies. We can give you conversation. We can give you quiet if that’s what you want. We can give you a place to plug in your phone. That’s it.”
Now, on a given weekday, 70 or so local residents will come by, taking advantage of St. Stephen’s hospitality services — coffee and snacks and conversation — while others meditate or nap in the sanctuary. While most are not there for the services, Kountz leads the daily worship for anyone who cares to participate.
Click here to read more.
Source: Religion News Service
BCNN1 WP 