Episcopal Church in Green Ridge



Episcopal Church in Green Ridge

helps homeless and poor

BY LAURA LEGERE

Staff Writer, Times-Tribune, Scranton

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Link to Times-Tribune

At North Washington Avenue and Electric Street, amid the mansions in the heart of Green Ridge, the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd has been quietly feeding the homeless, the working poor and struggling senior citizens a monthly meal for the last five years.

Now, the regional Episcopal diocese has awarded the church a $200,000 grant to help it expand that mission.

The church will receive $40,000 a year for the next five years from the Diocese of Bethlehem to upgrade its kitchen, create a food pantry, renovate its clothing exchange, install showers and restrooms and establish an emergency shelter in the church basement.

The grant is the first the parish has received since it began reaching out to the needy using time and funds donated by the community and the congregation. It is also a reflection of a new purpose at Good Shepherd, which struggled to survive after a priest and at least 30 members left the church four years ago because they disagreed with the denomination’s ordination of a gay bishop.

Now, through giving, the church is growing back.

“We were able to rededicate ourselves to the idea that our future is outside these doors,” said Warren Shotto, the lay leader of the church and a member of the homeless outreach program the parish calls Seasons of Love. “We stopped focusing on how we were going to pay the heat bill and focused on helping the poor.”

He was sitting with his wife, Pam, and Kathy Elgaway, both members of the homeless outreach project, in a small classroom on the second floor of the parish hall warmed only by two space heaters. In 2008, the church received about 12 new members and now counts 150 total, between 40 and 70 of whom attend services weekly.

“The more we’ve focused on the community outside our parish, the more people are just walking through our doors,” Mrs. Shotto said.

In announcing the grant, Bethlehem Bishop Paul V. Marshall commended the parish for emphasizing its outreach mission instead of dwelling on survival. “In its rebirth,” he said, “this parish has become something of a miracle.”

The dinners at Good Shepherd started, and stayed, humble — Mr. Shotto browses grocery store circulars in order to buy dinner and a take-away meal for between 70 and 90 people each month for $200 — but they expanded to include much more than food. Nurses volunteer to check the diners for high blood pressure and signs of diabetes. Local beauticians — and sometimes other volunteers who are handy with scissors — offer the homeless free haircuts in the parish hall basement, which is complete with donated salon chairs and where the scent of shampoo lingers.

The homeless are given deodorant, toothpaste, socks and underwear. They also can browse the donated clothes that are stacked and hung in the cavernous undercroft of the church. The room will soon be organized with racks, cubes and shelves the church bought from the closed Steve & Barry’s store in the Mall at Steamtown.

“It’s going to look like a store when we’re finished,” Ms. Elgaway said.

“It’ll be clean and bright and neat,” Mrs. Shotto added. “I think it’s going to give it dignity.”

Over the next five years, the room will also be renovated to hold a food pantry and house a 15-bed emergency shelter for those displaced by floods or fires and, on the coldest nights, the homeless. Down the hall, both men and women will have restrooms, showers and locker rooms where they can attend to their daily hygiene— something the homeless can do at only a few local facilities.

Eventually, the church aims to provide the needy with clean clothes, food, warmth and a place to bathe between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

For the volunteers who have formed those goals, the opportunity to help others has been an awakening. Mr. and Mrs. Shotto and Ms. Elgaway shared stories of the people they have helped — a man in his late 80s who lost his home when his unmarried partner died, a young woman who attended the Good Shepherd church as a girl, men and women the Shottos recognize from high school.

“They parallel your life, a lot of them,” Mr. Shotto said. “Only they had a fork in the road.”

He recognized that it is not only the people the parish has helped who have been altered by the experience of generosity.

“For everybody who’s been through these doors, including us, it’s been life-changing.”

Contact the writer: llegere@

[pic]The Church of the Good Shepherd located in Green Ridge volunteers from left: Char Jeffers, Warren Shotto, Dave Jeffers, Ethel Dougherty, Tom Dougherty, Kim Kandel, and Pam Shotto, in the large kitchen area were meals are cooked once a month for those less fortunate. [Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer]

[pic]Pam Shotto, front, and Char Jeffers fold piles of donated clothes on Saturday, that will be given to those less fortunate, inside the basement at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Green Ridge. [Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer]

[pic]Pam Shotto folds piles of donated clothes on Saturday, that will be given to those less fortunate, inside the basement at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Green Ridge. [Butch Comegys / Staff Photographer]

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