Church of the Holy Trinity/Church in the Yard, Nashville

On Friday, March 4, our urban ministry class visited two locations in Nashville, Church of the Holy Trinity and St. Luke's Community House.

The Church of the Holy Trinity is an Episcopal parish located right outside downtown Nashville, in a more industrial area and just down the street from one of the city's largest homeless shelters. It is an historic church, first established in 1849. In 1907, it was designated as "the" black Episcopal church in Nashville. Now, the church has an average Sunday attendance of about 60 people, most of them retired older African-American people from the area -- many of them former professors at the historically-black universities in the area (Fisk and Tennessee State).

But the story that drew our urban ministry class to visit Church of the Holy Trinity isn't directly connected to what the Rev. Bill Dennler, priest at Holy Trinity, refers to as the "inside congregation." It's the larger and fast-growing "outdoor congregation."

On Sundays at 2 p.m., Church of the Holy Trinity offers an outdoor Eucharist in the church yard, aptly called "Church in the Yard," followed by a community meal. The model is similar to The Outdoor Church I was a part of in Cambridge, Mass., which was a branch of Ecclesia Ministries in Boston, but Trinity's outdoor church is not officially affiliated with Ecclesia.

Trinity's outdoor church was born of a local initiative to feed the homeless started by a local chef at an upscale restaurant in Nashville. He was disturbed by the amount of waste thrown away at the restaurant each night, and wondered why those living on the streets shouldn't be able to have just as fine of a meal as the customers in his high-ticket restaurant. So, he started taking leftovers from dinner each night and creating magnificent concoctions -- soups and stews of all sorts -- and serving them in a back parking lot in downtown Nashville to homeless people.

This went on for a while, but as these things usually do, it drew attention -- and not positive attention -- from the neighbors and the city officials. Soon the officials were telling the chef he couldn't continue to serve these meals in public without a permit. And surely his motley crew of folks didn't meet with federal cleanliness guidelines!

So the priest at Church of the Holy Trinity, Bill Dennler's predecessor, volunteered to help out. "Come hold the meal on our church grounds," he told the chef. "They can't kick you off private property."

So Holy Trinity became the refuge of this renegade chef and his feeding program, and the congregation of Holy Trinity became unwitting hosts to around one hundred homeless and poor people each week. Eventually, the priest decided to start offering a service in addition to the meal, and eventually the church took over providing the meal as well as the worship service. Now, volunteers from churches around the city take turns providing the meals each week, so Holy Trinity is only responsible for one meal per month. Many volunteers from suburban churches welcome the opportunity to come and serve the "urban poor" that they do not see in their own neighborhoods.

The unfortunate part of the story is that the congregation at Holy Trinity was never really consulted in the beginning phases of this partnership, so that they still do not see Church in the Yard as part of "their" ministry as the community of Holy Trinity. From what Fr. Bill Dennler described, the relationship seems to be more of a "tenant-landlord" relationship rather than a sense of ownership over the ministry as a Holy Trinity ministry. Fr. Bill hopes to change that, and says that some people from the "inside congregation" at Holy Trinity have indeed begun to become involved with the outdoor service and meal.

Fr. Bill (second from left) with Vanderbilt nursing students who offer foot care and clean socks to the congregants of Church in the Yard. Photo from Vanderbilt Reporter.

The outdoor church and the outreach to the homeless is an issue near and dear to Fr. Bill's heart: he himself has been homeless, served time in prison, and is a recovering alcoholic, and is open about his past with his congregation. He has a kind of clout with the homeless population because he's "been there, done that," so to speak -- he can relate to the struggles many of them are going through with addition and other destructive behaviors.

The Church in the Yard is growing at much faster rates than the "indoor congregation." While the Sunday morning congregation either remains stable at 60 or is declining, the Sunday afternoon congregation continues to grow exponentially. When we met with Fr. Bill on March 4, he told us that they were currently seeing 100 people for the service, and another 100 people who show up just for the meal afterwards. Church in the Yard is beginning to define Holy Trinity's existence and put it "on the map," so to speak, both for the homeless people in the area and for other churches who want to help with this ministry.

Interestingly enough, Fr. Bill reported that a large number of "young people" from non-denominational churches come to volunteer and unexpectedly, seem to enjoy the Episcopal liturgy. These people are real "prayer warriors," Fr. Bill reported, spending a lot of time in one-on-one intercessory prayer with the homeless people who attend the service.

Our class returned to Holy Trinity on Sunday, March 27, to experience the worship service first-hand. I missed that session, since I am currently doing my field education on Sundays at a church near Sewanee. (I am the only student in the class who is a second-year student in the middle of field education work; the rest are all seniors who are finished with field education and one junior (first-year) student who has not yet started her field education.) However, I had already been to Church in the Yard several times, during my first year at Sewanee.

After meeting Susanna at the "Come and See" weekend at Sewanee when I came to look at the school, and realizing how much she "got it" in terms of outreach to the poor and homeless, I had been in touch with her to see if she knew of any groups in Chattanooga or Nashville that were similar to the outdoor church I'd been a part of in Cambridge. She referred me to Church in the Yard, and my husband and I had attended services there several times. I even thought about doing my field education there as a summer immersion experience, but wound up deciding to try something different -- small-town, small-church ministry -- for my field education instead.

Nevertheless, it was exciting to me to see this kind of ministry happening so close to my new home. Like with Church of the Common Ground in Atlanta, I haven't gotten up to the Church in the Yard as often as I would have liked to during my time here, but visiting a few times, and being back through the visit with our class, has affirmed my sense of calling to this kind of ministry. There's something about seeing a priest celebrate Eucharist outdoors in the midst of a crowd of homeless people that just seems to me to be a living icon of what church is really about.