Outreach at Trinity Lime Rock

The parishioners of Trinity Church are encouraged to offer back to God the various gifts and talents with which He has blessed us. While we do this in many ways, one of the most important is in reaching out to help people outside our own congregation.

In some cases, our gift to others is ourselves in the form of labor.  In other cases, it is in the form of goods:  food, supplies, or needed objects we are in a position to provide for others.  Other forms of outreach -- such as our Sports and Recreation ministry program, to which the entire community is invited -- are a bit unusual, especially in the Episcopal Church.  And, finally, although we are not a wealthy parish in terms of dollars, sometimes it is in the form of money.

We conduct our Outreach through involvement in many areas, and our congregation takes the lead in determining where and how our efforts will be directed.

Christmas 2007 Outreach

In 2007, for our Christmas project, we consulted with the Social Worker for our neighboring community of Falls Village -- which has no Episcopal Church of its own (many Falls Village people are members of Trinity, and we view Falls Village as part of our community).  We collected specific gifts for needy young people of that town.

We also collected small gifts for the elderly of Falls Village, such as toiletries, stationery, and the like -- the sort of things that elderly people on Medicaid cannot afford for themselves, but which help provide a small sense of dignity and self-worth in old age.

Watch for our NEXT outreach project!

Here are some of our other recent Outreach efforts:

A recent Outreach project (August 2007):

Trinity partnered with Salisbury Family Services to contribute lunchboxes and non-perishable snack food for needy children to take with them to school this Fall.  SFS delivered the lunch boxes to the recipients during the last few days of August so the kids have them when school starts.

Here's a thank-you the parish -- and particularly our Outreach chair, Cheryl Duntz, received from SFS:

Our Outreach project for Advent 2006:

During Advent, we "adopted" some local children and provided each of them with a few gifts, much in the same spirit with which we reached out to the children of North Canaan in our backpack project earlier this year.  We held the ingathering of gifts on December 17, the third Sunday of Advent, and the gifts were blessed at the 10:30 AM Holy Eucharist.  Immediately over the service the gifts were handed over to the social workers for distribution to the families.

Click on the photo below to see some of the gifts displayed in front of the Altar.

----Building on a past outreach success with preparing backbacks for needy children to take to school, as the new school year opened some 30 backpacks, complete with school supplies, were donated by Trinity parishioners and were distributed among young people at nearby North Canaan Elementary School.

Here is the text of a letter from the Principal of NCES to our Outreach Chair:

----We regularly collect food for OWLS Kitchen food pantry in Lakeville. 

Our "feed a family of four for a day" program each year generally collects at least 25 shopping bags full of groceries for those in need in our own area.  Regardless of what you may have heard about Connecticut's Northwest Corner as an upscale community, there is still grinding poverty here.  We try our best to help in some small way to alleviate it.

This year, for our "feed a family of four" the parish collected 28 bags of groceries.  The management of OWLS Kitchen greatly appreciated the gift, and also commented that "Trinity ALWAYS bring great groceries!"

----Saint John's Church in Salisbury has an active ministry called Puentes to the largely-invisible Hispanic population of our area. 

We help support the Puentes program financially.

----Our Diocese

Like all parishes in our Diocese, a significant percentage of our parish pledge to the Diocese is directed to Outreach at the Diocesan level.

Here are some of our more memorable past outreach efforts:

--Trinity is one of a half dozen parishes in our Diocese that actively sought an outreach partner in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and we were selected to partner with the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, the Episcopal presence at Tulane University.  Their building and its contents were largely ruined by Katrina -- effectively leaving the students, faculty, and staff of that great university without a campus home of the Episcopal Church. 

Our ECW earmarked $300 from a recent benefit for Chapel of the Holy Spirit, and our Altar Guild assessed our supplies with an eye to furnishing them with Altar linens and other material that would be more valuable to them than to us at this point.

--In November 2005, our organist and choir director, Christine Gevert, organized a "Hurricane Concert" for relief in storm-damaged areas of the South.  Thanks to the Hotchkiss School, the concert, with a choir of well over 100 voices, conducted and accompanied by professionals who contributed their time, raised a significant amount of money for relief. 

--In the past we have helped construct a Habitat for Humanity house in Salisbury, and have been an active participant in the "Adopt a Social Worker" program of Covenant to Care, Inc.   

--In 2004 and 2005, we participated in an effort to assist the Children's Ministry -- an activity of two Episcopal Churches in one of the poorest neighborhoods of New Haven that provides an after school program and other needed support for children growing up in as inhospitable an environment as can be found in the United States.  Interestingly,  our Sunday School students were responsible for this initiative.  Our partnership with the Children's Ministry came from a spontaneous decision by a few of our Sunday School students that they wanted to take up a collection that would go to children less fortunate than they.  We are heartened when we see this kind of spirit in our children, and that it seems to have been a reaction on their part to seeing the new Sunday School rooms provided for them in our new addition. 

At the suggestion of Bishop Smith, Children's Mission was introduced to us, and they were the recipients of that collection.  We also continued our Outreach to them, setting up a collection box (decorated by the same Sunday Schoolers that took up the original collection) to collect craft supplies and snacks for Children's Mission's after school program.  (Click on the picture below to see a full-sized picture of the box and one of the Sunday Schoolers who helped create it.)

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--Exciting for all of us -- and still memorable -- was the arrival in February 2000 of a family of four from the former Yugoslavia under the auspices of the Interfaith Refugees Ministry. Trinity Lime Rock sponsored this family and helped them to settle into a new life in a new country. 2001 brought further news:  our refugee family acclimated so well to the United States that they have set off to Wisconsin to live! 

--Our relationship with the Children's Mission was not the first major partnership initiated by our Sunday School.  In the past our Sunday School has adopted children in far-off lands, and has been an active participant in the Heifer Project (as shown in the photo below).

Our Outreach chairperson is Cheryl Duntz. 

Please contact Cheryl or one of the Wardens if you would like to be involved in one or more of our Outreach activities.