Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC

"Obuntu." This Bantu word greeted us, blazoned on the folders we were handed as 40 or so Episcopalians from across the US boarded buses for the first stage of CEEP's Outreach Pre-Conference. As we drove uptown and into Harlem, we learned the meaning of "obuntu": "human community," or "I am because we are." We saw this spirit at work first in FoodChange, a community kitchen in West Harlem that, in addition to serving 770 healthy meals per week, is committed to improving lives through nutrition, education, and financial empowerment. In the South Bronx we visited the Nehemiah Project, neighborhoods of neat new row houses constructed through the efforts of the Industrial Area Fund and its affiliate, South Bronx Churches. These single-family homes, occupying blocks once blighted by burned-out tenements and derelict vacant lots, have turned renters - and in some cases the homeless - into homeowners with a real stake in their community. Both the Nehemiah Houses and FoodChange demonstrate that "obuntu," which really can't be precisely translated into English, can mean "building community partnerships for social transformation."

For the next two days a series of panel discussions and workshops heightened our understanding of the possibilities of and challenges to outreach programs both local and global. Roger Ward from New Orleans described the success, despite initial resistance in the parish, of Trinity's Jeremiah Project, an after-school tutoring program for inner-city school children; Bill Bancroft and Tom Blackmon from Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, presented a video of highlights of that parish's five-year involvement in a town in Honduras; Catherine Roskam, Bishop Suffragan of New York, told of a transforming experience in Africa and her subsequent founding of the Global Women's Fund. She urged us to listen to our brothers and sisters in Africa, to be receptive to what they have to give us, to share with them what they need and want from us, not what we think they ought to have - to have what she calls "a Pentecost of the ears."

Having begun by defining "obuntu," CEEP's Outreach program ended with another kind of definition, James Lemler's workshop reminding us that, as Episcopalians, "mission is our purpose, identity, and call." I left the series of sessions feeling proud of the way that the Chapel of the Cross lives out its identity as a "missionary" church - and feeling challenged by all the opportunities available to us to answer that call more fully.

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