Transforming St. Andrew's

The transformation of St. Andrew's College Park began in the breezeway in 1989.

The glass-enclosed passageway from the church to the Parish Hall had outside doors that hadn't locked properly for years. Homeless people from the area were aware of this fact and had taken to sleeping in the breezeway on cold nights. Our rector at the time, A. Moody Burt, brought the issue to the vestry, which discussed ways to make the breezeway more secure.

But somehow, installing better locks just didn't strike Moody as an adequate solution on a spiritual level, even of it made perfect sense on a practical one. Everything seemed to come together a few weeks later, when the Gospel reading was about Lazarus at the gates. In a sermon that one listener later described as "heart opening," Moody spoke of his vision, inspired by a program in Montgomery County, of a winter homeless shelter that would move from church to church throughout the northern part of Prince George's County. St. Andrew's, he said, would take the lead in turning the vision into reality.

For a parish that had been inward-looking for much of its 99-year history, it was an astonishing idea, and Moody said later that he was extremely apprehensive about the reaction. But to his surprise and delight, the vestry reacted enthusiastically to the idea, and volunteers, many of whom had never dreamed they would be involved with feeding and housing the homeless, signed up by the dozen. Moody succeeded in involving a significant number of other churches in the College Park and Hyattsville area to join the project, and Safe Haven was born that winter, with St. Andrew's housing the shelter for its first week. Today 50 to 60 churches in Prince George's County participate in some way in the Safe Haven program each year.

Safe Haven marked the rebirth of St. Andrew's as a church truly dedicated to the part of its mission statement which proclaims its "special care for all of God's children in its neighborhood." A small house owned by St. Andrew's and adjacent to the church property, once slated for demolition, was renovated and turned into Advent House, a transitional housing facility. The parish began a monthly service at Greenbelt Nursing Home. It agreed to participate in Warm Nights, a county-run traveling shelter program, in addition to Safe Haven. It dramatically increased the portion of its budget devoted to mission beyond the parish, and declared that it would increase the percentage devoted to outreach each year. This goal has become such an important part of St. Andrew's parish culture that when the vestry proposed temporarily cutting the budget percentage devoted to mission beyond the parish in order to make what it saw as important building and security improvements, a major controversy erupted and the vestry modified its plan in order to preserve more outreach funds.

"That would never have happened before 1989," said Moody, who viewed the "guns and butter" controversy over outreach spending as yet another sign of the church's transformation. "The Holy Spirit caused a change of heart, a turning out," he said. "It's as simple as that."