Outreach Ministries is one of the six Commissions
that coordinate the many ministries of Grace Church.

Outreach Ministries Commission

This Commission organizes the appeal and distribution of the Christmas and Easter offerings to projects that meet basic human needs, including food, clothing, and shelter and in which individual parishioners are already involved as support to their particular actions of Christian witness. The Commission also serves as the umbrella organization for other outreach projects that the parish supports, seeing to it that there are volunteers from the congregation for the Not Bread Alone soup kitchen, for the Emergency Cot Program in Northampton, and for an annual campaign to solicit donated food for the Amherst Survival Center.  Grace Church is a covenant church with Habitat for Humanity and with Bread for the World. OMC sponsors the annual Oxfam Fast as well as films, lectures, and discussions of national and international conflicts and human needs.  Outreach Ministries Commission meets every first Monday night at 6:00 in the Parker Room.  If you are interested in being a member of the Commission, please contact one of the clergy or Royster Hedgepeth.

A note from General Convention: MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) as a mission priority

MDGs? What are those? I wondered this often enough over the last year or two whenever the term was dropped into conversation. At General Convention last month the Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation (EGR) space in the Exhibition Hall was one aisle over from the reconciliation booth, where I spent my time. Every booth advertising a cause, a process, or goods for sale gave away free stuff to lure people a little closer, perhaps even to chat. Our booth gave out pins, prayer cards, and fliers. EGR had the best peanuts in the hall, and so that was where I stopped by several times a day when life was slow in reconciliation. I am very thankful for the peanuts, because if I scooped up the peanuts, I felt I had to hang around and find out more about the EGR and, in particular, the MDGs, which was one of their main educational efforts.

MDGs is the acronym for , a summons to the world from the UN to help defeat deep world poverty and its effects. Every day at Convention, representatives from the EGR handed out cards to passers-by on the way to the daily Eucharist. The first card listed the eight goals:

  1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
  2. Achieve universal primary education
  3. Promote gender equality and empowerwomen
  4. Reduce child mortality
  5. Improve maternal health
  6. Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases
  7. Ensure environmental sustainability, and
  8. Create a global partnership for development with a focus on debt, aid, and trade

Each subsequent day the card focused on one of the goals, and indicated what one person could do, what one parish could do, and what one diocese could do. One of the mantras of this campaign is “0.7%”, which calls for each diocese, each parish, and each individual to give 0.7% of their income to achieve these goals by 2015. Our diocese has made this commitment, as have Grace Church and some parish members. The General Convention made it a major outreach priority for the Episcopal Church. Over the next weeks and months Grace Church will be offering information and occasions to hear speakers so that the MDGs will become more meaningful to us than just another acronym; perhaps there will also be opportunities for mission-focused trips. The campaign has many features that make it particularly appealing; one of these is the hope that frames this whole endeavor “to make poverty history.” For more information, see www.e4gr.org

Nancy Lowry

The Episcopal Peace Fellowship at Grace Church is a branch of a
national organization.  They meet the second Sunday of each month, after
the 10:30 service.  They worked with other faith groups in the Pioneer Valley
to construct a "Declaration of Conscience." 

 

Greening Grace is an active group focused on environmental issues. 

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