Annual Meeting

Yesterday we had our Annual Meeting at St. Mary's.

I made a motion, which was carried unanimously, that we communicate to our diocesan delegates to General Convention that we urge the repeal of B033. I originally forgot to include support for same sex blessings, but we managed to tack it on before the meeting broke up.

I know that the support of one parish is not terribly significant, but it's important for our small congregation to be reminded of our connection to the wider church.

At one point in the discussion, it was mentioned that St. Mary's was the sponsor of two of the Philadelphia Eleven (the first women in the Episcopal Church to be ordained to the priesthood in 1974, not the 2004 anti-gay demonstrators) and that my signature, as Clerk of the Vestry, appears on the documents sent to Bishop Paul Moore in support of the ordination of Carter Heyward and Emily Hewitt. I mention it only to make the point that we (and I) have been pushing issues for quite a while. It's part of who we are.

I'm put in mind of another part of who we are by MadPriest's recent sermon on Mark 1:9-15. We minister to the marginalized. For several years we operated a weekly soup kitchen -- just over a year ago we urned it into a food pantry. The siginificant point is that a large part of the staff consists of people who first came to us on the food line. Many people from the line have become involved in the church. These days we also provide bag lunches in a Saturday outreach program to homeless people in our general neighborhood.

Three weeks ago, Estelle, a sometime member of our choir, passed away. Her passing was noted by Padre Mickey as well as several others who remember The Ronettes. Estelle is just one of the many fragile folks who have gotten some fellowship at St. Mary's.