We're too small to make the News! I think personal stories of outreach are especially important right now. So..

I reached out to check on one of our oldest members the other day, and she told me how her mother came to join what was then known as All Saints Episcopal, probably around a hundred years ago. This woman spent her whole life Shining The Light from our beautiful little neighborhood church. She was baptized there 90+ years ago! Here's her story:  Her grandfather had recently died. Her grandparents had been non-practicing Christians of different denominations. This would have been sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, and a mourning custom of the time was for the close family members to dress in black for a full year. A friend invited her mother to an event at a nearby Presbyterian Church.  Apparently, her reception there was not very welcoming. The other "young ladies" made fun of her black mourning attire! So of course, she was crushed!  A while later, still, during her mourning period, she was taking a walk around the neighborhood when she ended up at the corner of 32nd & Wyandot; where an event was going on in our charming little church. All the windows were lit, the doors were open and someone invited her inside! She felt so welcome, she went home and brought her sisters back. The girls got their mother to join them for a Sunday service and she too eventually joined the congregation!  Rightly, she likes to brag a bit about her family's Episcopal Church legacy by counting-up her all her nieces and nephew's by generation, all the way to her Great-Great ones who have now been baptized/confirmed in the Episcopal Church.