Thanks for Giving!

On behalf of the Stewardship Committee, thank you! Your generosity helps our vibrant parish thrive and we are so grateful for the many gifts of time, talent, and treasure that support all we do at Grace-St. Luke’s. Because of your faithful support, 2023 brings a wealth of opportunities to learn more about our faith, our community, ourselves, and each other.

Just as Jesus invited his disciples, we invite you to come, see, experience all that is happening at our parish. While we celebrate the many ways that GSL enriches our lives and surrounds us with God’s grace, we recognize that all we do as a parish is supported by each of us and our households—the time we give and the financial support we provide.

Thank you to all of you who’ve made your pledge to Grace-St. Luke’s for 2023! A pledge is simply an estimate of what you hope to give and how you hope to serve in the coming year, and your estimates of giving directly impact the programming and ministries we’re able to offer. If you’ve not done so already, we hope you’ll prayerfully consider the ways your gifts of time, talent, and treasure can support the ministries of GSL and give generously to our 2023 pledge campaign. Please visit gracestlukes.org/pledge for details and pledge today. We give thanks for you!

Chapman Morrow

Membership and Stewardship Associate

901-252-6328 | cmorrow@gracestlukes.org

Intergenerational Ministry, continued generations and the ministry areas that often represent them in parish life. The fruit of such deeply rooted and tended ministry will be more times and spaces within our common life where our youngest, oldest, and everyone in between fully participate in the whole liturgical and communal life of our local church.

Another way to speak and imagine what intergenerational ministry entails is to connect it with what the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers calls, “Radical Welcome.” Radical Welcome is “the spiritual practice of embracing and being changed by the gifts, presence, voices, and power of The Other3: the people systemically cast out of or marginalized within a church, a denomination and/or society.”4 Canon Spellers is inviting the Church to a new way of being the body of Christ. A way that involves the “gifts, presence, voices and power,” of those marginalized in churches. “Marginalized” means the church often doesn’t think about or ask certain folks about their needs as the church goes about planning, singing, offering classes, etc. Children, along with Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQ folks, siblings with various disabilities, the unhoused and many others are often on the margins of “the core activities of the church.” The beginning of intergenerational welcome, is to open our hearts and ears to what “the least of these, my siblings” (Matthew 28:37-40), whoever they are, have to teach the church.

So we should be on the lookout! Looking for opportunities to join intergenerational opportunities at GSL this Lent, to volunteer to be with children in Sunday School or Youth Ministry, to sit with a family during breakfast, and to be open to all the ways God might open our parish and our hearts to ancient-future ways of being faith-filled Episcopalians!

Anthony Calzia

Director of Children and Family Ministries

901-252-6321 | acalzia@gracestlukes.org

1 Christian Smith and Melinda L, Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2009).

2 Holly Catteron Allen and Christine Lawton, Intergenerational Christian Formation: Bringing the Whole Church Together in Ministry, Community and Worship, (Intervarsity Press, 2012), 7.

3 For a brief and insightful definition of “The Other,” visit: https://dev.churchpublishing.org/siteassets/pdf/radical-welcome--embracing-god-the-other/abouttheother.pdf

4 Stephanie Spellers, Radical Welcome (Church Publishing, 2002), 6.