Go into the Neighborhood and Change the World!

Diocesan News, Education, Front Page • May 23rd, 2016

Episcopalians from Western New York, Rochester, Erie, Ohio, Virginia and Massachusetts gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral this past weekend.  They gathered to learn about partnerships between churches and public schools. The gathering was co-sponsored by the All Our Children Network and the Diocese of Western New York in response to General Convention resolution B005 that calls on congregations to develop relationships with public schools, especially under-resourced public schools.

The group heard about some existing partnerships, visited Waterfront Elementary and the Buffalo Elementary School of Technology and shared their own experiences.

The Rev. Gay Jennings, President of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church, spoke about the challenge to move from doing charity to doing justice.  She used the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate the point. She said that resolution B005 called us to take a journey across race, class and geography and that the journey that we are on is a pilgrimage.  We are looking for the sacred and expect to be changed by the journey and by what we find.

The Rev. Brenda Girton-Mitchell, Director of the Center for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the US Department of Education, told the group that they may have thought that they were there because they chose to be there, but they were called to be there.  She talked about public education as the Civil Rights issue of our time and that education is the shared responsibility of the community.

One of the themes of the gathering was that the church is called to see every child as our child, that they are all our children and that working for equity and equality in education is to respond to our Baptismal promises to strive for justice and peace among all people.  It is one of the ways that we can go into the neighborhood and change the world.

For information on how your congregation can get started in a church-school partnership, visit the All Our Children network’s web-site, allourchildren.org.