Outreach for Justice at St. Mark’s

The Body of Community

St. Mark’s by-the-Lake has a newly minted Outreach for Justice Team. Kathy Wight, Bob Hubbard, and Mary Beland have gathered a couple of times now to discuss outreach and justice and how we participate in those ministries. I was thrilled to hear of the conversation of their last meeting which embraces a conversation about doing more for those in the world we called to minister to. It is a conversation about how we can become the body of Christ. Henri Nouwen writes;

“When we gather around the table and break the bread together, we are transformed not only individually but also as community. We, people from different ages and races, with different backgrounds and histories, become one body. As Paul says: "As there is one loaf, so we, although there are many of us, are one single body, for we all share in the one loaf" (1 Corinthians 10:17).

Not only as individuals but also as community we become the living Christ, taken, blessed, broken, and given to the world. As one body, we become a living witness of God’s immense desire to bring all peoples and nations together as the one family of God.”

I am so pleased with the dialogue thus far as it is really rooted in the theology of the body of Christ. When one part of the body suffers we all suffer as a result. Jesus reminded us that we are to cloth the naked, feed the sick and visit the lonely. In this parish we have done much in the past seven years to move along our ministry outside our doors and we are doing much nowadays. We do have the capacity to be more focused on what we do and that is what this group can give us. We can begin to have some direction in discovering how we fit into the Body of Christ. We could use some help become more aware of how we can help all nations and peoples come together as a family of God. We could use some education and awareness about the things that we are involved in and the projects that we might want to be involved in.

My thanks to those involved for giving putting a container around the many projects we call outreach at St. Mark’s by-the-Lake. We look forward to hearing more about Amnesty, The Food Bank, Doctors without Borders, Downtown Missions, and the host of other ideas that are out there. “We are one body, for we all share in the one loaf.”